Small Sustainable Notes

Kara Swisher Says Car Ownership is Finished

Kara Swisher believes that autonomous vehicles will learn from each other each time an accident happens and thanks to quantum computing, won’t just be wandering around like people assume

Cities and regulators need to make change happen she believes. One cant wait for Silicon Valley to get everything started

No one is going to have a private car. It’s like Disney and Disney Plus. It’s still content but the medium changes, the car industry will be the same way

More creative solutions found within the car industry, not out of Silicon Valley

America’s Love Affair With Cars

Wanted to modernize the American roadway system in the 1950s

There was a lot of anti-car sentiment in the country, many protests, most famously the one in 1958 with Jane Jacobs who wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” This protest was two weeks before the infomercial, “Merrily We Roll Along” came out

The anti-car people were seen as Luddites and urban elites

The program painted the first automobiles as the new girl in town

New girl in town seen as dangerous but also as chance to escape from small town values and the Victorian world

Peter Norton, author of “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City”

Rise of cars between 1915 to 1930, transforming streets from places for people to places for cars

The “love affair” expression takes off in 1961

The program tried to sell driving, not a specific car

The Pedestrian

What happens when we can’t walk because of the way we have built our world?

The ability to walk is what makes us humans, not anything else

Antonia Malchik, author of “A Walking Life” talks about our connection to each other and to the environment, air pollution. She wants to rebuild the understanding that you can’t cut yourself off from a relationship with nature and one of the best ways to do that is by walking

Solutions to urban problems begin by knowing who we are as a collective

Cars And the Culture Wars

Rob Ford’s speech in 2009 used the term “the war on cars”

Car is a red state incursion on the city

Wendell Cox is an urban planner and uses the phrase, then the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation

How far back does a war on cars go? 1907 the war started, first in small towns

Back then if you wanted to go out to the city you took a car but now it’s suburbanites coming into the city!

The hosts understand you can use a car in the suburbs but using a car in the city should be the exception, not the rule

A car is an incursion on your freedom which is the freedom to be able to hop on a bus that’s going to be there soon, inexpensive, reliable, clean transit