‘War on Cars’ podcast hosts at Bike Happy Hour on Wednesday

I’m excited to share that this coming Wednesday (11/12), The War on Cars Podcast hosts and Life After Cars authors Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear will join us at Bike Happy Hour.

This dynamic duo is on a national media tour talking up their excellent new book that diagnoses, dissects, and debates how car-dominated places have negatively influenced our lives — and what we’d gain by living life without (or a lot fewer of) them. With a new political era sweeping across our country, it’s the perfect time to talk about ideas that once felt radical, but now feel inevitable.

I’ve followed the rise of Doug, Sarah — and the third co-conspirator on the book, Aaron Naparstek — for almost as long as I’ve been doing BikePortland. Aaron was the founding editor of Streetsblog (and also author of the 2003 classic, Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage), Sarah was founding editor of the Livable Streets Blog Network, and I’ve followed Doug since he maintained the Brooklyn Spoke blog and got even more deeply involved in transportation politics in 2013.

Suffice it to say; Sarah, Doug and I are kindred spirits who’ve chosen different paths and tools in the fight against motordom, carbrain, motonormativity — or whatever word you want to describe America’s seductively destructive relationship to cars and driving. And what they’ve done with their podcast since its launch in 2018 is nothing short of extraordinary. With a massive following and guests that include actors, entertainers, experts and politicians from around the world, the podcast has transcended the transportation field and has helped shift the Overton Window around the idea of carfree and low-car cities.

Sarah and Doug have a masterful grasp of the evidence to back up their (very well-reasoned, despite the provocative names of their podcast and book!) arguments for helping people see that cars and driving really isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be. In fact, as you can learn in Life After Cars, the entire idea that Americans have a “love affair with the automobile” is nothing more than propaganda to peddle products and cajole capitalists. In one of my favorite passages in the book, I learned that even Superman once considered drivers and their cars worthy of a fight!

You can hang out with Sarah and Doug this Wednesday at Bike Happy Hour. We’ll get there at 3:00 and then sit down for a short chat and have some audience Q & A at 5:30. We’ll be in the back patio of Migration Brewing on North Williams Avenue. Remember you can enter from the alley between N Shaver and N Failing.

And if you can’t make it Wednesday, grab tickets to see them at Powell’s Books on Thursday at 7:00 pm. For more about the book, read Taylor’s article in the Portland Mercury. Also check out the official websites of The War on Cars Podcast and the Life After Cars book.