On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution. But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable
Writer. New Yorker. Co-host, The War on Cars podcast. Our book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, is out October 21, 2025. lifeaftercars.com
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On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution. But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable
I think in this picture I was trying to defend myself for wearing a puffer in Minneapolis in April lol. It was cold!
Not at all!
from your lips to god's ears
Aftermath of a car crash in Utrecht, Netherlands: *The street is closed off to cars. *Police measure angles of impact and look for possible causes (to prevent future crashes). *Officers politely summarize the incident with people walking & rolling by. How are car crashes evaluated in YOUR city?
this is so fucked
“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.
I took this picture myself at the CDC protest today. These are among the hundreds of bullet holes in CDC headquarters windows, visible from the street. I heard today that the admin has no urgent plan to fix these windows. Imagine being a CDC employee going to work under these conditions
Look at this thread and imagine that you had to deal with this in your own life and maybe you will start to get it.
I remember the first time I heard this was a possibility. It was more than 20 years ago and it scared the shit out of me. And now here we are.
this article had me at "the oyster is praxis." because it is!
Guerrilla typography ftw
every day we get numerous pieces about "what the left needs to do" or "what the left is doing wrong" or "what the left should focus on" and my brothers in bullshit, the left can't even get a major newspaper column
In 1933 the Nazi Party looted and destroyed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research) in Berlin, the first clinic for modern gender-affirmation surgeries in the world. The Institute's library and archives were publicly burned.
We can do this, people. It's not even that difficult.
A domestic violence history is always a tell
Even if climate crisis did not exist, air pollution deaths, spiking & unpredictable costs, and national security would EACH ON THEIR OWN be sufficient reasons to quit fossil fuels ASAP Yet our media, champion of status quo profiteers, tells the public that it’s clean energy that’s risky
We redesign our roads to protect our children from the people driving these things, or we accept this statistic as the price kids should pay to enable car-owner liberty.
Big news! Tickets for our "Life After Cars" book event and live show on Oct 30th at the Black Cat in Washington, DC are now on sale. We're partnering with @waba.org and @solidstatebooksdc.bsky.social for this one. Special guest to be announced. Get tickets: www.etix.com/ticket/p/855...
People on bikes fear that without protected bike lanes, people in cars will “completely kill” them.
People need to understand just how openly genocidal the rhetoric on the far right is getting towards transgender people. They're openly talking about eradicating us and forcefully mass institutionalizing all trans people. These are people with direct ties to the Trump administration.
Indeed.
They are dismantling cities by doing this. Philly, Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island. Each crisis has arisen from the state legislature’s refusal to find new funding to save public transit, but Pennsylvania is the first state to actually push its biggest transit agency over the cliff. #DemVoice1
European new car-sales from Jan–July 2025 were 59% battery electric, plug in, & hybrid, up from 49% last year. Fully electric cars rose from 12.5% to 15.6% of sales. Big winner: VW & China’s BYD. Tesla suffered a 40% decline & now has less than 1% of Europe share. www.reuters.com/business/aut...
Want to see what happens when a city makes major transit cuts? Just look at Philadelphia. It's not pretty.
pritzker so far is the only one out of them who sounds like he understands what comes after extralegal military occupation of hostile urban centers
This is a hell of a letter. “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines…will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer….Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated…”
Basic human stuff that somehow seems beyond the capacity of so many North American communities.
Increasingly I feel like I am going to have to quit everything to stay human. But I really, really like being human, so it might be worth it.
I think if you looked at our podcast you would see we talk about all those things all the time.
😍
I told my son the television set in every hotel room we stayed in was broken for a good few years.
The husky boys need to sacrifice themselves.
"huskier"
Relevant, I think. This article talks about fiction submissions, but it's probably the same bs. nymag.com/intelligence...
Reminder - There was a call for anyone who could to go donate blood in the Twin Cities as there was a critical level of supply. With two mass casualty events in two days those levels are going to be even lower. So anyone who can please donate blood. www.mbc.org/donate-blood...
Union Station is also where a lot of people enter DC for protests.
What value is this going to add to our lives & region on this, the 20th anniversary of Katrina, from which we have yet to fully recover? What will this contribute to society? Who will this serve?
I get that and have the same resolve and i manage to abide by it about every other day. it's hard.
children in minneapolis shot while praying, children in DC passing armed military when they take the metro to school, this country is so sick
this is what we have done. are doing.
this
National Guard troops probably just thrilled they’re being called up away from their families to do garbage duty because of DOGE
Meanwhile
New BONUS episode: "Cars Drive Us Apart, Subway Takes Unite Us." Some recent studies explain just how destructive cars are to the social fabric of our communities. Plus: our take on David Byrne’s Subway Takes appearance—and his take about urban bike etiquette! www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-...
Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it
This is obviously nauseating. I was reluctant to watch but this man has influence and it's good to face reality. I also was chilled is his assumption that the elites in "modern" life should live in an "atomized" and anti-community way. What could possibly go wrong.
Robot meets bollard. Nothing beats the #WorldBollardAssociation
What's really remarkable about this is how much Mamdani really embodies a pure, unabashed, visceral love of New York City and its history and culture, and how much Adams and Cuomo absolutely despise him for it.
sounds about right
While the 6th-largest city’s transit system utterly collapses, here’s a gentle reminder that the Pennsylvania Turnpike has $17.37 billion in debt on the books, for all those who think roads and highways make money.
Solidarity from NYC!
celebrating all there is to celebrate in this remarkable, beloved city
petty cruelties to let us know they don't see us as human or worthy of living
exactly all this
It's showing this great city for the place it truly is!
Biden authorized the funding for this bridge. In any case, the finer point here is that the president of the United States is THREATENING TO DEGRADE THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF MAJOR CITIES IF THEIR LEADERS OFFEND HIM. This is front page news!
#zcavengerhunt, welcome to @thewaroncars.bsky.social
I don't think it was a financial decision at all. It was all about having power over other human beings, especially their own workers and servants, and MeToo, BLM and 3% unemployment all were huge threats to that power.
We’re 7 months in, and “Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago” is a headline in the Washington Post. And because it’s city number three, we’re already numbing to it. If you read this about any other democracy in the world, you’d conclude that it was well on the road to a dictatorship.
1 of 3 bike parking lots at the MN State Fair this week: Evidence that the Twin Cities’ investment in a network of protected bike infrastructure is paying off. More and more people are using bikes for more and more trips.
the idea that we should be protecting the clintons at this point in history is so deranged. come on. is this coming from the same people who want to listen to james carville's advice, i guess?
Once again: the military takeover of U.S. cities is not a distraction from the thing, it is the the thing
yes
Want a happy city? Build for bikes. So pleased to see Minneapolis continuing to be on this list & can personally confirm: I am happier here than anywhere I've ever lived. And a huge factor in that is my ability to live a less car dependent life with my family.
Lauryn Hill comes to mind, but for sure this can be a tough path
I will say the opening credits were cool
If the recommendation to Democrats was to speak plainly, casually, like a normal person having a real conversation rather than like a politician stumbling through jargon, they’d be gushing about Mamdani and telling Dems to be more like him. But they’re not, because they really mean something else.
Threatening bridge reconstruction money appropriated by Congress is as clear an example as you’ll find of how maximalist Trump views his spending authority *and* his willingness to use that authority to squelch standard political debate.
nooooooo
All other defects aside, from a queer female perspective, it was like watching a bunch of weird stereotypes from the last century. And not hot.
On another note, last night I saw "Honey Don't" and I would like to spare you that experience.
I've been off Twitter for I think two years or so and I have honestly forgotten what it was like to be on there. I have gotten a lot of benefit out of this site. But social media platforms come and go. They are not real life, which some seem to forget. Leaving them doesn't mean disappearing.
Yes! Catching up now on all of his train and bike-related activities!
technically!
Your first clue.
Also, Ed Sheeran, welcome to @thewaroncars.bsky.social
This is lovely. Look at all the possibilities there are for more fun, quieter, and more sociable ways to get around than cars. Imagine if we wholeheartedly embraced life-giving options like these within (North American) cities.
I really, really don’t think what blue voters want to hear right now is “military takeover is redundant because we can crack down on crime more effectively.” They want to hear “this is fascism and we won’t stand for it” and vanishingly few national dems are doing that
not really up on his history
the quiet part out loud: "keeping more money in my pocket than I could ever spend is worth fascism, death, and widespread immiseration"
This is a crime against the people of Philadelphia.
Amazing how little some city officials care about the health and safety of their constituents. All while the panic about "violent crime" spirals out of control.
The hits keep coming. “The departments that won’t be accepting Ph.D. students now include art history, cinema and media studies, classics, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, Germanic studies, linguistics, Middle Eastern studies…”
The chips...are down
US has become more & more unequal, with wealth continuing to concentrate at the very top. The bottom 50% of households has only 2.5% of nation’s wealth. Black ppl hold less of the nation’s wealth than they did 30 years ago, despite having a growing pop share. www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/...
theweek.com/politics/bla...
Imagine destroying everything you've spent decades building to stop a bike lane. That's exactly where Broadway Stages's Gina and Tony Argento find themselves, indicted by DA Bragg for bribing an aide to Mayor Adams to get her to block the safety redesign on McGuinness Boulevard. buff.ly/OcXZBFh
they are not distracting us from distractions, they are doing things
thx
Such disdain for cities that, if directed at suburban/exurban/rural areas by a democrat or anyone on the left, it would be headlines for weeks. But the media just normalizes this city punching bullshit.
We all want the same thing regardless of how we get around. Creative done with @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social
The perfect placement of The Ask sticker - directly on top of crossing flag instructions🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 📸 Rich Jones
Caring about 49 humans who were ruthlessly gunned down at the Pulse nightclub is not a “political statement,” Ron DeSantis. Removing their memorial is yet another cruelty. Ron DeSantis will quickly be forgotten. The love and legacies of the 49 will outlast his hate. #Pulse #FL
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” this thread notes.
Chef's kiss. Support local journalism, because we sure need it these days. Support @thecity.nyc
going into the weekend like this
I honestly don't know much about this race and would welcome someone explaining to me why this isn't shady as heck
👏