{"id":53376,"date":"2025-11-14T19:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/53376\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T19:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T19:43:08","slug":"the-war-on-cars-is-coming-to-car-centric-san-diego","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/53376\/","title":{"rendered":"The “War on Cars” is coming to car-centric San Diego"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Heavy<\/a>Morning commuters head toward Oakland on July 22, 2019. (File photo by Anne Wernikoff\/CalMatters)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy to imagine a life dependent on alternative travel in car-centric San Diego, but the creators of a podcast and a new book are coming to town to get people to try.<\/p>\n

in San DiegoCreators of the \u201cWar on Cars\u201d podcast and authors of \u201cLife After Cars\u201d bring their vision for an America beyond the automobile to San Diego \u2014 a hot-button issue in our car-centered region.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can try to imagine a life in which car use is not mandatory for every single trip that you ever make, you can start to imagine communities even in these legendarily car-centric places like Los Angeles and San Diego, where the communities themselves are the point,\u201d Sarah Goodyear said. \u201cNot the cars and the streets and roads that they drive on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goodyear and Doug Gordon are the co-authors of \u201cLife After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile,\u201d and the co-creators of the \u201cWar on Cars\u201d podcast. Their North American tour promoting the book includes a San Diego stop<\/a> at Adams Avenue Theater on Nov. 16.<\/p>\n

Transportation has been a rocky issue of late in San Diego. For the second time in a decade, voters last year rejected a ballot measure<\/a> for transportation improvements. And the city has raised parking fees, sparking community blowback<\/a>. City development decisions geared around making dense, walkable neighborhoods easier to build<\/a>, while removing parking requirements, has also been controversial<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Citywide, just 3.5% of residents commute by public transportation<\/a>, below the national average. Countywide, nearly 80% of residents drive to work<\/a>, compared to just 2.6% who rely on transit and 3.5% who bike or walk.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a life-or-death issue, so it is incredibly serious. But the world we want to move towards is very joyful,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cIt\u2019s fun to reduce driving in your life and replace it with more walking and more bicycling, and even transit \u2026 And when you can add those things to your life, it just makes your life better, your community better, your relationship with your neighbors better.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their book and podcast, Goodyear and Gordon argue that cars do more harm than good, costing 40,000 lives a year<\/a> amid rising pedestrian fatalities, compromising health with exhaust and noise pollution, and taking up valuable land space for highways and parking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Gordon and Goodyear, the hidden costs of cars far outweigh the monetary costs of expanding alternative transit options,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could start saying, \u2018You know what, we\u2019ve tried widening highways. It never works. It never makes the traffic better,’\u201d Gordon said. \u201cSo rather than spending a billion dollars to widen the [Interstate] 405 here, or the [Interstate] 5 in LA, what if we took that money and invested it in transit and invested it in high-quality bicycle lanes that a child or an older person would feel comfortable riding?\u201d<\/p>\n

They also argue that car dependency divides people rather than bringing them together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat people stand to gain goes back to the traffic that you\u2019re talking about, you know, how many people do you know who live in the Southern California community who don\u2019t see that friend who lives in a different neighborhood because, \u2018Oh my god, it\u2019s 40 minutes if you get caught in traffic,\u2019\u201d Goodyear said.<\/p>\n

While such a change would not happen overnight, they explained that little steps, such as putting a cone on a dangerous corner or organizing a bike bus for schoolchildren, can make a big difference. They hope to create solidarity at their live events through optimistic discussions of the future, Q&A sessions and time after for networking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not an all-or-nothing movement; it\u2019s what if we could replace just a few trips here and there? Maybe you still drive to work because work is too far away and there\u2019s no good transit schedule right now, but just little tweaks,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cThink about how much better the traffic would be if you went from that 2 or 3% of transit trips and cycling trips to 8%? That would be transformative for a place like San Diego or anywhere in Southern California.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ NEXT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Morning commuters head toward Oakland on July 22, 2019. (File photo by Anne Wernikoff\/CalMatters) It\u2019s not easy to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[6996,6221,2855,5323,74,76,75,821,987],"class_list":{"0":"post-53376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-podcast","10":"tag-public-transit","11":"tag-public-transportation","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-san-diego-headlines","14":"tag-san-diego-news","15":"tag-traffic","16":"tag-traffic-accident"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}