Stop Signs is probably the most comprehensive assessment of the power of the automobile I’ve yet read. It’s a history lesson on the car, and its rapid evolution and a field guide to Homo Automotivus. As the subtitle suggests, it focuses on the economic, social and environmental, but also neatly summarises topics like health, psychology, race, advertising and planning. It looks at the environment in which the car has flourished most, the United States, where it dominates the landscape.

All these are contained in the deceptively lightweight format of a whistle stop tour, to borrow a term from an age when the car was not so dominant. The book takes us on a long, tour of major U.S. cities by long distance bus. Thus, the book sounds like a travelogue of the key economic, social and environmental issues around automotivism.  

“Should I drive to get that loaf of bread, or can I walk? That decision amplified and repeated by many millions results in impossibly overloaded freeways and ridiculously expensive and unsustainable patterns of movement.”

If you are solidly or fervently in the carfree camp, this book might exasperate you. Despite the edgy first word in the title, this book is not edgy – it’s gentle. While it offers suggestions for changing the “car system” in America, it does so in a polite, muted way: “We need to rethink what we truly need and reclaim the control and freedom we like to imagine the car has given us.” They are not calling for radical change. Instead, these sisters, who lost a cousin and a close friend in car crashes, write about lessening the negative aspects of cars while still owning a car.

The book is well researched and includes many stick-in-your-head details: the average American spends 18.5 hours a week in their car, all the parking spaces in the USA could fill the state of Georgia, car makers spend the equivalent of US$630 on advertising per car sold. The chapters focus on describing the current car system, addressing the downsides (money wasted, lives lost, kilos gained, social inequities created) in a gently relentless way. I enjoyed chapter 2 the most, where they looked at the stories Americans tell themselves about cars (they give us freedom, individuality, status etc.) and poked holes in each myth. Each chapter ends with a suggestion for change, though it’s made quickly and without much detail, such as: “The one thing we can do today to help keep our families healthy is to make the conscious decision to drive less.” The final chapter presents an array of suggestions such as log your driving miles, sell your second or third car, delay your teen’s driving, shop on the Internet and support transportation advocacy groups. I appreciate that they address multiple approaches to changing car culture from buying smaller, used cars and driving less to making driving safer and getting politically involved in transportation issues.

Folks who live without a car are not portrayed in flattering ways. “Carless adults,” they write, “cope with the anxiety or guilt of relying on others for rides or the shame of seeming somehow immature, inadequate, or incompetent.” Riding a bike or walking instead of driving is suggested as a possibility but only for short trips when the weather is nice and the air quality is good. (I wouldn’t leave home for weeks at a time if I followed these guidelines!) But they didn’t write this book for me or anyone else carfree. They wrote it for the millions of people who haven’t given much thought to how they could get around differently. The reviewers on Amazon lauded the book as engaging and thoughtful and noted that it had altered their perspective. Perhaps then this book, in its own way, is radical. It might just sneak up on some unsuspecting drivers and jump start them into rethinking their car.

Reviewed by Kelly Nelson

Though Bicycle Diaries is a great title, this is certainly not the non-motorized version of Che’s famous diaries. It is Byrne’s experience – having carried his folding bicycle on the plane – of cycling in cities such as San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Manila and Berlin, and more so about his reflections on art and artists in those cities.

There is plenty to find fault with in this book. Some of Byrne’s arguments are weak or incomplete. In discussing violence on TV and in video games, he seems to feel satisfied with the fact that murderous scenes did not cause him to become a psycho killer…but of course the question isn’t the effect of such wanton violence on the majority. When writing about an anti-beauty aesthetic – the belief that it is somehow silly, inconsequential or sentimental for art to make people feel good – Byrne fails to relate such attitudes to the horrors of modern architecture that he so poignantly describes elsewhere in the book. If art and theory provide excuses to create inhospitable landscapes, they deserve far sharper critique than his.

The book is a lot more about art, music and people he works with than about cycling, and not all his stories are particularly enthralling. But where Byrne does talk about cycling, he gets it right – and his focus sharpens towards the end of the book. He cycles where he travels, he explains, because one sees and experiences far more: “I felt more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car”. Rates of cycling, he accurately observes, are influenced by the built environment and traffic mix, not by weather and hills.

Byrne devotes decent space to describing changes in his home of New York City, and helpfully suggests good routes. He includes some truly wonderful, place-specific bicycle rack designs that he made and that were actually used by the city. And his description of an event he organized, complete with Jan Gehl, musicians, photos of awful bike lanes, and valet bike parking is enlightening; I for one never knew that David Byrne was helping to make NYC better for cycling.

His vision of the future is compromised by his allowance for cars, yet surely his self-confessed eccentricity would allow him easily to envision streets full of a variety of cycles, some with three or four wheels, with an infinite variety of carriers and carriages attached, the image complete with some trams and lots of pedestrians and people just enjoying the car-free ambiance. Maybe Byrne is more mainstream than even he realizes.

But while I failed to find the book a truly great read or particularly inspirational, as a Talking Heads fan I couldn’t help but love the fact that he has written it. The book isn’t preachy, professional, or academic in the least; he uses slang and casual phrasing. His descriptions of how low architecture has fallen in some religious belts is devastating. And like some other books reviewed on the pages of Carbusters, this one has the tremendous advantage of having the potential to bring some of the unconverted on board – if not to carfree cities, at least to the exciting possibilities of the bicycle as a means of transport and the need for urban transport planners to prioritize cycling. Without efforts to bring on board the unconverted, our work will truly be a “road to nowhere”.

Or to cite the lyrics from that song (road to nowhere): “And we’re not little children/and we know what we want./And the future is certain/give us time to work it out. … There’s a city in my mind/come along and take that ride…And it’s very far away/but it’s growing day by day…” Kudos to David Byrne for helping us (in however limited fashion) take that ride to the city in our mind, that inevitable car-free city.

Reviewed by Debra Efroymson

Car Troubles is a collection of 13 academic essays, all but two written by professors at universities in Canada, UK, USA and New Zealand. The editors make a distinction between the system that supports car travel (vehicles, roads, gas suppliers) and the personal experience of car travel (freedom, frustration, thrill, rage). They signal this distinction with a hyphen: “automobility” for the system and “auto-mobility” for the personal experience.

The essays in Part 1 analyse the content of automobile advertisements, present a cultural analysis of transportation infrastructure, and describe the drag racing community in Vancouver, Canada during the mid-20th century. The essays in Part 2 discuss the changing discourse around auto-safety, argue for the integration of technology and social behaviour for improving car safety, and present how parents in Auckland, New Zealand think and talk about a walking school bus for their children. Part 3 includes a case study of the political and social discourse around hypermobility in Atlanta, USA an examination of the political and economic context of mobility in Chile, and a discussion of the pragmatic conditions and constraints that make driving seem compulsory. While the entire book is critical of cars and car usage, the essays in Part 4, titled “Beyond the Car”, may appeal most to the carfree minded.

Todd Litman, the head of Victoria Transport Policy Institute, writes about cars as “positional goods,” items that confer social status on their owners. He uses this framework to discuss the many downsides to car-centred transportation systems and policies in North America. He offers a list of six policy strategies to reverse these negatives, yet devotes only a sentence or two to each idea. I wish he had expanded on these. How can we raise the prestige value of walking and bicycling and public transit? How could we devalue the status of car ownership? He suggests these can be done, in part, through promotion and marketing, but what would that look like?

Sociologist George Martin compares patterns of motorisation in North America and Western Europe with those in Asia and Eastern Europe where car ownership is surging. He says there is a chance that cities in less developed countries may evolve into what he calls “soft motorisation”: cities built around multi-modal transportation where cars are smaller, powered by alternative fuels and often shared. I hope he’s right.

The book closes with a thoughtful discussion by sociologists Kingsley Dennis and John Urry about how the current car system will likely, but unpredictably, change during the 21st century such that “the steel and petroleum car system will finally be seen as a dinosaur”. Some combination of technological and sustainability turning points will usher in a post-car system, they say, though it’s impossible to say when or how this will take place. This article is more optimistic about the future than their co-authored book After the Car (reviewed in Carbusters #39).

The practice of building landscapes and lives around automobiles is thoroughly and repeatedly critiqued throughout Car Troubles. In much shorter supply are ways forward: how could we make changes in how we think, how we live, how we get around? While the book is slow reading, with academic language and many in-text citations, it does offer multiple frameworks for thinking about cars and the problems of car-centredness. It’ll be up to you to find ways to use this information to move forward and make a change.

By Kelly Nelson

Oregon State University Press, 2009, 288 pp, ISBN 9780870714191

As I pedal to work every day – a middle-aged woman on a red girl’s bike – I’m so busy watching for turning cars and shattered glass that I rarely pause to wonder if I am, at that moment, part of a cultural revolution. Jeff Mapes would say that I am.

His book documents current and past bike activity and advocacy in support of his claim that we’re in the midst of a cultural shift toward bicycling becoming a mainstream form of transportation in the US. Biking, he contends, is increasingly being viewed as a sane, hip and even sexy way to get around town. Mapes, a political reporter who lives and bike-commutes in Oregon, has done his legwork, compiling loads of information. He includes interviews with key bike advocates and activists such as John Forester, the iconoclastic author of the 1970s classic Effective Cycling, tattooed Phil Sano, a fan of naked rides who has made several short “bike porn” movies,  transportation planner Susan Zielinski who uses the term “new mobility” to talk about getting around without a private car, and Janette Sadik-Kahn, the transportation commissioner in New York City who has, among other initiatives, closed a section of Broadway to cars. Mapes also includes interesting historical tidbits such as Belva Ann Lockwood’s presidential campaign claim (in the 1880s) that “a tricycle means independence for women.”

The book focuses on urban cycling in places long associated with biking: Portland, New York and Davis, California, with nods toward San Francisco, Boulder and Madison. He also includes a chapter about the biking culture and infrastructure in Amsterdam. Mapes clearly likes biking and serves as a comfortable and able tour guide on his visits to these cities. I’d be more convinced, however, that a pedaling revolution is truly underway if he had detailed thriving bike cultures in Atlanta, Dallas and Las Vegas.

Still, kudos to Mapes for bundling all of this information in a readable package. Some of the information is basic (bike riding saves gas and burns calories) and some of it complicated (the varied plusses and problems of bike lanes versus bike paths versus bike boulevards versus cycle tracks) yet it’s an interesting read. And, with a six-page bibliography and a six-page index, it’s a great resource on bicycling and bike advocacy in the US.

Book Review by Kelly Nelson

One Less Car is about the politics of cycling in North America.

One chapter covers the 1890s, while the rest of the book focuses on “biketivism” from the 1960s onward. It began, Furness states, in Holland in 1965. An anarchist group called Provo proposed several plans for social change including a White Bicycle Plan: ban automobiles from Amsterdam and launch a free bicycle program. “The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car,” a Provo manifesto stated.

Pro-bike/anti-car activities first appeared in North American in 1970 with a Bicycle Ecology Day in Chicago and then a 1972 protest in New York City where bicyclists rode by an auto show chanting “cars must go!” (The organizing group, Action Against Automobiles, later became Transportation Alternatives.) About these and other early political efforts Furness writes, “The active politicization…of bicycle transportation in those decades…set an important precedent for advocates and…vocalized a joyous rallying cry for cyclists to take to the streets en masse, as both riders and protesters.” He goes on to devote an entire chapter to Critical Mass, the once-a-month, leaderless rides that originated in San Francisco in 1992 and were initially called “Commute Clot.”

Furness does a nice job of presenting the various strands and tensions within bicycle advocacy: do we focus on the positives of biking or on the negatives of driving?; should we encourage biking for the environment or for public health or for urban vitality?; is it enough to use a bike for basic transportation or should riding a bike be harnessed to a larger social message?; is it better to build separate bike paths or to teach bicyclists how to ride with cars? My favorite sections happened to be less overtly political: a discussion of how bike-riding characters are portrayed in movies and television shows and an examination of pro-bike sentiments in punk rock lyrics.

This book stems from the author’s dissertation in cultural studies so you’ll bump into academic speak throughout: “mobile ontologies,” “complexity of capitalist space(s),” “mobile subjectivities.” The upside is that readers benefit from all of Furness’s research: loads of interesting facts, a 42-page bibliography and 115 endnotes on average per chapter. This is the kind of book that needn’t be read straight through. Each chapter can stand alone. Read it for a thoughtful look into the many faces of bicycling culture and politics.

Note: The author is donating all royalties from his book to three community bicycle organizations in Chicago and Pittsburgh.

Review by Kelly Nelson