HIGH OCTANE SHIFT CARS ERA STARTS DRIVERS
For example, drivers in Texas alone are responsible for 0.5% of global emissions - more than the entire country of Nigeria's emissions. There are some absolutely wild numbers, too. The racial aspect of highway expansion doesn't escape Knowles, either, and he acknowledges the sheer destructive racism inherent in these expansions. Highway expansion, for instance, systematically tore neighbourhoods with residents of colour apart. The way the car has influenced society isn't a simple impact - and Knowles knows this and explores how cars are absolutely terrible on the climate, how cars have destroyed the social fabric of American society, how highway expansion had often torn vibrant neighbourhoods apart and set into motion urban decay, and how auto-centrism has wide-ranging effects on lower-income people that cannot afford to drive. Knowles' analysis is really comprehensive. Indeed, in the last few decades, developing countries have shifted more and more towards auto-centrism, while western European countries shift away and Asian countries build credible alternatives to driving. For those who have occupied urbanist circles online, this is nothing radical, but Knowles (the author) seeks to make this clear and also to explore how auto-centrism isn't a solely American phenomenon. Around 2008, the government recognised that congestion choked the city and that multimodal transport options were non-existent and sought to recify that.Ĭarmageddon's core thesis is that car-centric culture, as it played out in the western world, the former Soviet Union, and China, has completely and utterly destroyed their countries.
HIGH OCTANE SHIFT CARS ERA STARTS FULL
Fifteen years later, downtown Toronto is full of dense neighbourhoods, more reliable transit, and a modest expansion in cycling infrastructure. There was a remarkable shift - around 2008, downtown Toronto had a ton of parking lots sprinkled throughout the city. Proposed highways like the Spadina or Crosstown Expressways threatened to sever uptown. Transit was chronically underfunded prior to the mid 2000s: commuter rail was infrequent, subway and bus expansion never quite kept up with the growing expansion of the city.
Highway 401 is a comically wide expressway cutting through the city, the Don Valley Parkway is a scourge on some of the best parkland in the city, the Gardiner Expressway acts as a barrier keeping the city's residents from the Harbourfront. For many decades (and still to this day), the city was fairly car-centric, having chronically terrible public transit investment and freeways running through the city. London, Birmingham, and Coventry, England With these negatives, Knowles shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City.ĬARMAGEDDON features original reporting from: He takes readers around the world to show the ways car use has impacted people’s lives-from Nairobi, where few people own a car but the city is still cloaked in smog, to Houston, where the Katy Freeway has a mind-boggling 26 lanes and there are 30 parking spaces for every resident, enough land to fit Paris ten times. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, Knowles traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Cars have caused tens of millions of deaths and injuries. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal. Over the past century cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives technology just makes everything worse. The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century.
A high-octane polemic against cars-which are ruining the world, while making us unhappy and unhealthy-from a talented young writer at the Economist
0 kommentar(er)
