More road rage reads

I first came across Paved Paradise, our April book of the month, because I went on a streak of reading about cars, culture and crime.

Here’s why: Last year I got mildly obsessed with the story of a local cyclist who was hit and killed by a drunk driver not so far from where I live. The case was unusual in some ways: the victim was a champion cyclist, it happened on federal land, and the perpetrator wasn’t named for months and months. Speculation was wild in the months before the case made it to court, so once proceedings started I went to watch a few times to see things unfold. I ended up speaking to a lot of folks who knew more than me: friends, experts, locals. 

It got me wrestling with some deep thoughts about our cities and our justice system, and the ways we have changed our decision-making and behaviors not just to accommodate drivers, but really to benefit cars. I wrote several thousand words as I tried to understand what was going on, and although I haven’t published any of them yet, I hope to find a way to get them into public at some point.

Anyway, as I dug into the ideas that the case brought up, I picked up a stack of books exploring the way our roads have become conflict zones—often in a very literal sense. There’s been a glut of books about the subject over the last few years, perhaps seeded by Jeff Speck’s 2012 Walkable City and then given a shot of adrenaline by the pandemic.

So here are some other titles that you might want to look at if you enjoyed our pick this month.

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Killed By A Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall (Island Press, 2024) is a torrent of bite-sized chapters that lay out a provocative argument from this professor of civil engineering: that the way that engineers design roads is not just unhelpful for pedestrians and cyclists, it’s actively, knowingly harmful—and it’s based on almost zero evidence. The short blasts means it moves fast, creating a pacy (but deeply infuriating) rant from somebody who has seen it from the inside.

Carmageddon by Daniel Knowles (Harry Abrams, 2023) came out around the same time as Paved Paradise, and takes on the topic of society’s car addiction. Knowles tours you around the world—Kenya, Texas, various European utopias—to show how auto-centric culture has taken over in the past century, and offer ideas about what alternative futures might look like. If you feel like you want to double down on the indignation you got from Henry Grabar’s book, maybe this will be what you need. 

The Power Broker by Robert Caro (Vintage, 1974) is the classic biography of Robert Moses, the man who did more than almost anyone else to reshape American roads and cities by bending New York’s streets to his will. It’s older than me, but it stands the test of time: an exhaustive and still sadly resonant book about the way political power gets used and abused and ordinary folks have to deal with the consequences, sometimes for generations. If you’ve never read it, you might find it useful to listen to the recent, excellent 99% Invisible readalong series that gives you a companion through each part of the book.

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That’s all for this week. But a quick reminder: Next week we’ll be talking to Henry about his book: Tuesday April 22 at 7pm Eastern (that’s 6pm Central, 4pm Pacific) on Zoom, so I hope you can dial in. We’ll send a reminder with a link on Monday, and Club members will get a calendar invite sent to their email—no pressure to attend, but a few folks told me it’s the best way for them to remember that it’s happening. I look forward to seeing you there.

Onward

Bobbie