So I grew up in Toronto. 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. 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. 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. Proposed highways like the Spadina or Crosstown Expressways threatened to sever uptown.
There was a remarkable shift - around 2008, downtown Toronto had a ton of parking lots sprinkled throughout the city. Fifteen years later, downtown Toronto is full of dense neighbourhoods, more reliable transit, and a modest expansion in cycling infrastructure. Around 2008, the government recognised that congestion choked the city and that multimodal transport options were non-existent and sought to rectify that.
Carmageddon’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. 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. 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.
Knowles’ analysis is really comprehensive. 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. Highway expansion, for instance, systematically tore neighbourhoods with residents of colour apart. The racial aspect of highway expansion doesn’t escape Knowles, either, and he acknowledges the sheer destructive racism inherent in these expansions.
There are some absolutely wild numbers, too. For example, drivers in Texas alone are responsible for 0.5% of global emissions - more than the entire country of Nigeria’s emissions. If these are just Texan emissions, what of the rest of the planet, then? Lots of zingers - electric vehicles are the darling of many politicians. But Knowles sees through this - the ethical problems inherent with the extraction of rare-earth metals in developing countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the fact that the power grid would have to be expanded by a monumentally historic factor to support EV drivers mean EVs aren’t a credible alternative to petrol vehicles in the first place (and also that EVs are, you know, just heavier cars so cities would still be ugly and a whole host of other problems). He instead proposes a larger more material shift towards a more walkable, transit-oriented society.
A lot of the arguments in Carmageddon are really convincing in favour of urbanism and systematically deconstructs the idea of a car-centric society. None of his arguments sound forced or repeated, the book flows quite naturally and much like a really long long-form essay published in the news. In some ways it feels a lot like a good complement to what Chuck Marohn argued in Strong Towns, just without the repetition and actually analysing racial and social factors. Good read - would recommend especially to those interested in local politics.
4/5
Written 12 May 2023 Adapted from my review on Goodreads.