The War on Cars
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EPISODE 117: Fixing America's Car Culture with David Zipper
🕑 Added 2024-01-02 11:01:01 +0000 UTCHappy New Year to our Patreon crew! We are so excited for the months ahead. It's a busy time here at The War on Cars headquarters!
We’re kicking off 2024 by bringing you our conversation with David Zipper, one of the hardest-working analysts on the transportation scene today. You may be familiar with David from his writing at Bloomberg CityLab, Slate, The Atlantic and Fast Company, where he relentlessly covers road safety, climate change, and the future of micromobility
We talked with David about the excesses of the auto industry, our road fatality crisis, the absurd way speed limits are determined on American streets, and whether we might ever be able to swap out our bloated SUVs for electric golf carts. Or if that’s too much to ask, will cities at least start charging people more for driving massive glacier melters?
Thanks for coming along with us on this ride!
—Sarah, Aaron and Doug
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LINKS:
You can find out all about David Zipper’s work, along with links to his writing, at his website.
See David on NBCDFW’s excellent series about why Dallas is such a deadly place to drive.
This episode is produced with support from Cleverhood. Listen to the episode for the latest Cleverhood discount code.
See The War on Cars LIVE at Caveat on NYC on Wednesday, January 31st. Check social media for the announcement of our guest! You won't want to miss the show.
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This episode was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.
Comments
Aaron Eischeid
Agree with other commenter Andrew Croker. David's response to the push back on are car companies evil and are knowing participant employees morally culpable was poor. He kind of touches on it earlier that a lot of the forces are not malevolent or have conspiratorially intent, but they absolutely ought to be called out as evil. None of that may end up creating a come-to-jesus moment for the companies, but it's an important part of the campaign of awareness. No free pass given to the cogs in the machine with the obviously evil outcomes. Empathy for them as fellow humans who needed a job, who weren't fully aware, sure, but also they owe other humans the dignity of accepting accountability of producing a product and perpetuating a system that ruins so many lives.
Austin Ledzian
David had great responses for some hard questions, fantastic episode!
