Close your eyes and imagine exiting your front door. Within moments, everything necessary for your life is a few blocks away, except perhaps your job. Groceries, coffee, toiletries, your bank—if you’re still a physical bank-type person—auto shop, all within walking distance. You never have to commute too far to live your life.
Sounds like quite a dystopian hellscape, doesn’t it?
Believe it or not, that’s yet another conspiracy theory that emerged earlier this year, because the ability to access things you need is apparently a Deep State plot. Derek is joined by “The War on Cars” co-host, Doug Gordon, to discuss how this conspiracy started and why smart urban planning is a boon for society. First, we discuss Jane Jacobs, the Scranton, Pennsylvania-born journalist and theorist who brought her civic activism to Toronto in 1968, with Matthew coloring in how her legacy has fared during the rise of the Ford family.
Corrections: In his unbridled enthusiasm for the topic and the memories it churned up, Matthew messed up THREE things—the Escalade is a Cadillac, not a Ford, “Downtown” was sung by Petula Clark, not Peggy Lee, and Bill Davis was a Progressive Conservative Premier, not a Liberal! Apologies.
Show Notes
The Woman Who Saved New York City from Superhighway Hell | Vanity Fair
‘The streets belong to the people’: Why a premier killed the Spadina Expressway | TVO Today
Ford family is building a political dynasty
Video shows Councillor Doug Ford handing out $20 bills at TCHC building
Where the Spadina Expressway Didn't Stop | The Local
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And this week we should add how the idea of walkable cities makes some people so terrified that they will lose the psychological armoring of their cars, they'll make up global conspiracy theories about it instead of going to therapy.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspiratuality 179, The Conspiracy of Cities with Doug Gordon.
Close your eyes and imagine exiting your front door.
Within moments, everything necessary for your life is just a few blocks away, except perhaps your job.
Groceries, coffee, toiletries, your bank, if you're still a physical bank type person, your auto shop, they're all within walking distance.
You never have to commute too far to live your life.
Sounds like quite a dystopian hellscape, doesn't it?
Believe it or not, that's yet another conspiracy theory that emerged earlier this year because the ability to access things you need is apparently a deep state plot.
So this week, I'm joined by Doug Gordon, who is a co-host of The War on Cars, and we will discuss how this conspiracy of 15-minute cities started and why smart urban planning is a boon for society.
But first, we're going to discuss Jane Jacobs, the Scranton, Pennsylvania-born journalist and theorist who brought her civic activism to Toronto in 1968.
and Matthew is going to color in how her legacy has fared during the rise of the Ford family.
Well, I love Jane Jacobs.
Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, taught me a lot about cities and city planning that I had never thought of or considered.
Namely, the wonkish but essential world of urban planning.
The city that I imagined for my first novel, Shadowstone, which I built outside of Newark, New Jersey, was based entirely on her ideas.
Now, Jacobs is often pitted against Robert Moses, the New York City urban planner who basically destroyed minority neighborhoods around the boroughs by putting highways right through them.
And yes, he's remembered for connecting the city, and he built over 650 playgrounds around the boroughs.
I used to take the Belt Parkway out to the Rockaways, a trip that is nearly inaccessible via the subway and it takes four times as long.
But here's the thing.
Moses also tore down neighborhoods to build projects We famously and infamously know them now, often through a lot of rap albums, especially from the 1990s.
I mean, you don't get Nas' Illmatic or the Wu-Tang Clan without Robert Moses, at least not their rough upbringings in some buildings that were left over from his legacy.
I'm not trying to praise Moses for creating these projects.
He definitely doesn't deserve that.
But it is a reminder that people do their best to rise above their circumstances.
And in the case of Nas, he's a billionaire by now, but definitely not giving Moses any credit for that.
That's despite him, not because of him.
Now Jane Jacobs championed diversity, which has its own sort of efficiency, which it was basically what Moses was always advocating for, supposedly.
But it's just not in the way that he would understand.
Now in her book, Jacobs writes, the more successfully a city generates diversity and vitality in any of its parts, of course, the better become its chances for building success ultimately in still other parts.
Including, eventually, those most discouraging to begin with.
Moses segregated the city so that such diversity would never even be allowed to flourish, and Jacob strived to integrate all the thriving parts and cultures that build a city.
In fact, she helped block Moses' plan to build a highway through Soho, Chinatown, and Little Italy, and what a nightmare that would have been.
I couldn't imagine having lived there for 12 years as I did and having to get around a highway in those areas.
They're some of the most walkable areas of Manhattan.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit more about her with Doug Gordon.
Yeah.
But, Matthew, what are your thoughts on Jane Jacobs?
Well, I have a lot.
And in preparing for today, it was great to listen to Doug Gordon for the first time.
And it was also a real treat because my ears were burning as he brought up a lot of Toronto history that's really familiar and personal to me because I grew up here.
So Jacobs, as you said, came to Toronto right after facing off over Moses' plans to rip apart Greenwich Village.
And she had been arrested and charged with inciting a crowd at a public hearing.
So it's after that that she makes the move up north.
She takes up residence in a neighborhood called The Annex, and she immediately just gets right into it again, taking a leadership role in something called the Stop Spadina Movement.
Which was, you know, arranging itself against a proposed highway system.
So, the Spadina Expressway, at the heart of that new system, had been proposed as far back as the 1940s as part of a new limited access highway network in Toronto.
Which, just like the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which never got completed, it would have sliced right through neighborhoods in the downtown core to, you know, efficiently deliver cars from the suburbs to polished concrete garages in the banking district.
So the whole context is this post-war clash playing out everywhere between inner-city residents, This Toronto plan would have torn up ravines and wetlands.
It would have felled thousands of very old trees.
And the tree canopy, by the way, here is a serious thing.
It covers about 30% of the city and people really love it.
And also, the highway would have demolished whole city blocks built at the turn of the century in the annex, and it would have bisected Chinatown and working-class warehouse factory neighborhoods to, yeah, just dump a stream of shiny new gas-guzzling cars into Kensington Market, which is, to this day, one of the city's most walkable neighborhoods with a decades-long record of small, immigrant-run businesses that have done a really good job at resisting gentrification.
I don't know if it's still there, but I'm Hungarian, my family's from that area, my wife is Thai, and Kensington Market will always remain my memory because there is a restaurant called Hungry Thai.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a fusion of Hungarian and Thai food, which is one of the most unique culinary offerings I have ever seen.
Yeah, it was like I was probably in there just last year.
And it's like schnitzel dumplings with, you know, sweet and sour sauce.
And I'm glad it's still there.
I think it was a husband and wife couple anyway.
But Kensington Market is just like that, like completely unique, one of a kind businesses.
So, yeah, it has not been, you know, flattened by, you know, numerous initiatives like this.
So, this coalition that Jacobs worked with against the Spadina Expressway, it drew a lot of intellectual firepower.
Marshall McLuhan lived only a few blocks from where the highway would have flattened a bunch of old neighborhoods, and he wrote, quote, Toronto will commit suicide if it plunges the Spadina Expressway into its heart.
Our planners are 19th century men with a naive faith in an obsolete technology.
In an age of software, metro planners treat people like hardware.
They haven't the faintest interest in the values of neighborhoods or community.
Their failure to learn from the mistakes of American cities will be ours too."
McLuhan was politically conservative in a lot of ways, and so he and Jacobs wouldn't have agreed on everything, but he did bring his medium-is-the-message view to bear on urban planning with this position.
He and Jacobs both knew that there's really no daylight between how we live in space and the kind of space we create.
So, she's in Toronto for two and a half years, it's 1971, and the coalition wins.
The Stop Spadina movement triumphs, mainly on the power of left-leaning persuasion.
The Premier of Ontario at the time, the Liberal Premier, Bill Davis, stands up in Queen's Park in the legislature, which also would have been physically disconnected from its neighborhoods by the proposed highway, and he says, We must make a decision as to whether we are trying to build a transportation system to serve the automobile or one which will best serve people.
And then he finishes that speech by repeating one of the key slogans at the time, the streets belong to the people.
I'm about halfway through this story here and I'm going to connect some dots in the things that I've said so far.
I don't think it's an accident that Jacob's activism is blossoming in 1968 as social revolution boils over everywhere.
I don't think it's an accident that she was dismissed as a woman by the all-men, Don Draper-style urban planning establishment at the time.
But then she also won out in the realm of ideas through community organizing and ground-level protesting that cut across cultural, class, and language barriers.
I don't think it's an accident that she moved to Canada after her throwdown with Robert Moses so that she could shield her sons from the Vietnam draft.
And it's not an accident that the annex house that she moved to at 69 Albany Avenue, and then she lived in until she died in 2006 at 89, was a three-minute walk away from Trinity Saint Paul's Church, which has been a center for spirituality and social justice since the early 70s.
And that church is at the hub of a small shop and cafe district that for decades let writers, artists, left-wing organizers hang out at all hours, staging open mics, arguing, falling in and out of love, and creating co-op housing.
And this is where it gets personal to me because the neighborhoods she helped save carried this legacy, I mean somewhat battered but still vibrant, into my own young adulthood in the late 80s and early 90s, which I spent in the annex.
I would busk on the corner in front of Dooney's Cafe and the Future Bakery on Bloor, where I spent hours with my writer's friends.
And just south of that bakery was a place called the Transact Club, where the local Marxist book club met every week.
And this was just several blocks west from that church, Trinity St.
Paul's, which hosted the small press book fair every fall.
And on the north side of the street, above a corner grocery mart, There was a large meeting space rented out by Greenpeace and other protest organizations at the time that I worked for.
So I walked around that space a lot with friends.
And my best friend actually taught me that old phrase, Salvator ambulando, or any problem can be solved by walking.
And my point is that if that expressway had been built, none of that space would have been there.
I mean, we would have met each other and organized things in different ways, but I think you really have to be on foot to do the real thing, to be present.
I think you need a 15-minute city to connect with each other.
And I think this stupid, stupid conspiracy theory that you discuss with Doug, Derek, only really makes sense to me as a kind of resentful, suburban defense mechanism, you know, against what it really means to be connected with each other.
Like, to be in each other's business to the point that you have to care.
So...
I didn't grow up, however, in the Annex.
I grew up in a completely different spot in Toronto, in the West Toronto borough of Etobicoke.
So this is like 1940s and 50s detached houses on really big lots, super suburban, the area was carved up by perimeter highways, and we were a car family.
We needed our car for most things.
But also the subway line came out just as far as our neighborhood, and I could hop a subway and get downtown in like a half an hour.
And my parents encouraged that in part by sending me to school downtown.
Now, my mom and my dad didn't grow up with, you know, public transit or, you know, easy access to downtown areas.
My mom grew up in the car capital of Windsor across the river from Motor City, Detroit.
Where my dad was from, and so they were not like public transit people.
But she loved, nonetheless, heading into town for the museums, the fabric shops, the bookstores, bakeries.
One of her favorite songs was Downtown by Peggy Lee.
You know, when you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown.
And so, you know, my mom was really content in this 50s home, but she also loved the shabby, chic diversity of the century neighborhoods and the various waves of, like, immigrant heritage that had made them what they were.
But I was surrounded in Etobicoke by families who loved to hate the city, who spent a lot of time at suburban malls and hockey rinks and a lot of time in their cars.
And, you know, these are like dads who worked in town and they would have an hour commute on very clogged arteries.
And so they would sit and curse while listening to Toronto's low-rent versions of Howard Stern.
And if the boys from these families ever rode the train downtown, you know, they'd pack together in gangs, wearing hockey jerseys and ball caps, and they'd make fun of brown people.
And this was the petri dish for an aggressive backlash against the legacy of Jane Jacobs.
And it's a backlash that's fully embodied by Etobicoke's Ford family.
And what you're going to hear is that Doug Gordon's podcast is called The War on Cars.
And he explains that they cribbed the title from Toronto's infamous mayor, Rob Ford, who was in office from 2010 to 2014.
Because when he won his campaign, he declared that the war on the car is over.
I can't support bike lanes.
How many people are riding outside today?
We don't live in Florida.
We don't have 12 months a year to ride on the bikes.
And what I compare bike lanes to is swimming with the sharks.
Sooner or later, you're going to get bitten.
And every year, we have dozens of people that get hit by cars or trucks.
Well, no wonder.
Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks, not for people on bikes.
And, you know, I feel my heart bleeds for them when I hear someone gets killed.
But it's their own fault at the end of the day.
If you don't quite remember, Rob Ford was Toronto's yelling, sweating, you know, crack-smoking mayor busted on viral media.
It was like an international news for a while.
He was notorious for shit-faced public drunkenness while in office.
You know, and two years before he became mayor, he was charged with assault and threatening to kill his wife.
You know, he was a real mess of a human being.
And he carried like a whole clan's worth of white suburban resentment.
And I think he was like the main psychic toilet for his family's aggressions.
And that family is now a dynasty.
His dad was a conservative MP in the provincial government that clawed back most of Bill Davis's legacy.
And his brother Doug is the current conservative premier of the province.
Some people have called him the Trump of the North.
And now he's on the verge of being arrested for corruption, for allegedly, guess what, Derek, selling off environmentally protected land in the ring around the city so that his construction buddies can pave it over for more highway-connected subdivisions.
So is he gonna use that arrest and the court date as proof that the deep state is against him?
Yeah, probably, or at least his followers were, yeah.
Okay, so I have to describe Rob Ford beyond the crack and the drunkenness for a minute.
To draw the line between how Jacobs is an early theorizer and champion of the 15-minute city, and the reactionary forces that zero in on walkability and community as suspicious projects of the elites.
Because I don't think there's a conspiracy theory here without that weird political turn.
So, what Rob Ford loved to do most was to drive around Toronto in his big-ass black Ford Escalade, always on his phone, Often speeding, always complaining about the traffic into downtown, probably sometimes inebriated.
He had at least one DUI in his closet.
Now, who is he on the phone with if it wasn't, like, you know, AM radio hosts?
usually his own constituents, often his neighbors, who he would invite to call him on his personal line
at all hours about the smallest issues that mayors should be totally delegating to staff,
like road signs, parking tickets, potholes.
He would show up on people's doorsteps in the middle of the winter,
like a high school kid working for pocket change to help shovel out cars.
You know, he was not big on brains.
He didn't have any interest in long-term planning.
But he did have a certain charm, like a kind of lend-a-hand attitude
that won over, like, the barbecue dads.
And the Ford family didn't completely ignore the Black folks, but Rob's brother Doug, so he's the premier now, his idea of racial coalition building was to show up in the lobby of a public housing block and have himself filmed handing out $20 bills to teenagers who'd slap him on the back and tell him he was cool.
So, you're shaking your head, Derek.
It's 2023, and I know this was probably a few years ago, but how does that enter someone's mind as the right thing to do?
I'm consistently blown away by that.
It's just the way, it's their kind of populism.
There's no real way of relating to people except through, like, You know, cash and, I don't know, and holiday picnics.
I mean, one of the big things that they would do every year on Canada Day is throw a free Ford family picnic at their house, or sometimes they'd rent out a park or something like that.
But, you know, thousands of people could go and you could get as many free hot dogs as you wanted to eat at this thing.
And that was like, that was them giving things back, right?
It was very sort of like, I don't know, I don't know, just very easy efforts at kind of being a good guy, but no real sort of thought to it, no politics behind it really.
Yeah.
So, Rob Ford was like the OG one-man trucker convoy.
Like, I mean, even down to not having a truck, and he wasn't a trucker or any kind of working-class guy, but he did position himself along with his family against the downtown elites, the cappuccino-sipping crowd that Jane Jacobs would have been hanging with.
I mean, and he'd have to forget, of course, that his construction buddies drank a lot of cappuccino.
And so he developed this pseudo working class version of faux populism that creates a mirror world vision of where the power lies in a city or in a country.
So, he's helping out his elderly white neighbors, you know, by changing their flat tires.
And he creates this image of, like, the helpful mechanic of the suburban common person.
And that also fans the resentment of everyone who feels alienated from the out-of-touch university people in the downtown core.
And, to be fair, he had an angle.
Because by the 2000s, places like the Annex were fully gentrified, and the old Victorian multi-unit houses of the Bohemian precariat were being renovated into single-family pads for bankers and tech bros and tenured profs in the business schools.
So, these downtown neighborhoods were becoming economically exclusive, and actually some of Jacobs' own ideas about preservation.
Gordon quotes this great phrase, new ideas need old buildings.
Some of that has been appropriated by wealthy people to promote forms of nimbyism, right?
So, this is part of how you wind up with the hypocrisy of Toronto King Jordan Peterson living just blocks from where Jacobs lived.
And, you know, he enjoys long walks and all of, you know, the metrosexual perks and no one is laughing at his Batman suits because everybody's very accepting.
But somehow he still thinks that cars and gas are at the root of his freedom instead of the vibrant social network that gave him a chance at being an interesting person.
But Rob Ford didn't have any money concerns.
He had money from his family business, he had political power, but he also had this, like, personal fragility as big as the Sky Dome.
And it spilled out all over his politics, and it buoyed him up as the imagined victim of smarter downtowners.
And I think he felt most comfortable in that escalade.
Because it was a tank.
And as Gordon points out, when you guys get to that excellent Petro-masculinity article at the end of the interview, there's a real sense in which being that armored means that you don't have to think or feel things in any grounded or connective sense.
Like you're safe and alone and cozy with your grievances.
So, Rob was set to run for a second term in 2014.
And he had to drop out right after being diagnosed with late-stage abdominal cancer, and he died shortly after at the age of 46.
Now one last thing I want to mention is that if Jane Jacobs and her colleagues had lost the battle over the Spadina Expressway, the Ford family would have eagerly continued to pave over more and more of the city.
And, you know, we've already talked about how the local business and small business culture would have been ripped apart.
But the other casualty would be that some of Toronto's main protest locations wouldn't exist.
When thousands of people showed up to protest the G20 meeting in Toronto, this is in 2010, and it sparked an intense police backlash, but also it unleashed a decade of mass protests against war, racism, police violence, and inequality.
The people who went were eventually kettled on Spadina Street around Queen West.
Now today, and over the past few weeks, crowds are gathering in the annex outside of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's office, about a four-minute walk from Jane Jacobs' old house, and a block away from Spadina, and across the street from a great Jewish community center that lots of people use for meetings, and I used to swim there in their saltwater pool.
And the protesters have been demanding that Freeland and Trudeau lobby for an end to war in Israel and Palestine.
And, of course, there are counter-protesters there as well, and that's democracy.
And without Jane Jacobs, there could have been a highway running right through those streets, you know, jammed with more cars, playing more talk radio, with more terrible takes, you know, handed into the ears of more isolated drivers, burning up more gas.
You know, strengthening the perverse incentives for war and of course, heating the planet.
Well, as you were talking at one point, I decided to look up to see if I could find a clip of Rob Ford talking about the war on cars.
And one of the first things to pop up on YouTube was Prager University in 2017 did a segment on the war on cars, which seems to have just taken Ford's ideas and talked about in America how all of those scary liberals are trying to get more people into public transportation.
Yeah.
PragerU, founded by Dennis Prager, is not a university.
It's a conservative foundation.
They are climate change deniers.
They have some pretty strange views on race, picking up where you left off.
So it doesn't surprise me.
I probably will avoid watching that, but I'm sure at one point my curiosity will get the best of me and I'll get even more angry.
But overall, I know this seems like a bit of a strange topic for conspirituality, but I am a big fan of the War on Cars.
I also never get to talk about cycling on this podcast, which is funny.
I know, you don't.
You don't.
Yeah, it consumes a lot of my time.
I have said before, I put more miles on my bike every year than my car, and that is something, so I am very on board with a lot of what they talk about on the War of Cars.
But given that a conspiracy theory was attached to the very wonkish idea of 15-minute cities, reaching out to Doug was a no-brainer, and I'm actually pretty fascinated that something as mundane and bureaucratic as urban planning would warrant a conspiracy.
But I should not be surprised by anything at this point.
Yeah.
So, Doug Gordon writes and produces shows for PBS, Discovery, National Geographic Channel, Travel Channel, and more.
His beat covers the intersection of science, history, and popular culture.
He lives in my old neighborhood, which is Park Slope in Brooklyn, where his vehicle is a bicycle, and when I lived there, that was my only vehicle as well.
It's a perfect neighborhood for that.
It's one of the best commuting areas.
New York City is a very challenging area to ride with certain parts, but Brooklyn you
can get around.
And Doug, of course, is the co-host of The War on Cars alongside Sarah Goodyear and Aaron
Napierstek.
I highly recommend checking it out.
Doug, thank you for joining Conspiratuality Today.
My pleasure.
I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Awesome.
Well, likewise, I have been listening to The War on Cars most of the year.
In our pre-intro banter, you just mentioned that the title comes from Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, or former Toronto Mayor, I believe.
Matthew, of course, is in Toronto.
We'll have preempted this interview with a little bit of talk about Jane Jacobs.
So, please just give me the 101 on how this podcast got started.
I should explain the title of the podcast first.
So if you're an advocate like I am, anytime you want to change one parking space and turn it into parking for 10 bicycles, or take 10 parking spaces and turn it into a bike lane, you get accused of waging a war on cars.
And that phrase has been used by lots of people, but sort of the biggest person who used it was Rob Ford, former mayor of Toronto in 2010.
When he was elected, he sort of was speaking to the outer suburban ring of Toronto and said, ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car is over.
He promised to rip out bike lanes, stop investing in trams, things like that, really catering to suburban drivers.
So, when we were searching for a name for our podcast, my co-host Sarah Goodyear said, well, it's sort of the podcast about the war on cars.
And we said, ah, you know, that's it.
My podcast is, I'm the co-host with Aaron Aperstech and Sarah Goodyear, who are both journalists who've been covering this forever.
When we started, we realized nobody was approaching the car as sort of a cultural object.
You know, we approach transportation as a policy question to be solved.
As a governing question, but cars are arguably like the biggest cultural totem in North America.
They inform every single piece of our politics, of our culture, the way we live.
I'm sort of preaching to the choir here.
So we've covered everything from policy, but you know, I also did an episode on why there are no bike lanes in Lego play sets, which is odd because it's a Danish company.
We do an annual episode on the Super Bowl and all the car ads and sort of what they say about American culture, masculinity, all the rest.
So that's sort of the general 101.
My wife is a UX researcher and one thing we talk about often is how people navigate spaces.
So she went from being an events director for hotels to leading people through apps.
The idea is when you open an app, you don't want to have to read a bunch of tool tips on how to use it.
And I think about that when I'm walking through cities.
A lot of times people aren't probably going to be aware of city planning, but how they navigate spaces affects them physically, it affects them emotionally.
Since you've started the podcast and grown it to a lot of success, how has the response been to people understanding city planning a little bit better, perhaps?
Yeah, it's funny when we started about five years ago and people would ask me or my co-hosts, well, what do you do?
I think we were all a little reluctant to say that we did this podcast because we were sort of the weirdos and maybe we didn't want to get into it.
But we have found that there's been a bigger awareness of our issues.
COVID, for example, got everyone familiar with outdoor dining and, you know, how we could use the curb to benefit businesses and not just individual drivers.
I think we all experienced the clear skies and clear roads and the quiet that happened during COVID.
Now, obviously that's not how we would want to change our cities, but I think it got people thinking about, wait a minute, maybe there's a better way to use public space than just for the movement and storage of two ton personal mobility devices.
I am a road cyclist.
I had mentioned that besides getting to talk about 15-minute cities, which we're going to get to very soon, I just don't get to talk about bicycling much, which is my main passion.
I cycle, part of the reason I moved to Portland, because the infrastructure for cycling is wonderful.
But when I lived in Brooklyn, specifically Park Slope where you live, I had a hybrid because when I was riding on the streets, I knew that I was going to have to jump a curb at any moment, and that's not very easy to do on a road bike.
So I had this mountain bike slash road bike concoction to help me navigate that space.
Now, recently, Eric Adams has been talking about cyclists and sort of putting some of the onus and responsibility on cyclists and saying he's done a lot.
So can you talk a little bit about what Eric Adams is talking about and is he making the city any better with transportation for cyclists?
This has been the deadliest year for cycling fatalities since the Vision Zero program began under our former mayor, Bill de Blasio.
I think we're up to 26 people killed cycling.
And, you know, Adams, he's a Republican.
Like, you know, he's a Democrat.
He ran on the Democratic ticket.
So he takes a sort of safety individualistic approach to staying alive on our streets.
Everybody is responsible for their own safety, and if cyclists are dying, well, it's because some cyclists are not following the law.
That's not really what Vision Zero is about.
That's not how you build a good cycling city.
You build a good cycling city with good infrastructure.
You know, Vision Zero, for your listeners who might not be familiar, is a Swedish program that sort of puts the onus on safety culture.
on the system designers, right?
We expect people to make mistakes.
People are imperfect.
And recognizing that people make mistakes, you design into the system things that make
it possible so that when a car crashes into a human being, it's happening at a low speed,
let's say.
Or there's separation between the car and the human being.
So that the result of predictable mistakes is not death.
And so Adams has not been very proactive in that sense.
He's also in sort of true conservative style, just slashing budgets.
So our Department of Transportation has less money, less personnel to implement proven safety methods.
I want to talk big picture and then drill down on this idea of 15-minute cities.
The way that I always look at New York City, once I started to learn about it because I didn't know, was sort of this Jane Jacobs versus Robert Moses equation that I've concocted because Jane Jacobs wrote so intelligently about city planning, about things like having windows on a ground floor in brownstones helps make The neighborhood's safer because the grandmothers who are at home taking care of the grandkids and the kids can see the whole neighborhood at once and how newer buildings lose that when they have retail or they don't have that same dynamic.
Now, Robert Moses, of course, just was exceptionally racist and went through neighborhoods to put in highways.
And some people look at his feats as wonderful because he connected all the boroughs in some ways and made it easier for cars to get around, but it had detrimental effects on a lot of neighborhoods.
So looking at what you have today in 2023 in New York City, what are some of the best things that you can do or the city can do to actually implement a more commuter friendly city that is not so reliant on cars?
New York has a great historical legacy of a very good subway system, a very good bus system.
It's not perfect by every measure.
It doesn't access every neighborhood equally, but we've got great bones.
You know, I think that's the sort of Jane Jacobs idea that new ideas just need old buildings, basically.
You know, that like we've got the good bones of a great urbanism.
The neighborhood I'm in, Park Slope, has ample sidewalks, protected bike lanes, generally low traffic speeds, things like that.
I think we all intuitively understand what makes a city great.
If you go on vacation, where do you go?
You usually go to places where there aren't a lot of cars or you don't have to be in a car all the time.
Whether that's Mackinac Island, Martha's Vineyard, or Disneyland.
We tend to not say, hey honey, let's just be stuck in traffic.
Let's take the kids.
We go to places where we understand that walking and seeing the city and seeing other people is what makes human connection, makes us happy, makes us safe.
New York has done a lot over the last, let's say, 10-15 years.
We've added tons of protected bike lanes, There's a new bus-only busway, basically, on 14th Street in Manhattan, and it's adding some more of that stuff.
It's not happening at a pace that I think is in line with the challenges we face, whether that's congestion or climate change, but it is happening.
Let's get into the heart of this, at least from our perspective in terms of conspiracy theories, because that's something we cover a lot.
You did an entire episode on 15-Minute Cities.
I will link to it in the show notes.
It is excellent.
It taught me a lot about the history of it, but can you give a broad overview of what a 15-minute city is and how it evolved into becoming something that the right and conspiracists kind of latched onto as a deep state pogrom?
A deep state program is a great way to put it.
I mean, in many ways, a 15 minute city is just a city, right?
I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
My daughter walks 10 minutes to high school.
My son is in fifth grade.
That's a seven minute walk.
I have three grocery stores.
One is five minutes away.
The farthest is 12 minutes away.
Transit, buses, the subway stations, all very close.
I have a hardware store, a bank, a dry cleaners.
It's all in a very short radius around my apartment.
It doesn't mean I never get in a car.
If I have to go somewhere far away to visit family, then I go do that.
We have basic medical services in my neighborhood, but if I have to go see a specialist, I go into Manhattan, which is much farther than 10 or 15 minutes away.
So, in many ways, the 15-minute city concept is just putting this sort of arcane academic bent on a thing we sort of intuitively understand about cities.
You don't need to have Brooklyn or Manhattan kind of density to have a 15-minute city.
Where you are in Portland, you have a lot of things accessible to you within 15 minutes.
It's sort of the archetypal small American town with the Main Street, with all of the You know, the green grocer in the hardware store and the bank where they know you by your first name.
That can sort of be a 15 minute city as well.
The concept, the name 15 Minute Cities comes from this French Columbian urbanist named Carlos Moreno who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris.
And he really was just putting, like I said, this sort of academic label on this thing that has been floating around in urban planning circles for a very long time.
You can go back as far as the 1920s, if not earlier.
In the 1920s, there was an urban planner named Clarence Perry, and he came up with an idea he called the Neighborhood Unit.
And basically what he did was he took a map.
identified a public school in the middle, and he drew a circle around it with a 15-minute radius.
And he basically said, everything inside that circle will be accessible to people walking and
biking. And this was actually largely in response to the rise of automobiles in the early 20th
century, when cars were sort of seen as this invader that were disrupting communities,
In New York, I think one child a day was being killed in the 1910s and 1920s.
And so there was a real reaction to automobiles as this plaything of the rich and destroyer of communities.
There's fascinating research by Peter Norton at the University of Virginia.
He's a historian.
He has a great book called Fighting Traffic, which really gets into the rise of the automobile and the backlash that occurred.
So Clarence Perry basically said, you know, let's keep the automobile sort of on the edges, big arterials.
That's where the cars will go.
You might be able to drive in the inside of this neighborhood unit, but you might not be able to go in a straight line.
We're going to make it safe for a child to walk from one edge of the circle to the middle and then from the middle to the outer And that's the neighborhood unit.
Flash forward to the 90s and 2000s, and you have cities like Portland, Oregon, for example, that were really coming to grips with sprawl, climate change, sustainability.
And Portland came up with, I think it was a 20-minute neighborhood.
They basically had this plan that by 2030, all of the residents would have basically all non-work essentials in a 20-minute radius of their homes.
Boulder, Colorado had a very similar thing, because Boulder has a huge housing affordability crisis.
And so they said, you know, we need to make a city where everybody has equal access to every amenity without having to get in a car for every last trip.
So this is not a new concept by any stretch.
It's just that Moreno put this, like I said, sort of arcane academic title on top of it.
And where did the conspiracy theories enter?
None of the people who are involved with this conspiracy will be unfamiliar to a conspirituality audience.
There have always been conspiracies surrounding urban planning.
You look at Agenda 21, which is a UN framework on sustainability and environmentalism, and you had people like Glenn Beck saying that this was a globalist plot to change Americans' lifestyle.
The 15 Minute City Conspiracy Theory was sort of the convergence of a lot of things.
One of them, namely, being COVID.
So, as most of us remember, COVID, there were a lot of lockdowns of varying degrees.
If you lived in places like Paris or the UK, They were probably a lot stricter than they were here in the U.S.
You know, you might have actually needed a doctor's note or permission to leave your home for a brief period of time.
As this 15-minute city thing started making the rounds, it became very much this thing that the right picked up on.
I think in many ways I liken it to CRT, this very obscure academic idea that explains a lot of how the world can and should work, that they just plucked from obscurity
and said, oh, you know, the left, the globalists, whoever, your child, your seven-year-old
is learning about Rosa Parks in second grade.
Well, that's CRT, which is just, of course, ridiculous.
With the 15-Minute City, it's sort of the same thing.
It's like, here's these pointy headed intellectuals.
They want to trap you in your homes.
It's no longer, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to get in a car to get a cup of coffee or get a carton of milk or take your child to school.
It's you're going to be trapped in your home and you'll only ever be able to leave in increments of 15 minutes.
And it's sort of like, leave, go seven and a half minutes out
to get your cup of coffee, and quick, you better make it back before seven and a half minutes
are up.
You had sort of like the Murdoch-backed news media, largely in the UK, pushing back against this.
You had Jordan Peterson saying that basically, you know, walkability and livability are nice,
but it shouldn't be up to kind of these pointy-headed intellectuals to tell you
how to live your life.
Katie Hopkins in the UK, noted former contestant on the British version of The Apprentice and Islamophobe, I might add.
She has a YouTube video where she talks about this.
Mark Dolan on GB News in the UK.
He also has a video where he basically says like, what would it be like to live your life in increments of 15 minute units?
Like you could watch half an episode of How I Met Your Mother or something like that.
Just totally ridiculous stuff.
They were all seizing on a plan that came from Oxford in the UK, which I can get into if you want.
Oxford and also if you could talk a little about how Davos dovetails with this.
Yeah, so in the Jordan Peterson tweet about this, he was quote tweeting some random person, and some of the hashtags in the quote tweet were like, hashtag WEF, hashtag jail Schwab.
Basically, what happened was that during COVID, there was a plan from the World Economic Forum called the Great Reset.
Nothing truly substantive.
On the episode that we did, we sort of called it like a sort of TED Talk for rich people, nothing too exciting.
They looked at things like the ways in which COVID exposed general inequalities in our healthcare system, in how we live, in the effects that it had on blue skies and carbon emissions, and said this is an opportunity for a quote-unquote great reset.
The people who believe that this is a conspiracy to lock you in your home feel that the 15-minute city conspiracy is part of this great reset.
There was a video produced with now King Charles where he narrated talking about this opportunity to reset our world.
Klaus Schwab, the director of the WEF, wrote a book called The Great Reset.
In it, it contained all of these ideas of like rebuilding cities
so that we don't have so much sprawl.
So we're not emitting so much carbon just getting in our cars.
Public transportation would be part of this.
Walkability would be part of this.
As your listeners know, once the WEF has its hands on something,
that is just red meat for the conspiracy theorists.
When I shared our notes, because we had gone back and forth a little bit
with Matthew leading up to this, he said the funny thing is Jordan Peterson
is known to walk for hours a day around Toronto, around his neighborhood.
So here you have someone who is likely taking advantage of the ability to walk around and probably have a lot of convenience around him and yet turns around and says this is some sort of conspiracy.
I also remember The Great Reset was very early in our podcast when we launched and people were treating it as if it's some hidden nefarious agenda.
We were like, it's published online!
You can read everything that they are talking about.
It's not hidden in any way.
Now, there is an argument that, yes, these rich people who are known to exploit natural resources are now saying, hey, let's get everyone else not to do that.
And that is a credible argument.
But what you covered was, in the UK, the idea that You would not be able to visit your grandmother who lives in an adjacent neighborhood because then you would be rerouted for an hour or such.
Can you go a little bit into some of the paranoia around the specifics of what people were saying it was going to do?
Yeah, and I think it's really helpful then to look at the Oxford Plan because this really became the nexus, the container in which all of these conspiracy theories were dumped.
So, Oxford, UK, it's a really small city.
I think about 160,000 people.
Very classic medieval town center.
It's a university town, so you see lots of people biking, walking, taking transit.
But it's also choked with cars because it was never built to handle automobile traffic.
A couple of years ago, the City Council came up with a plan that they were going to divide the city into six zones.
And the idea would be that if you wanted to walk, bike, or take transit between those zones, no big deal.
Nothing changes for you.
If you were driving, you would only get 100 passes per year to do that.
to drive between zones.
There were some exceptions based on what zone you're on.
There were exemptions for people with disabilities, taxis, things like that.
The exceptions are really not that important, but it was a pretty well thought out plan
in terms of who might this disadvantage, and they accounted for that.
Now, I personally think this was not a great plan.
If you look at the cities that have successfully managed traffic, we can sort of get into this maybe a little later, they're generally not based on, exclusively, on traffic cameras, license plate readers, things like that.
But that's what the Oxford plan was.
That you would drive from one zone to the next, and a camera reader would snap a picture of your plate, and you would get docked.
Okay, this person made one trip.
They're down to 99 out of their 100.
If you went over 100 in a year, you might get fined up to, I think, 70 pounds, which is pretty significant.
This was basically seen as big brother, right?
They're going to surveil you.
They're going to watch you go.
If you just want to visit your grandma in the adjacent zone, who are these bureaucrats to say that you only get to do that 100 times in a year?
Again, it's really important to note that if you're walking, cycling, or taking transit, there's no limit to where you can go, when you can go, and how often you can do it.
This really became red meat for the conspiracy theorists.
So not only is the World Economic Forum basically saying we need to trap people in their homes to prevent further climate change, but we're going to add the surveillance state on top of it.
And Big Brother is going to tell you where and when you can go in a car.
There were huge protests in the center of Oxford, and it shouldn't be lost on anyone that they were walking.
Let's all meet up in the town square to protest against this, and this attracted sort of your usual suspects, like obviously the people who were just there to protest this quote-unquote lockdown, but anti-vaxxers, a lot of far-right extremists, Islamophobes, Nazis.
The city council members in Oxford who proposed this, they received death threats.
You know, I had heard stories of people who child services were called on their, you know, families, just all of this sort of doxing that people are probably familiar with that happens in these situations.
And they had to come out with a video statement basically saying, we are not locking you in your home.
We, this is not a conspiracy.
This is just a plan because our city is overrun with automobiles and it's not working for anybody.
You always know the vibe at a rally by whether the Nazis show up to support it or not.
You know where it's going in that sense.
Yeah, yeah.
If I'm at a rally and the Nazis show up, I leave the rally.
That's usually my rule.
Unless you're fighting the Nazis, or at least protesting against them, yeah.
Exactly, right.
Now, what amazes me about this, growing up in New Jersey, I remember in the 80s, when you were riding on the Turnpike or the Parkway, you only had the option of throwing exact change, so you always had to have it on hand.
And then over time, you can use credit cards, so that freed that up.
And then over time, they added readers, so you could just put it up on your dashboard, and then you could have the money in there, and they would charge you, and that way they had faster lanes.
I don't ever remember any sort of conspiracy theories coming up around this, but it seems like you get to this point and now they're reading your license plate when they were already tracking your credit card or they were already tracking your readers.
They had all that data, but now there's something different about this that becomes the deep state.
While you were saying that, I was reminded of something we talked about on the episode, which was my co-host Aaron Aperstack saying, like, the plan in Oxford, if you think about it, I mean, I live in New York City.
To go anywhere in New York City, I have to use my credit card, buy a transit pass, swipe it, There are cameras at every station and it can ostensibly track what station I enter, what station I leave.
You know, transit is inconvenient in many ways.
I generally have to go into the city to go back out to another neighborhood.
And then when we apply this to driving, okay, well, they're going to, you're going to need a pass and you're going to have to go into the city this way and not be able to go out this other way.
And it will be so inconvenient.
It's like, well, that's, that's the transit experience, right?
Cars have been marketed as a symbol of freedom.
It's plain and simple.
We see them as keys to opportunity.
It's, you know, the American love affair with the automobile, the lore of the open road, things like that.
And I do think it is interesting that when driver convenience is considered Very few people, except for the privacy absolutists, ever complain about things like E-ZPass, which you're referencing in your New Jersey example.
We have speed cameras here in New York City that take a picture of your license plate if you're speeding in excess of 11 miles an hour in a school zone.
Whoa.
Drivers will say, well, that's a horrible invasion of privacy.
How dare you take a photo of my license plate and fine me for it?
But those same people would not ever complain if E-ZPass readers help their trip across the George Washington Bridge or something like that.
So I think it's this idea of anything that constrains freedom in a car is really an assault on fundamental liberties.
Because we have conflated driving with fundamental liberties.
And we don't see that car-free living and the rights of people who don't have cars are equally as important, if not more so, than drivers.
Now you said cars as a symbol of freedom, and you also did an episode, I'll share this one in the show notes as well, on cycling being portrayed in television and movies as compared to bicycles.
Now I want to do a brief digression because my wife and I are watching season three of Lupin right now, and there's one scene where The main character is chasing a luxury vehicle and miles through Paris ends up arriving at the same time on a commuter bike.
It was showing the commuter bike as a bit of good, in a sense, if you caught it.
And the reason that I caught it was because I was thinking so much about this episode that I'm talking about.
Now, the dichotomy between vehicles and bicycles in cinema is really something fascinating to look at.
But then you also shared with me an academic paper that's linked to it about petromasculinity.
So let's start with the episode about why you decided to look at it through cinema, and then I want to spend the rest of our time talking about this paper because it's absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, it is really fascinating.
So first, bikes in film and TV.
So this is changing.
You are seeing, like you noted, more positive examples of cyclists in cinema, in streaming shows, especially for a younger generation.
But the sort of example par excellence, I guess, is the 40-year-old Virgin.
What do we know about the character of Andy in the 40-year-old Virgin before, title aside, we know that he has never had sex?
We know that he doesn't have a driver's license and he rides a bicycle in Los Angeles.
It's a shorthand for saying this guy is a loser, this guy is a child.
He also collects action figures, right, and like keeps them in the box.
Cycling is equated with him just being a man-child and that's often the case.
In another Judd Apatow movie, this is 40, I think Paul Rudd's character goes out And is doored, he's like this aggressive cyclist and he's doored by a driver and the driver blames him for it and it's sort of seen as this like pathetic low point for Paul Rudd's character.
And you see this in movie after movie, you know, even Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which I'm a huge fan of.
You know, Pee Wee is the hero, right?
He goes on the hero's journey, the classic hero's journey, but he's not exactly like Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis of like other 80s action movies.
He's a man child.
Nobody aspires to be like Pee-wee Herman.
I mean, I did as a kid, but I'm not normal.
Film and TV are visual mediums and you have, you need to use all these shorthands for establishing character.
And a great way to do it is to show their means of transport.
And when we did the episode, people responded and said, Oh yeah, you know, but what about the kids in Stranger Things?
Right?
Like they all ride bicycles.
So like, okay, those are children and that's their only means of getting around.
And then as the series goes on, the cool characters in that series, Steve, There's another character, Billy.
They're introduced by their cars, like sports cars and expensive cars that, you know, because Steve is the rich kid in town, he has a fancy car.
So cars and bicycles are really great conveyors of character in film.
And because so many movies are made and or set in Los Angeles, they become shorthand for something must be wrong with you if you're on a bicycle.
It's fascinating because I lived after living in Brooklyn, I moved to Los Angeles for 11 years before coming to Portland.
Part of the reason I left Los Angeles was just because I hated spending an hour and a half getting somewhere that should have taken 15 minutes.
But the cycling culture is phenomenal out there once you get out of the city into the canyons into the valley.
So it's this really weird dichotomy of There is actually world-class cycling right there, yet if you're in the city, which is what most people know Los Angeles for, it is an absolute nightmare trying to get around.
And I even remember when I was living there, they made it a law that cyclists had the same rules as cars, meaning you were allowed to take up a whole lane, which is kind of a nightmare given the aggression of the drivers there.
Yeah, I mean, it would sort of be like saying that, like, preschoolers playing tag on the same field as, like, the New York Giants practicing for their Sunday game, they're all subject to the same rules.
Like, it's not exactly the same thing.
Yeah, that was the problem.
That was their attempted fix.
Again, coming back to Portland now, the infrastructure is here and it's actually getting better.
They're trying to improve it constantly, which is very nice.
But I did mention this paper.
It's about a concept called Petro-masculinity.
It was written by Kara Daggett, who was an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech in 2018.
Can you introduce this concept a little and we'll get into some of what she writes about?
I mean this is one of those papers that to me I think kind of explains everything.
What Daggett is arguing with this term petro-masculinity is that she basically says that the American way of life for a long time was centered around fossil fuel consumption, right?
Levittown, suburban, white, middle class lifestyle that really was reliant upon the consumption of gasoline and oil.
You drive to your suburban home, you drive to your Your job.
And that in a way, sort of what we're dealing with now with the rise of authoritarianism, make America great again, is all based on fossil fuel consumption.
And anything that comes along that is a threat to that status quo is kind of giving rise then to further authoritarianism and its related impulses.
If I can quote one part of this really fascinating paper, I think it would be very helpful.
She says that Make America Great Again insists upon a leave-it-to-beaver innocence about fossil fuel burning, that there are no downsides to burning more oil and coal, or at least none for white Americans.
Through the rosy nostalgia afforded by petro-masculine identity, the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leech energy and power from the state-slash-traditional family.
And I think that's pretty powerful stuff, and it explains a lot.
You know, a question we often get on the podcast is, why is cycling this thing that you do on your own power, using your own muscles, you know, if you're able-bodied, right?
It doesn't require licensing by the state.
It doesn't require subsidies to the tune of all the money we spend on oil extraction, highway building, things like that.
Why is that seen as weak and left-coated?
Why is that seen as conventionally feminine, non-masculine?
Whereas driving a 6,000 pound Hummer, which you only need to power by tapping your toe and requires vast amounts of subsidies in terms of everything I just said, why is that seen as as tough and masculine?
And I think it gets back to this idea that the modern conservative movement and authoritarianism in general, it's not based on physical prowess.
Like Trump is not an exceptionally physically impressive specimen of a human being, but the people who like him, his followers, they love that he dominates other people, you know, through his sort of insult comedies, speeches, or the policies that he wants to enact that put down other people.
You know, one of the things that Daggett argues is that things like coal rolling are an assertion of that petro-masculinity.
So you see a cyclist or you see a person in a Toyota Prius and you just unleash a plume of toxic smoke.
It's a way of dominating other people.
And I think that really explains everything about what's going on when we sort of try to change our roads.
And she also argues that so much of that is rooted in weakness, not in strength.
I'm going to quote now.
The failures of fossil capitalism to sustain its white masculine order, which it helped to erect with wages and commodities, only exacerbates the sense of collective impotence.
In order to manifest power, the impotent authoritarian personality is forced to subsume its urge to dominate within submission to a stronger external force.
Be it God, the laws of the market, the military leader, or a tyrant, or fossil fuel burning.
Now, you mentioned coal rolling a minute ago.
Can you explain that?
You did say a little bit about it, but where it appeared perhaps, or some of its instances, because when I first saw it on Instagram years ago, I was shocked that people actually enjoyed doing this and it was a thing, but it kind of also makes sense given her ideas on impotence.
I mean, coal rolling is basically just a thing where people will take their mufflers and their exhaust systems and they will modify them.
These are post-purchase modifications, not factory stuff, to allow you at will to just unleash just diesel fumes, basically.
Clouds of black smoke, you know, press a button, tap a pedal, and out comes the smoke.
And, you know, like I said, a lot of times it is used to assert dominance over other road users, and so Daggett cites a lot of this in her paper.
It's riding by a cyclist and making them breathe in all of your exhaust fumes, or someone in a hybrid car, or a group of women standing, you know, on a sidewalk somewhere.
It's a way of asserting control.
You know, I think that impotence piece that you mentioned, that you quoted, it's really important because drivers have been sold a bill of goods by the car company.
When you watch a car commercial, the one thing you never see in it are other drivers.
It's slick roads, empty city streets, people speeding through lower Manhattan or even Los Angeles at night, and everything's perfect.
And then you get in your actual The averages are now well over $30,000 on.
You're spending $1,000 a month according to AAA to basically maintain fuel and insure your car.
And driving sucks.
A lot of the people who say that they love driving are big fans of our show because the type of driving that we all love to do is not the type of driving that we have enabled through the design of our cities.
Nobody wants to drive every day to work.
They'd love to drive on a camping trip or something like that.
So you get in this car and you're like, wait a minute, I was promised dominance.
Everything about the environment tells me that this world is built for me, the driver.
The signs, the pavement, the parking, and along come these little cyclists, right?
And they're tiny, and they just think they're better than us.
They think they're holier than thou.
But they're really not doing anything, right?
Other than just getting to where they're going.
And so if you are feeling this powerlessness, in this multi-horsepower, multi-ton car
that's going nowhere fast.
It's really easy then to lay your outrage out on the next available weakest target,
and that's probably someone on a bike.
Yeah, and what you said before about the fact that cycling gives you way more autonomy
than driving a car does, in terms of your physicality as well.
I think about design.
Some people love vintage cars and they take care of their car and have it for decades.
I have a Subaru and I only bought it because I knew I'd probably get 200,000 miles on it.
I actually cycle more than I drive per miles every year.
The design on a bike hasn't changed really much in 200 years.
Disc brakes are about the only newer invention.
It's been around for a while, but now it's really hit mass market.
Whereas the car is constantly changing to try to get people to keep buying it and buying it.
And you would think that if your logic was lining up, the bicycle would be something that represented freedom much more than the car would.
Yeah, and it does represent freedom as a child, right?
Like sort of the stranger things thing that I was referencing earlier.
Almost every person riding a bicycle is a huge rite of passage.
Learning to ride on two wheels, taking off the training wheels or whatever is a really big deal when you're a kid.
But then the next sort of rite of passage for a lot of Americans is when you turn 16 and get your driver's permit.
Because that's seen as a sort of freedom.
That's only because we've built our world, here in North America at least, to only allow for driving.
Yeah, so you know I often joke, I think that like we urban elites, let's say, need to make more of a pro-freedom based argument for changing cities to be more climate friendly, more efficient.
I joke all the time with my daughter who's 14 that if we lived in the suburbs she'd have far less freedom because I would have to drive her everywhere.
But now she comes up to me and says, hey, you know, my friends are meeting up at the park.
Can I go meet them?
Yeah, go.
Right.
Like I don't have to worry if I'm if I'm busy and can't do it.
We have just conflated this idea of freedom with automobiles for so long.
And look, that's starting to change.
Right.
Lots of cities are increasing their number of cyclists or investing in transit, doing things like that.
And so it's it's a real threat to the status quo.
There's a really great example that I think sort of brings home the idea of petro-masculinity, and that, of course, is Marjorie Taylor Greene complaining that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wanted to, quote, emasculate the way we drive by promoting electric vehicles.
And on the surface, it's just sort of, it's sort of bonkers, right?
Like, if the car is the same, right, or even bigger and more powerful because it's got an electric motor, what is emasculating about it?
But she really was basically like, Kara Daggett could have just lifted this and instead of writing this long paper, just put...
Put this Fox News segment sort of down instead.
She really was equating the burning of fossil fuels in your large automobile with masculinity.
And of course, you know, Pete Buttigieg, he's gay, he's married, he's a father.
So there's that angle as well.
Well, damn it, Doug.
I thought I was going to make it through an episode without talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
No, like I said, it's all the usual suspects.
Yeah.
We didn't even get to Alex Jones.
I think Pat Robertson.
All of these people play into the 15-Minute City conspiracy.
They will never pass over a good conspiracy.
Even if they have no idea what it's about, they will jump in.
We've noticed that over and over again.
Yeah.
I will link to Kara's paper.
Everything I link to in the show notes, people should check out today.
But we know that America is addicted to fossil fuels and our cars.
Earlier, you said we can get into possibly some good examples, either from other American cities or countries, with models that are actually trying to make commuter transportation a little bit better.
Can you give any examples to close out today?
Regarding Oxford's plan, which was heavily reliant on cameras, a much better example is the city of Ghent in Belgium or Groningen in the Netherlands.
Both of those cities had a traffic circulation plan facing the same problem that Oxford was was facing.
And rather than do this complicated surveillance, license readers, plate readers, things like that, what they did was they both separately introduced traffic circulation plans where they essentially drew a circle around the city.
And so we sort of want to prevent people from just driving through if they have no reason for being in the city.
So you're on the east side of the city, you want to get to the west, It shouldn't be on city residents to absorb the cost of someone just driving through.
Pollution, danger, noise, those are the costs I'm talking about.
So what they did was they also divided the city into sort of zones, but they just reversed the direction of some streets and said, if you're driving, you will no longer be able to go from the east side to the west side in one straight shot.
You have to kind of go out around the middle of the city, around the edge of the city.
And if you want to come back in, that's fine.
You're not going to be able to do it.
It's just a sort of rat running.
So I think those are great examples.
In those two places, if you are walking, Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you over on Patreon or perhaps here on the main feed next Thursday.
