Carmageddon, Daniel Knowles
Carmageddon, Daniel Knowles
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Carmageddon
How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It

Author: Daniel Knowles

Narrator: Christian Coulson

Unabridged: 9 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/28/2023


Synopsis

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

The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives technology just makes everything worse. Over the past century cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal. Cars have caused tens of millions of deaths and injuries. They have wasted our time and our money.

In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, Knowles traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. 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. With these negatives, Knowles shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City.

CARMAGEDDON features original reporting from:
Chicago
Detroit
Houston
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
New York
Paris, France
Mumbai, India
Nairobi, Kenya
Tokyo, Japan
London, Birmingham, and Coventry, England
 
CARMAGEDDON also covers:
Atlanta
Cincinnati
Louisville
Memphis
St Louis
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Copenhagen, Denmark
Lagos, Nigeria
Sao Paolo, Brazil
Singapore

About The Author

Daniel Knowles is the Midwest correspondent for the Economist. Previously he worked as the paper’s Mumbai and Nairobi bureau chiefs, as well as a reporter in the Washington, DC bureau and in London. He has covered stories about everything from the wars in South Sudan and Afghanistan to the drug trade in Colombia to the growing sobriety of modern teenagers in the rich world, but prefers writing about cities, transportation, and social transformation. Knowles studied history and economics at Pembroke College, Oxford University. He lives in Chicago.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jason on July 24, 2023

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......more

Goodreads review by Nathaniel on May 26, 2023

This polemic against cars was written, surprisingly, by the Chicago correspondent of The Economist. Fascinating: even from the perspective of a free-market fanatic, cars are just awful. (And electric cars solve exactly none of the problems caused by their predecessors — they are a big scam.) Individ......more

Goodreads review by Christine on February 22, 2023

Rounding up to 4 stars. I would recommend this book to others based on the topic, staggering facts/figures, and overarching conclusions. But maybe especially because I think car dependency is such a big problem, I was upset by parts I think Knowles gets wrong. Freeway building and suburban expansion......more

Goodreads review by Katy on July 28, 2023

Good and informative, but felt a bit too much “How Cars Make Life Worse” and not enough “And What We Can Do About It”......more

Goodreads review by rachel on December 29, 2023

holy shit. i need to blow up my car......more