Early this past February, at evening rush hour, a herd of deer ran into traffic on the busy arterial of Diamond Drive. There were too many, coming too fast, to avoid them. Drivers plowed into their furry brown bodies, their long spindly legs. My husband drove past the scene and came home pale and nauseated. He didn’t tell me about it, knowing it would upset me: I found out from social media. The sad incident didn’t make the weekly police crash report that I get as a journalist. It didn’t make the news. It was just another day.
I considered filing a records request for the dispatch report and photos, but then decided I couldn’t handle it. And that was the end of it. If you didn’t drive past it, you never knew about it. Just another pile of dead deer, and then everyone driving to work the next morning over the rust-red stains on the road.
I thought about that incident the entire time I was reading the middle section of Life After Cars, by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek. This is the book’s most harrowing stretch—a systematic account of what cars cost us in nature, in human life, and in the connective tissue of society itself.
The nature chapter: incomprehensible carnage
Chapter Four, “Cars Kill Nature,” opens with the story of Barry, a female barred owl who became a minor celebrity in Central Park during the first COVID lockdown—and who was subsequently killed by a maintenance vehicle in the park, in the middle of the night, at not quite two years old.
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The authors use Barry as a feathery entry into the high ecological costs of motordom, from direct vehicle strikes on wildlife to noise pollution, tire particulate runoff, and habitat fragmentation. Drawing on Ben Goldfarb’s “road ecology” and Paul Donald’s term “traffication,” they show how roads don’t just kill animals—they transform entire landscapes into hostile terrain. The mountain lions of the Santa Monica Mountains are inbreeding to extinction on their asphalt islands, cut off from mates by freeways. The coho salmon are dying from tire chemicals. The songbirds can’t hear each other, and they need to hear each other to survive.
The chapter is really about the empathy paradox: the disconnect between the grief we feel for a single charismatic animal and our numbness to carnage at scale. Barry was just one bird killed, but between 89 and 340 million birds are killed every year in the United States by vehicle strikes. As the authors write, the idea of so many millions of birds killed annually “veers into incomprehensibility. That would mean just about one bird killed for every human being in the United States.”
It’s always easier to feel for an individual (of any species) over a faceless mass—but even on an individual level, sometimes we allow ourselves to mourn an owl or a pigeon more than a human. We’ll click on the owl story, but not the story about the 4-year-old in Albuquerque killed in a crosswalk this past January. The book suggests that animal suffering lets us feel emotions that are “perhaps too terrifying to explore when the body crushed on the pavement is the same shape as our own.” Or the same shape as our child’s.
By the end, the authors ask: if we can summon enough fellow-feeling for wildlife that we’ll die for ducklings or fund and build overpasses for deer, why don’t we show that same level of care for our fellow humans on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in wheelchairs? “We cared about Barry the barred owl,” they write. “Can we muster the same concern for our human neighbors? Or even for ourselves?”
Car deaths are the benchmark of all deaths
In Chapter Five, “Cars Are Killing Us,” the authors introduce what they call the Standard American Unit of Mortality—the 40,000-to-50,000 traffic deaths per year we’ve normalized so completely that other mortality crises are measured against them. When the opioid epidemic killed more Americans than car crashes did, it was treated as a public health emergency. When gun deaths killed more children than car crashes did, people panicked about guns. But car death itself isn’t measured against anything—it’s the yardstick.
It gets worse, because the risk is nearly inescapable: “The most responsible and risk-averse parents, who would never let their kids get near a Glock or a Percocet, are compelled by the structure of our transportation system to expose their children to one of the leading causes of child death every single day, simply to get them to school, or a doctor’s appointment, or a friend’s house,” the authors write.
The book argues that car dependence is a public health crisis manufactured by policy, not a natural outcome of consumer preference. That thesis runs through much of my own writing on transportation and land use in New Mexico, including this piece on road safety in Los Alamos. It’s also the argument made by University of New Mexico professor Nick Ferenchak, whom I interviewed here. Ferenchak teaches highway and traffic engineering and argues that traffic fatalities are foreseeable consequences of how we design our transportation system. In other words, they are not inevitable. We can choose to save lives. The challenge is finding the political will to do it. (That’s a later chapter!)
The society chapter: We are so lonely
In the late 1960s, UC Berkeley researcher Donald Appleyard and his team walked three streets in San Francisco—one with heavy traffic, another with medium traffic, and a third with light traffic—and asked residents what their lives were like. The results, published in his 1981 book Livable Streets, documented something closer to a controlled social experiment than a traffic study. On the heavily trafficked street, people reported near-total isolation. “It’s not a friendly street. No one offers help,” one resident said. “People are afraid to go out into the street because of the traffic.” On the lightly trafficked street, residents had three times as many local friends. That study has been replicated. It is still being ignored by engineers who design streets as conduits for maximum car flow, as if roads are drainpipes. Humans disappear entirely from this bleak landscape. There is nothing friendly or connected about it.
(The name “Appleyard” may sound familiar: Donald is the father of researcher Bruce Appleyard mentioned in my first installment. In a sad epitaph, in 1982, one year after Livable Streets was published, Donald Appleyard was hit and killed by a drunk driver in Greece. Bruce was only 17 when his father died.)
Chapter Six of Life After Cars connects Appleyard’s findings to the American loneliness crisis explored in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the Biden-era surgeon general’s report on social isolation. Life’s authors applaud the surgeon general’s report detailing the factors behind life-threatening American isolation and strategies to combat it, but they add:
Yet you will search in vain for the words traffic and cars in the report. While there are a few nods to the importance of public spaces such as libraries and parks, streets and transportation are never discussed. You could read the whole report and never once encounter the idea that the increasingly loud, dangerous, bleak and polluted conditions of our streets might be affecting our ability or desire to gather in community. Nor does the report consider whether the death of “the street” as social space could be part of the reason that we are now conducting so much of our social lives online.
The authors frequently note how invisible this community-killing car-dependency is to us, “just as water is invisible to fish.” They suggest that the is-ought fallacy, introduced by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, provides one lens for seeing that invisibility. The logical fallacy says, “Well, it is that way, therefore it ought to be that way.” We observe that cars do dominate our streets. Therefore, we conclude, they should. The descriptive becomes normative without anyone making a case for it.
I encounter this constantly in road safety debates: People simply must drive here. That’s just how it is. But “that’s how it is” is not a value-driven prescription or position—it’s a description of conditions produced by specific, reversible decisions: zoning codes, highway funding formulas, parking mandates, all made by particular people at particular moments. The is-ought fallacy is the rhetorical chassis carrying almost every defense of the status quo I have encountered. The human mind, unfortunately, just works like this. It takes real effort to think critically and avoid falling into this trap. Few people (including very smart ones) bother, and we’re left with lethal consequences.
Motor Mania: Goofy, but murderous
One of my favorite parts of this chapter was the description of a 1950 Disney animated short called Motor Mania, starring Goofy. The affable cartoon dog appears first as Mr. Walker: mild-mannered, courteous, wouldn’t step on an ant. The moment he gets behind the wheel, he becomes Mr. Wheeler: monstrous, raging, homicidal. Park the car, Mr. Walker returns—until the next time. (Below is just a short clip: the full 6-minute episode is here.)
I squirmily recognize this Walker/Wheeler transformation in myself. When my kids were little, and I saw someone speed down my street, I was furious—they’re endangering my kids! But, behind the wheel myself, running late, I felt the same pull toward impatience, the same instinct to treat the road as mine, all mine. I still feel this pull, but now I’m very aware of it, and I fight it because I write about this constantly. Most people aren’t aware of their own Walker/Wheeler selves.
Car culture doesn’t just reorganize space—it reorganizes personality. The same person who wouldn’t shove past you in a grocery store will lean on a horn, drift into a bike lane, and run a yellow light without a second thought. Another phrase for this is “car brain.” The only real way to fight it is to allow other ways to get around than by car. Exhorting individuals to get out of cars won’t do it, because car dependency isn’t a choice. People want other ways to get around. Why don’t those options exist in most American cities?
The missing piece: land use
Absent from all three chapters is the policy regime that made car dependence a precondition of ordinary life. Long commutes and sprawl are mentioned, with the authors noting that the average American now drives nearly 10,000 miles per year, about 50% more than in 1981. But what about the rules that steadily push homes, jobs, schools, and stores farther apart, requiring ever-more driving simply to accomplish the routines of daily life?
The authors barely mention the policy roots that drive all this vehicle use. Exclusionary zoning, single-use development codes (housing here, retail there), and the systematic defunding of transit receive almost no attention. “Land use” only comes up once, in the introduction. But you can’t fully explain Mr. Wheeler without explaining why Mr. Walker had no choice but to buy a house 25 miles from his job. Mr. Walker couldn’t walk (or bike, or bus) to work. To indict the car without indicting the land-use regime that made car dependence a precondition of ordinary life is to miss the fundamental cause of the problem—and therefore to miss the solution.
And this brings me back to those deer on Diamond Drive. They were in their territory, moving through the landscape at deer speed, just trying to get from one place to another. And then they were gone, wiped out in a moment. Diamond Drive is highway-wide, inviting highway speeds, and it cuts right through a deliciously grassy public golf course: one could not possibly design anything more likely to kill these animals. We sprawled as much as we could in the boundaries of Los Alamos County, as if trying to mimic Albuquerque, when we could have built ourselves more compactly. We made our downtown 30% parking and insisted on short buildings and single-use zoning, then pushed houses as far as possible from our two town centers. We could have just lived a little closer together. Among the many other benefits of building densely, we’d save our fenders and the lives of the wildlife we keep killing.
I couldn’t bring myself to file the records request. I couldn’t look at the photos of deer carnage. By the next morning, I was driving over the stains on my way to the grocery store—and I felt sad, but pretty soon I stopped thinking about it. We are all, every day, choosing not to look at what we’re driving over.
See Part I here. Next up: Who pays the price for car dependence, and who’s willing to risk their political career to change it? Part III looks at those left out by design and the officials betting their jobs on the idea that it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Believe it or not, this made me think of the week’s viral NYT story on remote work, and the intersection gave me a glimmer of hope. Much like driving cars, I am not so sure that remote work hasn’t developed into another “just the way it is” in spite of its costs. So perhaps remote work might lead to the walkable, more social community developments that the car society has taken away from us. I do believe that society will somehow address the loneliness epidemic caused by remote work and other things. And maybe the answer will lie in communities less dependent on cars at least at the neighborhood level.
I hadn’t heard about the deer 💔 that’s so upsetting, but also so unsurprising.