Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile
by
Sarah Goodyear
,
Doug Gordon
and
Aaron Naparstek
Published 21 Oct 2025
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We had a Wednesday-night”: Frank Greve, “Curb Ramps Liberate Americans with Disabilities—and Everyone Else,” McClatchy DC, June 11, 2007, mcclatchydc.com/news/article24460762.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT calls it the “curb-cut effect”: Angela Glover Blackwell, “The Curb-Cut Effect,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2017, ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Nearly one in three: US Department of Transportation, Policy and Governmental Affairs, Office of Highway Policy Information, accessed March 5, 2025, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/dl1c.cfm.
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And despite a lot of terrible infrastructure out there, we are capable of making good choices about how our streets are configured. Bringing our cities and suburbs back to a human scale is something we can do by design, if we decenter the car. It’s already happening in some communities around North America and the world. We shape our streets. Then they shape us. We can choose a human shape. The Curb-Cut Effect Not long after Sarah started classes at UC Berkeley way back in 1981, she noticed that more than a few of her fellow students used wheelchairs to get around. Where Sarah came from—New York City—she almost never saw people with wheelchairs on the street. It was a moment of revelation. What caused this difference?
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For all of them, the simple slope in the sidewalk as it meets the roadway enables seamless mobility. For all of them, walking instead of driving becomes a viable choice. Make infrastructure to provide access for people with disabilities, and you’ll get better infrastructure. Civil rights leader Angela Glover Blackwell calls it the “curb-cut effect.” It’s easy to see when you start looking. (Closed captions on video, developed for deaf viewers and now used by everyone, are another great example.) Now, widen your perspective. Look at the larger transportation infrastructure picture through that same lens of disability—the cars moving through cities at high speeds, the bus stops where riders wait in all weather for buses that come infrequently or not at all, the sidewalks and crosswalks that disappear at the end of a multilane road.