Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile
by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek · 21 Oct 2025 · 330pp · 85,349 words
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
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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
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we build our communities. And the humble curb cut can show us the way. Imagine what we could achieve if we tried to broaden the curb-cut effect. Designing for Nondrivers Helps Everyone Regardless of physical ability or wealth, absolutely everyone benefits, in the long run, when we design for people and not
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what scholar Mimi Sheller has called the “kinetic elite,” those who have the physical ability and financial resources to access our autocentric transportation system. The curb-cut effect is widely recognized in contemporary urban design circles. We know just how much better our communities can be for everyone if we build cities to
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shapes us, freeways distort and deform the human social world as surely as they do the natural world. You might postulate a corollary to the curb-cut effect, which improves the quality of life for everyone in a community: The freeway effect brings everybody down. When the Interstate Highway System was inaugurated, in
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, 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
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, 130 C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 58 culture wars, 130 See also bikelash; resistance to challenging cars curb extensions, 171, 171 See also infrastructure curb-cut effect, 159–60, 162 curb-cuts, 158–60 See also infrastructure Curbing Traffic (Bruntlett and Bruntlett), 229 cyclists behavior of, 39, 40, 41–42 in bike