Peter Norton

Nor does it count the incredible cost to human health a car-centric world inflicts on everyone, from removing the most accessible and least expensive exercise available, walking, including walking with assistive devices, to the magnetite particles and other heavy metals from car exhaust found in the brains of people who've died with diseases like Alzheimer's, and the up to 20% reduced lung capacity of children who grow up near busy roads, or the innumerable wildlife killed and habitats fragmented.

The stories that open this essay come from Peter Norton's 2008 book, Fighting Traffic, The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

Norton is an historian of technology and associate professor at the University of Virginia, whom I interviewed extensively for A Walking Life.

Fighting Traffic is his meticulously researched and well-told history of how cars and highways came to dominate Americans' lives, cities, and landscapes over the course of the 20th century.

There's an old blog post I've always enjoyed called Ghost Streets of Los Angeles, showing overhead views of strange diagonal streets and triangle-cornered buildings throughout Los Angeles.

both likely built along removed rail lines.

Peter Norton himself became interested in the history of this technology shift while sorting historical photographic negatives in Wilmington, Delaware in 1998 and finding in those pictures a world that no longer existed outside his doors, one full of streetcars and people walking.

When it comes to technology, the fundamental question beyond whom does this serve and at whose cost is, do you have a choice? Right now, I make the choice to never use LLMs.

Like we, we have since figured out that it's just the taxi and it increases VMT, you know, 70 to like 83% over had those things not existed.

So, It also, I mean, it reminds me also of Peter Norton's book, Autonorama, where he goes through the history of the same thing again and again and again of this promise of an autonomous future.

And I remember in that book, he talks about this Time Magazine article from like the 1950s.

And it was around the time the guy's name was like Vladimir Zwinskin.

But you have to be able to take a step back and see the broader picture because...

Because when you look at the big picture, I very much think it indicates we are heading toward a world if and when AVs scale.

And they may not scale, to Peter Norton's point about necessary skepticism.

But if and when they do scale, the price is going to come down.

And today, I'm joined by two guests who bring extremely helpful perspectives to that question.

Peter Norton is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he studies the history of technology and streets and mobility.

And he's the author of two great books.

Uh, one is Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and then his second is Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving.