There’s certainly some irony in a visit from ‘The War on Cars’ podcast hosts Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon being canceled by a Level 3 snow emergency that prevented drivers from taking to the road on Sunday.
There would have been something kismet about Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, hosts of “The War on Cars” podcast and coauthors of the book Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, trekking to Columbus just days after Franklin County issued a Level 3 snow emergency, closing roads to all drivers except for emergency personnel.
Instead, the pair’s visit will have to wait, with Winter Storm Fern dropping so much snow on the region that the two were forced to cancel a trio of local events set to take place over the next few days, including a meet and greet, a ticketed event at Wexner Center for the Arts, and a forum at the Columbus Metropolitan Club. (Transit Columbus wrote on Instagram that it was working to reschedule the pair’s visit and would post details at a later date.)
For more than seven years, Goodyear and Gordon have advocated for the adoption of public policies that would decentralize the automobile, expanding access to public transit and bike lanes and curbing our reliance on a form of transportation that is increasingly expensive, dirty (SUVs alone now emit more carbon than the nations of Germany, South Korea, or Japan), and deadly, with traffic accidents accounting for more than 40,000 deaths in the United States alone in 2024…