Our Disastrous Lovable Cars
They may be choking us to death but it’s so hard to give them up July–August 2012
So much depends on what is meant by “our cities” and “ourselves” in the subtitle of Taras Grescoe’s resounding new transit treatise, Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. If by “our cities” Grescoe means the cities of all humanity (including black-belt carbon catastrophes such as Mumbai, Beijing and Shanghai), and if by “ourselves” he means every one of the roughly seven billion riders on the fragile little subway platform we call…