Your Car Free 2001 Bookshop
Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence
The Trouble with Cars 
Peter Newman & Jeffery Kenworthy
Island Press, 1998
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Alternatives to the Automobile Transport for Liveable Cities
Marcia Lowe
Worldwatch Institute, 1990
Creating sustainable transportation for the future requires cities to make bold policy moves. However challenging such a shift may be, Marcia Lowe argues here, it is preferable to being caught unprepared by a series of environmental and economic crises in the decades ahead.
52 Pages / $7.00 CDN, $5.00 US
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End of the Road:
From World Car Crisis to Sustainable Transportation
Wolfgang Zuckermann
Chelsea Green, 1991
There are half a billion cars on the planet, and this is one of the earliest books to take a long, hard look at the contrast between the image and the reality of this fact. Zuckermann offers 33 "ways out" of our auto dependence, including pedestrianization, traffic calming, alternative modes, restructuring public transportation and rearranging our levels.
300 Pages / $24.95 CDN; $16.95 US
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Asphalt Nation:
How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
Jane Holtz Kay
University of California Press
Perhaps the best primer of the past decade on how the automobile has come to dominate our lives. Holtz Kay brings her background as planning critic for The Nation to her discussion of the history of the automobile and its political, architectural, personal, social, geographic and economic impact. She also provides successful examples of change from forward-thinking communities, and a range of innovative solutions to North America's addictive relationship with the car.
"Asphalt Nation is terrific" says no less an authority than Jane Jacobs.
New Paperback / 440 Pages / $24.95 CDN, $16.95 US
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Beyond the Car:
Essays on the Auto Culture
Sue Zielinski & Gordon Laird
Steel Rail Press/
Transportation Options, 1995
The century of the automobile has led us into a noisy, polluted, gridlocked mess. Where do we go from here?
This groundbreaking anthology tackles that question with works by leading auto-free thinkers from around the world, including Jane Jacobs, Michael Replogle, Joyce Nelson and Marcia Lowe. They examine car culture, the auto economy, urban planning, international development and alternatives to the automobile with style, wit and wisdom. A crucial tool for understanding and transcending what the automobile means to the way we live on this planet.
191 Pages / $19.95 CDN, $14.95 US
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Car:
A Drama of the American Workplace
Mary Walton
Norton, 1997
An uncommon opportunity to look at what squirms inside the belly of a giant automaker. Walton bars no holds in her portrayal of the management politics behind the 1996 redesign of Ford's best-selling Taurus, and of the combination of management conflict and poor marketing that let to the new model's lacklustre sales. Her frankness was too great for Ford, who denied her access to its employees after seeing a draft of the book.
Car is eye-opening and even encouraging reading for those depressed by the seeming unstoppable success of the giant automakers.
Hardcover / 360 Pages / $35.00 CDN
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Car Chaos
New Internationalist #195
Despite being a few years old, this issue of New Internationalist magazine still gives a great introductory overview of the major issues thrown up in the wake of the auto-explosion. Politics, sexualization, economics, urban sprawl, toxic emissions, inequity, and much more. Snap up a few copies while they're left, and hand them out to your skeptical motorist friends.
32 Pages / $4.50 CDN, $3.00 US
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J. G. Ballard's less known follow-up to Crash. Another paranoid meditation on technology, featuring a modern Robinson Crusoe trapped on a traffic island surrounded by freeways after his car has a blowout and crashes.
176 Pages / $12.00 CDN, $8.50 US
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Crash
Since its recent movie adaptation by David Cronenberg, the cult status of Crash has intensified. A dsytopic vision in which the car manifests, in the author's words, as a "sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology." Disturbing and visionary. Also available is the follow-up, Concrete Island.
224 Pages / $12.00 CDN, $8.50 US
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Divided Highways:
The history and politics of the Interstate highway system, America's great public works project and the longest engineered structure in the world. Lewis is no anti-car activist, but this is still a useful, very readable work, balancing the perceived benefits of the Interstates (freedom, space, speed) and their inherent side-effects (noise pollution, urban decline).
354 Pages / $19.99 CDN, $13.95 US
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Divorce Your Car
How can people divorce their car? Re-meet your feet, board a bike, take a train, pull out of this dysfunctional relationship with the automobile! Divorcing your car can take many forms, from simply using it less to not owning one at all. This practical guide shows how divorcing a car can be fun, healthy, money-saving, and helpful to the planet in the process.
For Love of the Automobile:
Far more than a means of transportation, the automobile has become a cultural icon for our times. After examining the history of the car from the late 1880s to the present, Sachs shows that the grand dreams once attached to the auto have changed with the banality of ownership, the problems of traffic flow, and the limits of energy and clean air. Sachs appeals for the cultivation of new dreams born of the futility of old ones, dreams of "a society liberated from progress", in which location, distance, and speed are reconceived in more appropriately human dimensions.
Hardcover / 227 Pages with Photos & Illustrations / $60.00 CDN, $40.00 US
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The Car and the City
Traffic jams may be our only hope, claims this provocative book. The Car and the City argues that resurgent cities could make urban life viable again, and even solve problems ranging from oil wars and rising seas to violent crime. An offbeat journey through the metropolises of Vancouver, Seattle and Portland - by car, train, bus, bicycle and foot.
64 Pages / $12.95 CDN, $9.95 US
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The City After the Automobile:
In the wake of the automobile, with struggling downtown's, sprawling suburbs and burgeoning private gated communities, is the traditional city becoming obsolete?
Unlike many who believe we must choose between cities and suburbs, between monolithic high-rises and panoramic vistas. Safdie envisions a way to have it all. His idiosyncratic utopia includes "conveyers" - city-wide horizontal escalators -- and "U-cars", publicly owned electric cars that can be picked up and dropped off at will. Fanciful? Perhaps, but well worth reading.
187 Pages / $23.50 CDN, $17.50 US
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The Ecology of the Automobile
This authoritative book anatomises the auto culture and explains how it got that way. Not afraid to use terms like "auto hegemony," Freund and Martin pull no punches about the scope of the car's ecological health and social impact. From the economic inequity of auto-centrism to the psycho-sexual appeal of the car, no angle escapes their illuminating gaze
Seven years after the publication, The Ecology of the Automobile remains the fundamental text in auto-studies.
218 Pages / $19.99 CDN, $14.99 US
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The Environmental Impact of the Car
This classic report from Greenpeace gives the lowdown on the car's chronic ecological record. Concise, eloquent and packed with factions and statistics, The Environmental Impact of the Car is the perfect entry-level text for those new to transportation issues, and an indispensable resource for anyone who wants the key information and arguments about the automobile at their fingertips.
60 Pages / $5.00 CDN, $4.00 US
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Sustainable Transportation Organizing
& Action Resource Kit This extensive how-to binder covers topics from fundraising to facts
and figures on the costs of the car, from organizing a good meeting
to writing a press release, from taking on City Hall to electronic networking.
It provides practical case studies of transportation events that you
can adapt to your own community. An essential resource for any transportation
group's organizing and action.
160 Pages (8.5 x 11)/ $20 CDN/ $15 US
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J.G. Ballard
Vintage, 1973
Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
Tom Lewis
Viking, 1997
Katie Alvord
New Society Publishers, 2000
Looking Back at the History of Our Desires
Wolfgang Sachs
University of California Press, 1992
Alan Thein Durning
Northwest Environment Watch, 1996
An Architect's Vision
Moshe Safdie
Harper Collins, 1997
Peter Freund and George Martin
Black Rose Books, 1993
Greenpeace, 1992
Transportation Options, 1996
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