Works in progress: Daniel Knowles

Library of Congress

     The Economist is a terrific magazine. "Reading it is like having an extra brain," as one wag said — okay, that was me. Of course I subscribe, and have attended several of the world-spanning, forward-straining seminars the magazine sponsored in Chicago — in 2019 I managed to chat with the magazine's editor, the delightfully-named Zanny Minton Beddoes, who invited me to sit in on an editorial meeting next time I'm in London, an offer I plan to accept at the first opportunity.

     I've make a point to get to know The Economist's Midwest correspondents — always sharp as tacks and good company.  Daniel Knowles is the fourth in the past 10 years — I imagine Chicago must be a hardship post for those used to London or Paris or, in his case, Mumbai, Nairobi and Washington, D.C. Daniel graduated from Oxford, covered the war in Afghanistan, and is as promising and energetic a young journalist as I've met. He took the train out to Northbrook for lunch— that should have been a tip-off to what was in store. I'm reading his anti-car manifesto now and plan to write a column about it in a few weeks. Until then, take it away, Daniel:

     When I first told people in London that I was moving back to America – and specifically to Chicago – several were surprised. “Won’t you have to get a car?” they said. An American colleague joked that all Europeans living in the States eventually crack and succumb to driving, however high their hopes were of sticking with their old habits of getting around by public transport, and on foot. It was going to be an especially difficult test for me – around the same time I accepted the job in Chicago, in late 2020, I signed a deal to write a book about why cars are dreadful and are ruining our cities. I was (and remain) perhaps one of the most militant cyclists on the staff of The Economist, an organisation full of people who bike to work.

     Wouldn’t I look silly if by the time the book came out, I had transformed into a petrolhead? A good friend joked about me turning up to the launch party in a Hummer and whining about parking it. The book, Carmageddon, is now out. And I can report that eighteen months since I got here, living without a car in Chicago has in fact never proven especially difficult. I have to rent them from time to time, but almost exclusively for work purposes, to go out of the city. I do not even use Uber much. Even though I whine a lot about the state of the CTA, and deeply miss the London Underground, where trains appear reliably every two minutes, it still seems a far better alternative to sitting in a traffic jam on the Kennedy Expressway, and then circling streets for half an hour looking for somewhere to park.
     In fact, a lot more Americans than I expected seem to agree with me that cars are not so great after all. I thought – hoped even – that the book would prove more controversial. After all, arguing that gasoline ought to cost lots more and that nobody should ever get free parking, seems to run against the grain of everything I know about American politics. And yet I seem to have a lot of allies. Even on a trip recently in rural western Illinois, I have had people tell me that they wish cars and parking lots didn’t so dominate everything. Perhaps small town America would be struggling less if you could walk to a shop on Main Street more easily than you can drive to a Walmart 20 miles away.
     I worry this is just Midwest Nice and I am being kindly indulged by people who secretly think I am a moron. But I think most of it is genuine. Most Americans wish that there were alternatives to needing quite so many cars. By reading the book, I hope lots more people will understand exactly how, unfortunately, it is exactly the number of cars getting in way of the alternatives working.