Eric Jacobsen: How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier

The Strong Towns Podcast

“Choosing screens over people.” It’s a phrase we hear often these days in relation to smartphones and other digital devices. But, as Eric O. Jacobsen describes in his new book, Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens, we started choosing screens—or, more precisely, windshields—decades before the smartphone.

Prior to the rise of car culture, we could expect to regularly interact with friends, neighbors, and strangers as we made our way through cities developed with walkability and multimodal transportation in mind. Especially since World War II, we still encounter those folks...but many of those encounters are “mediated by the automobile windshield.” Not only did car culture change how we build cities, it changed how (and how often) we encounter other people: “When we encounter someone [as a driver],” writes Jacobsen, “we don’t encounter another human being with whom we might connect. We as a driver meeting another driver encounter a competitor—a competitor for lane space and parking spaces.”

Eric Jacobsen returns to The Strong Towns Podcast to talk about his new book, car culture, and the impact screens are having on our cities and communities. Jacobsen is senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington. He’s also the co-host (with our friend Sara Joy Proppe) of The Embedded Church, a podcast about churches in walkable neighborhoods. A member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Jacobsen is also the author of the books The Space Between Us and Sidewalks in the Kingdom, as well as numerous articles that explore the connections between the Christian faith, local community, and the built environment.

In this episode, Jacobsen talks with Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn about how car culture has “exploded” our sense of space, fragmented communities, and weakened public and civic interactions. They discuss why conscious, rational thought and great ideas don’t shape daily decision-making as much as we’d like to imagine. They also talk about what Jane Jacobs can teach us about complexity and humility, why our sense of self can’t be understood apart from the context of community, and why starting a car is a “secular liturgy.”

Additional Show Notes

• Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens, by Eric O. Jacobsen

• The Embedded Church Podcast
• Eric Jacobsen (Twitter)
• Charles Marohn (Twitter)
• Strong Towns content related to this episode:
  • “The Bottom-Up Revolution is... Empowering Churches to Connect with Their Neighborhoods” (Podcast)
  • “Living in Communion,” by Charles Marohn
  • “Can We Kick the Car Habit?” by Marlene Druker
  • “How Driving Ruins Local Flavor,” by Joe Cortright
  • “The Negative Consequences of Car Dependency,” by Andrew Price
  • “Does God Care How Wide a Road Is?” by John Pattison