The transition to electric vehicles is lauded as one of the best solutions to reduce the roughly 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions that cars and vans emit annually, but what if it went one step further and eliminated cars entirely?

The War on Cars podcast hosts Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon explore the question in their book, Life After Cars co-authored with Aaron Naparstek. They trace the short history of human dependence on the automobile, the damage cars have caused, and what it would take for society to move beyond them.

Arguing that the EV transition is not the silver bullet it’s made out to be, they say electric cars still cause harm to people and the environment through manufacturing waste and the mining of raw materials. There is also the problem of tire wear toxin runoff that can leach into waterways and prove lethal to salmon.

The resources required for the EV transition are being extracted from vulnerable communities, Goodyear Earth Day webinar hosted by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. Extraction is also happening in fragile environments that could be destroyed before we fully understand them.

“The problem is cars, and that problem can’t be solved with different cars,” Gordon said.

It is absurd, he added, that moving a 150- to 200-pound person requires a 6,000-pound vehicle with a much shorter life span than a bike.

Moving past cars is a controversial—even taboo—idea in North America, where they are widely considered essential to daily life. Achieving it, Goodyear and Gordon acknowledge, will require a large systemic shift and real political will power.

Part of what makes that shift so difficult is the industry’s economic weight. The automotive sector alone contributes more than $16 billion annually to Canada’s gross domestic product, and amid an energy transition, EVs are framed not just as a way to reduce emissions, but also a key to preserving the car industry. In a race to tackle range anxiety and get more people buying EVs, manufacturers produce larger batteries using more materials, even though vehicle trips in North America tend to average less than 9.6 kilometres.

Yet the two podcasters see signs of a political shift. More politicians are now amenable to planning cities around people, not just cars. Active transportation advocates were once “seen as a nuisance,” but they are now treated as a constituency to be served.

“That is a radical shift,” said Goodyear.

The idea is not to put people in the auto industry out of work, but as an example, restructure those jobs to manufacture trains instead of cars.