ATTACK OF THE
E, SCINTILLATING ROOFLI
GOP CLONES
,

Y

THE END
OF PARKING

E

My
Right
to Die

e

January + February 2016

HEADLINE T

ASSISTED SUICIDE, MY FAMILY, AND ME
BY KEVIN DRUM


It’s not just tuna. It’s a choice to
stand for human rights and the
preservation of our oceans.
Take action at tuna.greenpeace.org

January  February 2016

volume 41, number 1

FEATURES

16 No Parking Here
FIORINA: MARK HAMMERMEISTER; SINGH: SEAN MCCABE (PHOTO ILLUSTRATION), MANOJ VERMA/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

How robocars and millennials are
about to make your city cleaner,
greener, and cheaper

26 My Life to Leave
BY KEVIN DRUM

Assisted suicide, my family, and me

32 Do Candidates Dream
of Electric Sheep?
BY TIM MURPHY

Clone armies, super-PAC spawns, and
Potemkin headquarters. Welcome to the
Age of the Uncampaign.

36 Humanitarian Raid

BY CLAIRE PROVOST AND MATT KENNARD

The World Bank is supposed to help
the poor. So why do so many of its
investments underwrite oligarchs?

42

is Boy’s Life
BY COREY JOHNSON AND KEN ARMSTRONG

At 16, Taurus Buchanan threw one
deadly punch—and was sent away for life.
Will the Supreme Court give him, and
hundreds like him, a chance at freedom?

32
DEPARTMENTS

V
V

V V V

49 Mixed Media
Comedian Kumail Nanjiani
on being the ultimate fanboy.
Political gaffes of yesteryear
with John Dickerson
Star-crossed love in

Afghanistan
Book, film, and music reviews
V

V

V

5 OutFront
Can this lawyer put the
brakes on Uber?
Hanging chad, 2.0
Take a Valium, lose your baby.
The armchair detective
who debunked Putin—
from his couch
How big donors fuel GOP denial
V

V V

62 Food + Health
Hot takes on rooftop solar
Sorry, you can’t exercise your
junk calories away.

Join the
9 million smart,
fearless readers
who make

MotherJones.com
a regular habit.

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

1


Mother Jones

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837-1930) orator, union organizer, and hellraiser

Clara Jeffery editor-in-chief
Ivylise Simones creative director
Maria Streshinsky deputy editor
Mark Follman national affairs editor
Kiera Butler, Dave Gilson, Michael Mechanic senior editors
Clint Hendler managing editor
Jahna Berry web editor Ian Gordon story editor
Maddie Oatman senior research editor
Samantha Michaels copy editor
Kevin Drum political blogger
Tom Philpott food and ag correspondent
Shane Bauer, Josh Harkinson senior reporters
Jaeah Lee, Julia Lurie reporters
Nina Liss-Schultz assistant editor
Edwin Rios, Bryan Schatz, Luke Whelan senior fellows
Becca Andrews, Gregory Barber, Brandon Ellington Patterson,
Madison Pauly fellows
washington bureau

David Corn bureau chief
Daniel Schulman deputy bureau chief
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, Aaron Wiener senior editors
Jeremy Schulman senior project manager, climate desk
Stephanie Mencimer, Tim Murphy senior reporters
Patrick Caldwell, Russ Choma, Hannah Levintova,
Pema Levy, Max Rosenthal, AJ Vicens reporters
Delphine d’Amora, Miles Johnson fellows

new york bureau
James West senior digital editor
Ben Dreyfuss engagement editor Inae Oh assistant engagement editor
Tim McDonnell reporter/associate producer, climate desk

art and production
Carolyn Perot art director Claudia Smukler production director
Mark Murrmann photo editor Adrienne Armstrong proofreader

online technology
Robert Wise online technology director
Ben Breedlove, Mikela Clemmons web developers
Young Kim online systems coordinator Dylan DiSalvio ad ops manager
Cathy Rodgers business operations specialist

contributing writers
Michael Behar, Peter Bergen, James K. Galbraith, Ted Genoways,
Jennifer Gonnerman, David Goodman, Gary Greenberg, Jack Hitt, Garret
Keizer, Charlie LeDuff, Alan Light, Mac McClelland, Bill McKibben, Kevin
Patterson, Alissa Quart, James Ridgeway, Paul Roberts, Clive Thompson,
Julia Whitty, JoAnn Wypijewski, Barry Yeoman, Jon Young


contributing illustrators
Tim Bower, Steve Brodner, Harry Campbell, John Hersey, Peter Hoey, Mark
Matcho, Tim O’Brien, Yuko Shimizu, Owen Smith, Brian Stauffer

contributing photographers
Nina Berman, Marcus Bleasdale, Chris Buck, Matt Eich,
Danny Wilcox Frazier, Matt Slaby, Lana Sˇlezic´, Tristan Spinski

Monika Bauerlein chief executive officer
Steven Katz publisher
Madeleine Buckingham chief business strategist
public affairs
Elizabeth Gettelman public affairs director
For media inquiries, email

advertising
Khary Brown associate publisher, sales and marketing
Brenden O’Hanlon national accounts manager
Jamie Maloney integrated advertising sales representative
Jocelyn Giannini integrated advertising sales manager
Brianna Gerard advertising sales coordinator
For advertising information, call (415) 321-1700.

fundraising
Stephanie Green development manager, advancement and planned giving
Emily Cozart regional director, major gifts
Allison Stelly development manager, foundations and special events
Nallaly Jimenez development assistant


membership
Peter Sanderson associate publisher, consumer marketing
Brian Hiatt director of marketing and membership
Shelley Shames director of membership operations
Mari Amend marketing and membership coordinator
Richard Rhodes newsstand management
For subscriber customer service, call (800) 438-6656.

administration
Emma Logan director of human resources and administration
Michelle Reyes controller
Mitchell Grummon business development manager
Lynnea Wool senior staff accountant
Zanniab Khan accounts payable and receivable coordinator
Max Horten business coordinator

the foundation for national progress
The nonprofit fnp publishes Mother Jones magazine and its website and
directs the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program. Mother Jones produces
revelatory journalism that, in its power and reach, seeks to inform and
inspire a more just and democratic world.

board of directors
Phil Straus chair Monika Bauerlein president
Clara Jeffery, Steven Katz vice presidents
Sara Frankel secretary Jon Pageler treasurer
Harriett Balkind, Arran Bardige, Harriet Barlow, Jane Butcher,
Andre Carothers, Diane Filippi, David Glassco, Mitchell Grummon,
Erik Hanisch, Adam Hochschild, Kim Keller, Hannah Levintova,
Rick Melcher, Carolyn Mugar, Ken Pelletier, Kevin Simmons,

Judy Wise members

CONTRIBUTORS
When running late for her interview with a lawyer
suing Uber, 1 Hannah Levintova decided her best
option was to take the subway (“Road Warrior,” page
5). 2 Clive Thompson lives in a Brooklyn neighborhood where a parking spot converted to livable space
could fetch nearly $200,000 (“No Parking Here,”
page 16); Eevolver, whose staff has worked on
Hollywood projects like Life of Pi and Clifford the Big
Red Dog, made the story’s computer-generated illustrations. The portraits of Kevin Drum and his wife,
Marian, are by 3 Kendrick Brinson, who has photographed for the New York Times Magazine and Wired
(“My Life to Leave,” page 26). Tim Murphy (“Do
Candidates Dream of Electric Sheep?” page 32) wishes he had a super-PAC to write his stories for him.
Claire Provost and Matt Kennard are fellows at London’s
Centre for Investigative Journalism, and travel for their
article (“Humanitarian Raid,” page 36) was supported
by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; the piece’s
art is by Manhattan-based but Hong Kong-raised illustrator 4 Victo Ngai, who has drawn for NBC and The
New Yorker. 5 Ken Armstrong (“This Boy’s Life,” page
42) has won or shared in three Pulitzer Prizes, and coauthor 6 Corey Johnson has been a Pulitzer finalist;
they are both reporters for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering criminal justice.
2 MOTHER JONES |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

1

2


3

4

6

5




OUTFRONT

DISRUPTION, DISRUPTED

ROAD WARRIOR
MIRIAM MIGLIAZZI AND MART KLEIN

Is Uber ripping off its drivers? The woman who beat
Starbucks and FedEx in court says yes.

I

n early 2012, on a visit to San Francisco, Shannon LissRiordan went to a restaurant with some friends. Over
dinner, one of her companions began to describe a new
car-hailing app that had taken Silicon Valley by storm.
“Have you seen this?” he asked, tapping Uber on his
phone. “It’s changed my life.”
Liss-Riordan glanced at the little black cars snaking
around on his screen. “He looked up at me and he knew

what I was thinking,” she remembers. After all, four years

earlier she had been christened “an avenging angel for workers” by the Boston Globe. “He said, ‘Don’t you dare. Do not
put them out of business.’” But Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer
who has spent her career successfully fighting behemoths
such as FedEx, American Airlines, and Starbucks on behalf
of their workers, was way ahead of him. When she saw cars,
she thought of drivers. And a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading classaction lawsuits against Uber, Lyft, and nine other apps
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

5


that provide on-demand services, shaking
the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped
sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their
workers. If she can convince judges that
these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in
fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a
business model that relies on cheap labor
and a creative reading of labor laws. Uber
alone was recently valued at $51 billion.
“These companies save massively by
shifting many costs of running a business to
the workers, profiting off the backs of their
workers,” Liss-Riordan says with calm intensity as she sits in her Boston office, which is
peppered with framed posters of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The bustling
block below is home to two coffee chains
that Liss-Riordan has sued. If the Uber case

succeeds, she tells me, “maybe that will
make companies think twice about steamrolling over laws.”
After graduating from Harvard Law
School in 1996, Liss-Riordan was working at a boutique labor law firm when she
got a call from a waiter at a fancy Boston
restaurant. He complained that his manager was keeping a portion of his tips and
wondered if that was legal. Armed with a
decades-old Massachusetts labor statute
she had unearthed, Liss-Riordan helped
him take his employer to court—and won.
“This whole industry was ignoring this
law,” Liss-Riordan recalls. Pretty quickly,
she became the go-to expert for employees seeking to recover skimmed tips. And
before she knew it, her “whole practice was
representing waitstaff.”
In November 2012, she won a $14.1
million judgment for Starbucks baristas in
Massachusetts. After a federal jury ordered
American Airlines to pay $325,000 in lost
tips to skycaps at Boston’s airport, one of
the plaintiffs dubbed her “Sledgehammer
Shannon.” When one of her suits caused a
local pizzeria to go bankrupt, she bought it,
raised wages, and renamed it The Just Crust.
Liss-Riordan estimates that she’s won or
settled several hundred labor cases for bartenders, cashiers, truck drivers, and other
workers in the rapidly expanding service
economy. Lawyers around the country
have sought her input in their labor lawsuits, including one that resulted in a $100
million payout to more than 120,000 Starbucks baristas in California. (The ruling

6 MOTHER JONES |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

CONTRACTS
WITH AMERICA

21 MILLION

Americans work as independent
contractors.

29%

of the jobs added between 2010 and
2014 were for independent contractors.
Ride-app drivers working more
than 40 hours a week report earning
a yearly average of

$36,580
before expenses like gas.

Uber has spent more than

$1 MILLION

lobbying against regulations in
California since 2013. It is said to have
set aside at least $1 billion for future

regulatory fights as it expands abroad.
The company has been valued at

$51 BILLION.
was later overturned on appeal.) In a series
of cases that began in 2005, she has won
multimillion-dollar settlements for FedEx
drivers who had been improperly treated
as contractors and were expected to buy or
lease their delivery trucks, as well as pay for
their own gas.
Her Uber offensive began in late 2012,
when several Boston drivers approached
her, alleging that the company was keeping
as much as half of their tips, which is illegal under Massachusetts law. Liss-Riordan
sued and won a settlement in their favor.

But while looking more closely at Uber, she
confirmed the suspicion that had popped
up at that dinner in San Francisco: The company’s drivers are classified as independent
contractors rather than official employees,
meaning that Uber can forgo paying for
benefits like workers’ compensation, unemployment, and Social Security. Uber can
also avoid taking responsibility for drivers’
business expenses such as fuel, vehicle costs,
car insurance, and maintenance.
In August 2013, Liss-Riordan filed a
class-action lawsuit in a federal court
in San Francisco, where Uber is based.
Her argument hinged on California law,

which classifies workers as employees if
their tasks are central to a business and
are substantially controlled by their employer. Under that principle, the lawsuit
says, Uber drivers are clearly employees,
not contractors. “Uber is in the business
of providing car service to customers,”
notes the complaint. “Without the drivers, Uber’s business would not exist.” The
suit also alleges that Uber manipulates the
prices of rides by telling customers that
tips are included—but then keeps a chunk
of the built-in tips rather than remitting
them fully to drivers. The case calls for
Uber to pay back its drivers for their lost
tips and expenses, plus interest.
Uber jumped into gear, bringing on lawyer Ted Boutrous, who had successfully
represented Walmart before the Supreme
Court in the largest employment class
action in US history. Uber tried to get the
case thrown out, arguing that its business is
technology, not transportation. The drivers,
the company contended, were independent
businesses, and the Uber app was simply a
“lead generation platform” for connecting
them with customers.
Techspeak aside, Liss-Riordan has heard
all this before. When she litigated similar
cases on behalf of cleaning workers, the
cleaning companies claimed they were
simply connecting broom-pushing “independent franchises” with customers. When
she won several landmark cases brought by

exotic dancers who had been misclassified
as contractors, the strip clubs argued that
they were “bars where you happen to have
naked women dancing,” Liss-Riordan recounts with a wry smile. “The court said,
‘No. People come to your bar because of
that entertainment. Adult entertainment.
That’s your business.’”


OUTFRONT

CRASHING THE ELECTION
THE ELECTORAL NIGHTMARE of hanging chads, butterfly ballots,
and Bush v. Gore in 2000 spurred states and counties around the
country to ditch their old voting machines for shiny new digital
ones. Fifteen years later, those machines, which were designed
well before the first iPod, are quickly becoming obsolete—just in

time for another presidential election. As the vice chair of the
federal Election Assistance Commission told the Brennan Center
for Justice, which has documented these glitches, “We’re getting
by with Band-Aids, but I worry about a crisis with some of the
older machines.” —Dave Gilson

America’s aging voting machines

43 states have machines that are
10 or more years old. Almost all
of those machines are no longer
manufactured.

Almost all of California’s voting
machines run on Windows XP
(released in 2001) or earlier operating systems.
Some old voting machines’
memory cards can hold only 512
kilobytes. (That’s 0.07 percent of
a typical cd-rom.)
Machines in one Ohio county
require Zip disks, which became
outdated in the early 2000s.

*Insufficient data for Idaho

Uber’s argument is pretty similar to that
of the strip clubs. “Uber is obviously a car
service,” she says, and to insist otherwise is
“to deny the obvious.” An Uber spokesperson wouldn’t address that characterization,
but said that drivers “love being their own
boss” and “use Uber on their own terms:
they control their use of the app, choosing
when, how and where they drive.”
Some observers have suggested creating a new job category between employee
and contractor. But Liss-Riordan is tired
of hearing that labor laws should adapt to
accommodate upstart tech companies, not
the other way around: “Why should we tear
apart laws that have been put in place over
decades to help a $50 billion company like
Uber at the expense of workers who are trying to pay their rent and feed their families?”


Q All voting machines bought in 2006 or earlier
QMajority of jurisdictions bought machines in 2006 or before
QMinority of jurisdictions bought machines in 2006 or before
QAll voting machines bought since 2006

For the most part, courts have sided
with her. Last March, a federal court in
San Francisco denied Uber’s attempt to
quash the lawsuit, calling the company’s
reasoning “fatally flawed” (and even citing
French philosopher Michel Foucault to
make its point). In September, the same
court handed Liss-Riordan and her clients a major victory by allowing the case
to go forward as a class action. The judge
in the Lyft case has called the company’s
argument—nearly identical to Uber’s—
“obviously wrong.” Last July, the cleaning
startup HomeJoy shut down, implying
that a worker classification lawsuit filed by
Liss-Riordan was a key reason.
Meanwhile, other sharing-economy startups are changing the way they do business.
The grocery app Instacart and the shipping

The estimated cost of replacing
outdated voting machines is
more than $1 billion. Election
officials in 22 states say they
don’t know where they’ll find
the money.


app Shyp—Liss-Riordan has cases pending
against both—have announced they will start
converting contractors to full employees.
Liss-Riordan says that’s her ultimate goal: to
protect workers in the new economy, not to
kill the innovation behind their jobs. “This
is not going to put the Ubers of the world
out of business,” she says.
One of her opponents has played
a more creative offense. Last fall, the
laundry-delivery app Washio convinced
a judge that Liss-Riordan had no right to
practice law in California. Liss-Riordan
easily could have relied on a local lawyer
to head the case, but instead she signed
up to take the California bar exam in February. “Their plan kind of backfired,” she
says. “I expect they’ll be seeing more of
me, rather than less.” —Hannah Levintova
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

7


OUTFRONT

NANNY STATE

THE WAR ON
WOMBS
Here’s what happened when

politicians started treating
women’s bodies like meth
labs. Literally.

THOMAS KIEFER/INSTITUTE

Casey Shehi’s son James was born in August

2014, remarkably robust even though he
was four weeks premature. But as the maternity nurse took the baby from his exhausted mother’s arms, Shehi felt a prick
of dread. “She said they were going to have
to take him back to the nursery to produce
some urine, because I had a positive drug
screen for benzodiazepines,” recalls Shehi,
a 37-year-old nursing-home employee
from Gadsden, a small Alabama city about
60 miles northeast of Birmingham. “I said,
‘That can’t be true. Can you please check
it again? Run the screen again.’”
The nurse asked if she had a prescription for any form of benzo—Xanax or
Klonopin or Ativan? No, Shehi insisted,
there must be a mistake. Then she remembered: the Valium. One night a few weeks
earlier, Shehi and her ex-husband had gotten into a huge argument on the phone
and she had swallowed half of one of her
boyfriend’s Valiums to calm herself down.
She popped the other half during a sleepless night on a family vacation.
Occasional, small doses of diazepam
(the generic name for Valium) are considered safe for treating anxiety and hypertension during pregnancy. According to the
lab report, James had nothing in his system. Shehi said the pediatrician reassured
her, “Everything’s cool.”

But a few weeks after Shehi returned
home, investigators from the Etowah
County Sheriff ’s Office showed up at
her workplace with an arrest warrant. She
had been charged with “knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally” causing James to
be exposed to controlled substances in the
womb—a felony punishable, in her case, by
up to 10 years in prison. The investigators
led her to an unmarked car, handcuffed
her, and took her to jail. Her booking photo—her eyes puffy from crying, her mouth a
thin grimace of disbelief—appeared in local
8 MOTHER JONES |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

EXPOSURE

Found
and Lost
P H OTO G R A P H S BY
THOMAS KIEFER
While working part time
as a janitor and landscaper
at a Border Patrol facility
in Arizona, Tom Kiefer
arranged and photographed
the belongings seized from
migrants who had been
caught while crossing into the
United States. To see more of

these collected objects, from
water bottles to headphones,
visit motherjones.com/border.


E
IT

D TIME OF

Taught by Professor Jason M. Satterfield

R
FE

OR
D

ER

off

13

70%

RY

LIM


Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy: Techniques for
Retraining Your Brain

BY F E B R U

A

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO

LECTURE TITLES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

Conquer Your Bad
Thoughts and Habits
Why is it so hard to lose weight, stop smoking, or establish healthy
habits? Why do couples argue about the same issues over and over? Why
do so many people lie awake at night, stricken with worry and anxiety?
The answers to these questions—and the path to lasting change in
your life—lie in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Developed on
a proven foundation of neurological and behavioral research, CBT is
a well-tested collection of practical techniques for managing goaloriented change. Build a toolkit of CBT techniques as you to take on
the role of medical student, physician, psychologist, and patient, and
learn how to create lasting change in your life.

Offer expires 02/13/16

THEGREATCOURSES.COM/4 MJ
1-800-832-2412

Cognitive Behavioral Foundations
Quantified Self-Assessment for Therapy
Setting Therapeutic Goals
Third-Wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Stress and Coping
Anxiety and Fear
Treating Depression

Anger and Rage
Advanced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Positive Psychology
Healing Traumatic Injuries
Forgiveness and Letting Go
Digging Deep and Finding Meaning
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Medicine
Staying on the Wagon
Thinking Healthy: Weight and Nutrition
Behavioral Therapy for
Chemical Addictions
Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
Mastering Chronic Pain
Building and Deepening Relationships
Constructive Conflict and Fighting Fair
Thriving at Work through Behavioral Health
Developing Emotional Flexibility
Finding the Best Help

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:
Techniques for Retraining Your Brain
Course no. 9631 | 24 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)

SAVE UP TO $190

+$10 Shipping, Processing, and Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee

Priority Code: 120443

For 25 years, The Great Courses has brought the

world’s foremost educators to millions who want to
go deeper into the subjects that matter most. No
exams. No homework. Just a world of knowledge
available any time, anywhere. Download or stream
to your laptop or PC, or use our free mobile apps
for iPad, iPhone, or Android. Over 550 courses
available at www.TheGreatCourses.com.


OUTFRONT

TREATING PRENATAL DRUG
USE AS A CRIME AGAINST
THE FETUS HAS EMERGED
AS AN IMPORTANT PART
OF THE STR ATEGY TO
DISMANTLE ROE V. WADE.
and even abuse. It does not distinguish between an addict and a stressed-out single
mom who takes a harmless dose of an antianxiety medication. There are no standards
for law enforcement officials or judges to
follow, giving local prosecutors and courts
wide discretion in pursuing charges. “We
have clearly used [the statute] a little bit
different than it was designed,” says Steve
Marshall, the district attorney of Marshall
County, Alabama. “That, in and of itself,
doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
While the law’s proponents talk about
10 M O T H E R J O N E S |


J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

Casey Shehi and her son James

“mamas smoking meth on the way to
the hospital” and drug-exposed newborns fighting for their lives, a review of
Alabama’s chemical-endangerment prosecutions blasts holes in those stereotypes.
The most common drug identified in
court records wasn’t meth but marijuana,
followed by cocaine and opioid painkillers. Meth was No. 4, benzodiazepines
No. 6. About 20 percent of the cases involved only pot.
Since the “crack baby” panic of the
1980s, authorities in at least 44 other states
have sought to hold women criminally
accountable for abusing drugs while pregnant, often by repurposing laws against
child abuse and drug distribution and trafficking. More recently, the personhood
movement, which seeks to establish the
embryo or fetus as fully human in as many
legal and medical contexts as possible, has
transformed the debate. Treating drug use
in pregnancy as a crime against the fetus
has emerged as an important part of the
strategy to dismantle Roe v. Wade, and the
Alabama Supreme Court, possibly the
most conservative high court in the country, has proved especially receptive.
In decisions in 2013 and 2014, the court
ruled that the meth lab statute could indeed
be used to prosecute mothers—not just
from the time the fetus is viable (around
22 weeks) but from the earliest stages of

pregnancy. Under the statute’s flexible
language, the justices concluded, “a child”

could be a fetus, and “an environment in
which controlled substances are produced
or distributed” could be a womb. The high
court asserted that its decision “is in keeping with the widespread legal recognition
that unborn children are persons with
rights that should be protected by law.”
As a new drug panic over opiates and
“oxytots” spreads through the South and
Midwest, lawmakers in other states have
been contemplating their own chemicalendangerment-type statutes. Tennessee
passed one in 2014; early last year, seven legislatures introduced similar bills. Alabama’s
experience holds lessons about the kinds of
overreach that can result even from laws that
may seem to be narrowly focused, says Sara
Ainsworth, a lawyer for National Advocates
for Pregnant Women. “Alabama isn’t an aberration,” she says. “It’s a bellwether.”
In Etowah County, where Shehi lives,
law enforcement officials have drawn “a
line in the sand,” vowing to aggressively
pursue all chemical-endangerment cases.
Sheriff Todd Entrekin has emerged as the
policy’s most forceful advocate. Pregnant
women who take controlled substances
under a doctor’s care won’t face arrest,
he says, but those who use even a small
amount of an unprescribed drug will. “If
[an] offense is ignored,” he asserts, “sheriff ’s deputies have failed to uphold their

sworn oath of office.”
By punishing mothers harshly even
when their children have not been hurt,

ROB CULPEPPER/SPECIAL TO PROPUBLICA

newspapers and all over the internet.
Shehi is one of at least 31 women arrested in Etowah County since 2013 for
running afoul of Alabama’s “chemical endangerment of a child” statute, the country’s toughest criminal law on prenatal
drug use. Passed in 2006 as meth ravaged
the state, the law targeted parents who ran
drug labs in their homes, putting their kids
in danger. Yet within months, prosecutors and courts began applying the law to
women who had exposed their embryos or
fetuses to controlled substances in utero.
The law treats prenatal drug exposure
as a form of child abuse, and the penalties
are exceptionally stiff: A woman accused
of using drugs during pregnancy can face
1 to 10 years in prison if the baby suffers
no ill effects, 10 to 20 years if the baby
shows signs of exposure or harm, and 10
to 99 years if the baby dies. She also risks
losing custody of all her children, not just
her newborn. An examination of thousands of pages of police and court records
reveals that at least 479 new and expecting
mothers in Alabama have been prosecuted
for chemical endangerment since 2006.
Ninety percent could not afford their own
lawyers; the vast majority pleaded guilty.

Scores have ended up in prison.
Prosecutors contend their goal isn’t to
throw mothers in jail but to force them
into drug treatment and help them restart
their lives. Yet the statute invites overreach


ENSURE a just & vibrant DEMOCRACY
for GENERATIONS to COME

Leave an enduring legacy for investigative journalism by including Mother Jones
in your estate plan. You’ll help Mother Jones shine a light on the urgent issues
of the day now and in the future. Join the Mother Jones Legacy Society: it’s
simple, flexible—and you’ll create a more secure future for your family.
motherjones.plannedgiving.org

Please contact us at or 415-321-1700 to learn more.


OUTFRONT

chemical-endangerment charges can upend entire families. In Shehi’s case, social
workers had determined that James was
fine and could remain in her care. But she
and her ex-husband had an open custody
case involving their preschool-age son.
After the arrest, the judge overseeing those
arrangements issued an emergency order
granting her ex-husband sole custody.
There wasn’t even a hearing. Meanwhile,

James’ father—who had the Valium prescripton—wasn’t charged. After her ar-

rest, Shehi left her boyfriend, accusing
him of abuse; he was later arrested and
charged with violating a protective order
and carrying a concealed gun. His bail on
the weapon charge was $1,000, one-tenth
of Shehi’s bail for swallowing two halves
of a Valium.
After nine months in limbo and thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees she
could not afford, Shehi learned in June
that her chemical-endangerment case had
been dismissed. She has since regained full

custody of James, but her legal fight for
her older son has been put on hold. She
also has been taking her clearance letter
around town, trying to make things right.
One of her first stops was the Etowah
County Sheriff ’s Office, where she asked
to have her mug shot removed from its
website. They took it down immediately.
—Nina Martin
This story was reported by ProPublica and AL.com.
Read a longer version at motherjones.com/alabama.

FREE AGENTS

THE SPY
WHO STAYED

IN FROM
THE COLD

How armchair intelligence
analysts are debunking
propaganda and uncovering war
crimes without leaving home
in eastern Ukraine had been attacking
government forces, and the Russian military was massing along the border. And
though the Kremlin was insisting that it
wasn’t operating inside Ukraine, Eliot
Higgins was uncovering strong evidence
to the contrary—from the comfort of his desk.
As Higgins, an independent intelligence analyst in Leicester, England, noticed that Russian soldiers were posting selfies and candids
to social-media sites like VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook,
he came to realize the images could blow apart the official story.
Higgins scoured the soldiers’ images and videos for hints of
where they had been shot: road signs, landmarks, numbers on
military vehicles, the angles of shadows. He started to uncover
proof of cross-border artillery strikes and Russian tanks trekking
into eastern Ukraine’s war zone. One photo showed a mound of
rubble in front of a row of houses with green fences. Using images
from Google Earth and the photo-sharing site Panoramio, Higgins
was able to determine exactly where and when the photo had been
taken. The mound was a Ukrainian checkpoint. The houses were in
the Ukrainian town of Vuhlehirsk, less than 10 miles from a major
battle between government forces, separatists, and Russian troops.
The 36-year-old Higgins runs the investigative website Bellingcat.com, whose name comes from “belling the cat,” an expression
for a seemingly impossible task. It’s the online home of a dozen
citizen journalists who trawl the internet’s vast reservoir of publicly accessible material to investigate conflicts thousands of miles

away. Using YouTube, Facebook, and Google Earth, they can pin12 M O T H E R J O N E S |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

point the locations of everything from artillery strikes to executions, or verify the timing of a missile launch caught on camera by
analyzing the angles of shadows cast on buildings as if they were
sundials. Last May, the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based
think tank, teamed up with Bellingcat to publish a report called
“Hiding in Plain Sight.” It revealed that, despite the Kremlin’s
claims, the Russian military had been operating in Ukraine.
“These guys, who often aren’t even getting paid to do this, sit
at their laptops wherever they are, and they flat-out proved the
Russians were lying,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer
who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm.
“They debunked the Kremlin’s propaganda. That’s amazing.”
Higgins is part of a small army of armchair analysts who are
venturing into territory occupied by government intelligence
agencies by virtually investigating conflict zones where access is
nearly impossible. In Albania, Gjergj Thanasi tracks the flow of
black-market weapons through Balkan ports to Middle Eastern
war zones and countries under arms embargoes. From his family’s home in Amsterdam, 19-year-old Thomas van Linge creates
detailed, highly accurate maps of the positions of ISIS and other
rebel groups in Syria and Iraq. (He also keeps an eye on Hezbollah

MAX-O-MATIC

It was late 2014. Pro-Moscow separatists


We were sued by a billionaire

political donor— and we won.
From the desk of:
Monika Bauerlein
CEO, Mother Jones
Dear reader:
For nearly three years, we’ve been fighting a lawsuit broug
ht against Mother Jones by Frank
VanderSloot—a billionaire political donor with a histor
y of intimidating journalists.
In February 2012, we published a story about how the
Citizens United decision allowed
wealthy contributors like VanderSloot —then a natio
nal finance committee co-chair for the
Romney campaign— to drastically increase their politi
cal spending. It covered the unusual
lengths VanderSloot had gone to oppose LGBT rights in
his home state of Idaho, and it touched
on his company’s run-ins with regulators. It was a straig
htforward piece of investigative
repor ting: letting voters know who was funding the Romn
ey campaign.
VanderSloot, not surprisingly, saw it differently. His lawye
rs sent us letters complaining about
it. When we didn’t retract our story, he sued us for defam
ation.
It was a classic case of the wealthy using their power
to try to control the media. But we
refused to back down because this case wasn’t only about
us. It was about everyone who
relies on Mother Jones to go after the truth, whatever

it takes. And because we knew readers
like you would have our back if we took a stand.
On October 6, a judge dismissed the lawsuit—because
, she said, Mother Jones repor ted the
truth. It was a victor y for investigative repor ters every
where. But it came at a big cost. The
aggressive legal assault consumed a good part of the
last two and a half years, it cost our
insurer $2.5 million. It left Mother Jones with $650,000
in out-of-pocket costs—and we’re still
battling legal red tape as I write. That’s a huge burden
for a nonprofit, and we need your help
to cover the hole it created in our budget.
Readers have already stepped up and donated $300,000
to help us pay our legal bills. That’s
a great start, but it’s only halfway.
Please make an emergency, tax-deductible donation
to Mother Jones to help us pay our legal
bills, and help us keep investigating the megadonors like
Frank VanderSloot who are trying
to dominate the election. You can mail your donation
using the postage-paid envelope at the
back of this magazine, or go online to motherjones.com
/legalfund.
Thanks for reading, and for having our back.

P.S.: There’s more to say about this lawsuit than can fit
here. Read the full backstory at
motherjones.com/editorsnote —and please donate after
you do.


Make your emergency, tax-deductible donation using the envelope at
the back of the magazine or simply visit motherjones.com/legalfund.


OUTFRONT

and Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants.) Using geolocated
social-media posts, Russian blogger Ruslan Leviev revealed that
his country’s “selfie soldiers” were inside Syria well before the
Kremlin announced it was sending troops to help the Assad regime. Christoph Koetll, who investigates conflict zones for Amnesty International, recently traced a rifle that had appeared for
a split second in a video, using it to expose the aftermath of 600
extrajudicial executions apparently conducted by the Nigerian
military and its state-sponsored militia.
Higgins is self-taught, and he attributes his skill at open-source
investigation to his obsessive and compulsive mind—and hours
playing online games. He started analyzing the weapons used in
the Syrian conflict as a hobby, but soon started to break major
stories. He was among the first to expose the Assad regime’s use
of barrel bombs and chemical weapons, and he uncovered a secret arms trail that brought weapons from Croatia to Syrian jihadist rebels. He reported on civilian casualties caused by US missile
attacks on Al Qaeda’s Khorasan group. (The Pentagon issued a
denial.) After Higgins identified where ISIS beheaded American
journalist James Foley in 2014, “you had all these online jihadists
telling each other not to film stuff and to be careful about what
you have in the background,” he recalls. “It was the first time I’d
seen the Islamic State react that way.”
Most recently, his revelations have fed the international criminal
investigation into the downing of MH17, the Malaysia Airlines
flight shot down over eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The Kremlin had placed the blame on


14 M O T H E R J O N E S |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

Ukraine, supplying a satellite image of what it alleged was a fighter
jet approaching the airliner. Bellingcat exposed the photo as a sloppy collage. As more details emerged, Bellingcat systematically discredited Moscow’s version of events, showing not only that Russia
had supplied the missile that took down the airliner, but also that
the missile launcher in question was issued to Russia’s 53rd AntiAircraft Missile Brigade. Bellingcat turned over more information
to Dutch investigators, including social-media profiles of members
of the Russian missile unit who, Higgins notes, “mysteriously deleted all their posts.” In October, the Dutch Safety Board released
a report alleging that the airliner had been hit by a Russian-made
Buk missile that only could have been launched from an area held
by pro-Russian separatists—just as Bellingcat had reported. Dutch
police are thought to be preparing criminal charges against the missile attack’s suspected perpetrators.
Even as Higgins and his peers have proved the power of technology to expose war crimes, social media has made it easier to
spread falsified information. With this in mind, there’s talk of a
team of analysts, journalists, human rights activists, and perhaps
some Silicon Valley titans working on what one source describes
as “an open-source version of the Associated Press that focuses on
decrypting lies.”
Will it work? “Some nations might think twice about trying to
get away with something when they know it’s going to be blown
out of the water,” Skinner says. And as Higgins has shown, when
conflicts can be investigated from half a world away, the fog of war
may be lifting. —Bryan Schatz


THE DENIAL
DONORS


republicans

RECENT SURVEYS have found that a
solid majority of Republicans accept
that climate change is happening. So
why does their party stand so firmly
against even market-friendly policies
to do something about it? One reason
could be the influence of big donors.
Data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study reveals a
significant gap in attitudes toward
climate change between the gop’s rank
and file and supporters who dropped
$1,000 or more on campaign donations:
While nearly one-third of Republican
voters say they believe climate change
requires action, just 11 percent of big
donors do. Meanwhile, there is no such
split among Democrats, whose deeppocketed donors are eager to see immediate action to stop climate change.
—Sean McElwee

Wait to take action

Climate change is a real problem; take action

QNonvoters
QVoters
Q$1,000+ donors

Climate change is not a real problem; take no action


20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

democrats
Climate change is a real problem; take action

Wait to take action

Source: Cooperative Congressional Election Study

QNonvoters
QVoters
Q$1,000+ donors

Climate change is not a real problem; take no action

20%

40%

60%


80%

100%

Sources: 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study; Brian Schaffner

New Alternatives Fund
Wind Energy
Solar Energy
Energy Conservation
Clean Water
A socially responsible Mutual Fund focused on
alternative energy and environmentally sound investments
Since 1982
www.newalternativesfund.com / 1-800-423-8383
•

• See our track record
Examine our list of investments
• Minimum investment: $2500

Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fund carefully before investing. Go to our website at
www.newalternativesfund.com, call 800 423-8383 or write to the Fund to obtain a prospectus that contains this and other information about the
Fund, and read it carefully before investing. Funds that concentrate in one market sector are generally riskier than more diversified strategies.
Investments made in alternative energy and environmental products are subject to political priorities and changing government regulations.
Distributed by Foreside Funds Distributors LLC, 899 Cassatt Rd., Berwyn, PA 19312 | New Alternatives Fund, 150 Broadhollow Road, Melville, New York 11747

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

15



NO PARKING HERE

You’ve heard about how robocars are going to upend the economy.
But have you thought about what they’ll do to urban space?

BY CLIVE THOMPSON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY EEVOLVER



NO PAR KI NG H ER E

F YOU DRIVE OUT to visit
Disney’s Epcot center in Orlando, Florida, you will arrive
at one of the biggest parking
lots in America. With room
for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out
over 7 million square feet—
about the size of 122 football
fields. If you look at the lot
on Google Maps, you realize that it’s nearly the size of
Epcot center itself. Disney
built one Epcot to hold the
visitors. Then it built another
to hold the cars.
Disney isn’t alone in its
expansive approach to parking. Parking is, after all,
what cars do most of the

time: The average automobile spends 95 percent of
its time sitting in place. People buy cars
because they need to move around, but
the amount of time they actually do move
around is tiny. So the cars are parked, and
in multiple spaces: A car owner needs a
spot near home, but also spots near other
places he or she might go—the office, a
shopping mall, Epcot. A 2011 study at
the University of California-Berkeley
found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots.
Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the country,
that means we have roughly four times
more parking spaces than vehicles. If you
totaled up all the area devoted to parking,
it’d be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger
than Connecticut.
Social critics often complain that the
interstate highway system deformed the
United States by encouraging sprawl.
But the metastasizing of parking has
had equally profound effects. On an aesthetic level, it makes cities grimly ugly.
Economically, it is expensive to build.
A study by the Sightline Institute found
that at least 15 percent of the price of
rent in Seattle stemmed from developers’
cost of building parking. Those costs are
passed on to tenants whether they own
a car or not (on top of any per space fee
the landlord charges)—padding rent by an

average of $246 a month in Seattle and
$225 nationwide.
And worst of all may be the emissions
that parking causes. Studies have found

18 M O T H E R J O N E S |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

that anywhere from about 30 to 60 percent of the cars you see driving around a
downtown core are just circling, looking
for an open space to claim. (An IBM survey
found that worldwide, urban drivers spend
an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking.) When Donald Shoup,
an urban-planning professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, examined just one small business area near his
university—Westwood Village—he found
that “cruising” for parking, as he dubs it,
burns 47,000 gallons of gas and generates
730 tons of carbon dioxide a year. What’s
more, all that asphalt traps heat and raises
the temperature of cities during the summer. Environmentally, aesthetically, and
economically, parking is a mess.
But for the first time in history, urban
experts are excited about parking—because
they can see the end in sight.
We are, they say, on the cusp of a new
era, when cities can begin dramatically reducing the amount of parking spaces they
offer. This shift is being driven by a one-two
punch of social and technological change.
On the social side, people are increasingly

opting to live in urban centers, where they
don’t need—or want—to own a car. They’re
ride-sharing or using public transit instead.
And technologically, we’re seeing the
rapid emergence of self-driving cars.
Google’s models have traveled more than
a million miles with almost no accidents,
and experts expect that fully autonomous
vehicles will hit the consumer market as
early as a decade from now. Indeed, car
technology is advancing so rapidly that
it’s causing legitimate economic concerns. Already, companies like Uber and
Lyft are under fire for treating drivers as
independent contractors, with far fewer
rights and benefits than employees (see
“Road Warrior,” page 5). And that disruption is nothing compared with what will
happen once cars can drive themselves;
millions of taxi, delivery, and long-haul
trucking jobs that traditionally have gone
to new immigrants and low-education
workers could vanish in a few years. Labor
activists and economists are understandably alarmed at the prospect.
But at the level of urban design and
the environment, self-driving cars could
produce huge benefits. After all, if cars
can drive themselves, fleets of them
could scurry around picking people up

and dropping them off, working with
sleek, robotic efficiency. With perfect

computerized knowledge of where potential riders were, they could pick up
several people heading the same way,
optimizing ride-sharing on the fly. One
study suggests a single self-driving car
could replace up to 12 regular vehicles.
Indeed, many urbanists predict that fleets
of robocars could become so reliable that
many, many people would choose not to
own automobiles, causing the amount of
parking needed to drop through the floor.
“Parking has been this sacred cow that
we couldn’t touch—and now we can touch
it,” says Gabe Klein, who has headed the
transportation departments in Chicago
and Washington, DC. He sees enormous
potential—all that paved-over space suddenly freed up for houses and schools,
plazas and playgrounds, or just about anything. “All that parking could go away, and
then what happens?” he asks. “You unlock
a tremendous amount of value.”

love affair with parking in the 1940s and ’50s, when car use exploded. Panicked cities realized they would
soon run out of curb space, but they didn’t
want to discourage car ownership or build
enough public transit. So instead they
passed minimum parking requirements: If
a developer wanted to erect a new office or
apartment building, it had to build parking. For residences, typically two spots per
household are required. And in general,
cities calculated the highest peak amount
of parking a location might need and demanded that developers build it.

Way back in the 1960s, UCLA’s Shoup
became alarmed by the massive growth of
parking. As he saw it, the problem was that
in most people’s minds, the spaces seemed
to be “free.” When developers are forced
to build parking, the cost is folded into the
purchase price, be it a home, an office, or
a restaurant. And when people don’t pay
to park at the curb (only a tiny fraction
of curbside spots in the United States are
metered), it’s the city that pays to build
and maintain that spot. These costs are
passed down to consumers and taxpayers,
but since they’re never itemized, they’re
easy to ignore. In my neighborhood in
Brooklyn, for example, housing prices are
sky-high, but the city doesn’t charge me
AMERICA BEGAN ITS


The average
automobile
spends

95%
of its time
sitting in place.

cent of US workers who lived in the same
city where they worked commuted to their

jobs in a car, by themselves. Only 7.8 percent of them commuted by public transit.
Parking, urban reformers fretted, seemed
like an intractable problem.
AT LEAST , THAT ’ S

to park on the street. When I tell this to
Shoup, he points out that if they did charge
me, the odds are high that I’d never have
bought my car. When a city provides free
parking, it’s also economically unfair, since
it’s a subsidy available only to those who
are wealthy enough to own cars.
“Parking is wildly mismanaged—it’s
probably our most inefficient use of resources in many ways,” Shoup tells me.
Indeed, minimum parking requirements
usually force developers to build more
parking than the market actually calls for.
Sightline found that in greater Seattle, 37
percent of residential lots are empty at
night—precisely when you’d expect residential parking spaces to be most used.
The deep irony is that cities rarely require
developers to construct enough affordable
housing, but they pass strict laws making
sure vehicles can be adequately housed.
“We don’t force [developers] to build the
right number of bedrooms for people! We

just force them to build the right number
of bedrooms for cars,” says Jeffrey Tumlin,
the principal and director of strategy for

Nelson Nygaard, a parking consultancy.
To be fair to politicians, there’s a long
history of people freaking out if parking
isn’t plentiful. “Thinking about parking
seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain
responsible for making snap decisions
about urgent fight-or-flight choices, such
as how to avoid being eaten,” as Shoup
dryly wrote in his 2005 book, The High
Cost of Free Parking.
Ultimately, he notes, parking is a selfreinforcing problem. Cities trained people
to expect that parking would be plentiful
and free, which encouraged them to drive
everywhere—which made them demand
more parking. Decades of perverse incentives cemented the automobile as the main
way people get around. As the Census
Bureau reported in 2005, fully 76.4 per-

how the picture looked
10 years ago. But then something strange
happened to our relationship with cars.
Jeff Kenworthy is a professor of sustainability at Curtin University in Australia,
and for decades he has been collecting
data on how people travel in major industrialized cities around the world. He’s
found that the pace at which people increase their use of cars has been slowing.
In the ’60s, car use grew by 42 percent. In
the ’80s, it grew by less—only 23 percent.
Then from 1995 to 2005, it went up by
only 5 percent. In some cities car use actually declined, including London (down
1.2 percent), Atlanta (10.1 percent), and

Houston (15.2 percent). Kenworthy says
many cities are reaching “peak car use,”
and it’s all downhill from here.
“The dominance of the car,” he says, “is
on the wane in many places.”
Why? It’s partly the price of gas, which
rose dramatically in the early 2000s and has
in many parts of the world stayed high since
then. (Car insurance is historically high too.)
But Kenworthy suspects it is also related to
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

19


20 M O T H E R J O N E S |

J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6

United States has since
gone down, and “when the
price is cheap, people are
going to drive more.”
But many experts argue
that the urbanizing trend is
likely to accelerate because
millennials are a Marchetti
generation—they’re increasingly turning against the
car. Research by the Frontier Group, a think tank
that often publishes work

on energy and transportation, found that the average annual number of
miles driven by American
16- to 34-year-olds dropped
23 percent between 2001
and 2009, a pretty stunning
fall. Meanwhile, millennials took 24 percent more
bike rides and used more
public transit. Indeed,
they’re much less likely
than previous generations
to even be able to drive: In

31%
of our
downtown
commercial
cores are
devoted to
parking.

1983, some 87.3 percent of
19-year-olds nationwide
had a driver’s license. By
2010, only 69.5 percent of
them did. And while you
might suspect that the recession was at play, rates of
driving are down even
among young adults with
high-paying jobs.
When millennials are

polled, they’re much more
likely than their elders to
say they try to actively
minimize driving to avoid
causing environmental
damage. They’re buying
far fewer cars than their
forebears did, which worries carmakers. Toyota USA
President Jim Lentz said
in a speech last year, “We
have to face the growing
reality that today young
people don’t seem to be as
interested in cars as previous generations.”

G I L L E S P E R E S S / M AG N U M P H OTO S

a concept known as the “Marchetti Wall.”
Back in 1994, the Italian physicist Cesare
Marchetti observed that throughout history—going back to ancient Rome—the majority of people disliked commuting more
than one hour to work. If you’re faced with
a longer commute, you hit the Wall and rearrange your life, finding a new, more local
job or moving closer to the office. In the
1990s and early 2000s, not only did use of
public transit grow, but Kenworthy found
that cities worldwide were becoming denser,
in part because millennials weren’t decamping for the suburbs (like their boomer parents did), and because seniors were moving
back to urban cores, to enjoy the walkable
life. As a society, we slammed into the Marchetti Wall and backed away.
True, this trend isn’t necessarily set in

stone. While the number of vehicle miles
traveled per capita in the United States began declining in 2005, it began rising again
in 2014. The dip might have been a result
of the Great Recession and $4-per-gallon
gas, says Constantine Samaras, a civil and
environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. The price of gas in the


NO PAR KI NG H ER E

trend of mobility that young
people have embraced, though: Ondemand car services like Uber and Lyft.
A year ago, Uber reported that its drivers were making 1 million trips per day;
this past summer, the company told prospective investors that it was growing 300
percent year over year. Fully 70 percent of
Uber’s customers are under the age of 34,
and 56 percent of them live in cities, as a
survey by the market research firm Global
Web Index found. Ride-hailing has big implications for weaning cities off their addiction to parking. The millennial generation
is learning that it can have a car without
needing to own or ever park one.
What’s more, Uber is seeing especially
rapid growth in its ride-sharing offering,
Uber Pool, which matches travelers heading to roughly the same destination. In exchange for sharing a ride, the fare is at least
25 percent cheaper than a regular Uber fare.
The company introduced the service in San
Francisco a year ago, and already nearly 50
percent of all Uber rides in the city are pooled.
This fact stuns even Uber itself. “The
adoption of ride-sharing is larger than anybody anticipated. The market is massive,”

says David Plouffe, the former Obama
campaign manager who is now Uber’s
chief adviser and a board member, during an interview at the company’s shiny
headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
“I don’t think anyone who was around in
the beginning suggested that the market
would be this big. I mean, we have a good
service, but clearly this is married up with
how people want to live.”
Uber, he says, is now launching a service
aimed at ride-sharing for daily commutes.
“So, I’m getting ready to go to work. I put
my coffee mug in the sink. I turn on the
app. I pick up my keys. Somebody three
blocks away says, ‘I’m going the same
way,’” he says.
Carpooling, of course, has been touted
for decades as a way to use cars more efficiently. But it never took off because it
suffered from an information problem:
There was no way to coordinate rides on
the fly, no way to know whether someone
four blocks away was heading in the same
direction as you, right this instant. Safer just
to drive yourself, right? And this gave birth
to a welter of personal choices that seemed

THERE IS ONE

perfectly reasonable individually, but that
together created a massive environmental

and urban land use problem—with many
of us heading off to work in the same direction and with cars that contained, statistically, only 1.13 people each.
That information problem is now gone.
The smartphone has solved it. Equipped
with GPS and mobile data, the mobile
phone may ruin our concentration and
erode our privacy at every turn, but it’s remarkably good at one task: on-the-fly coordination. If the trend toward ride-sharing
keeps accelerating, how might that change
traffic and parking? When a group of MIT
scientists crunched data on Boston-area
commuting patterns, they found that if
50 percent of drivers shifted over to ridesharing, it would reduce traffic congestion
by 37 percent and decrease the number of
vehicles on the road by 19 percent.
Tumlin, the parking consultant, is struck
by the shift in the zeitgeist. He’s 46 and says
that “my generation was the last generation
to believe that owning our own car would
bring us freedom, autonomy, social status,
sex.” For today’s young people, the mobile
phone is a much more potent technology
of autonomy and social status—and, in a
neat twist, you can’t use your phone while
you’re driving. They are rival activities, and
the phone is winning. People want access to
a car, but don’t feel a need to own one, just
as they’ve increasingly adopted streaming
services instead of vinyl, CDs, or even MP3s.
“This conflation of auto ownership and
personal identity,” Tumlin concludes, “is

permanently broken.”

self-driving car first
pulled out into a busy intersection, with
convertibles racing past us, I stole a look
over at the driving wheel. It was turning
by itself, as if a ghost were piloting the vehicle. It was an unnerving sight, though
the Google engineers riding along with
me were by now quite blasé: These cars
have already driven a total of 1.2 million
miles and have only been in a tiny number of accidents. The computer guidance
system, said the engineer sitting in the
driver’s seat—his hands folded in his lap—
is a very cautious driver.
“Almost like a new person who’s driving
for the first month or so,” he added. These
cars can also sense far more than humans

WHEN THE GOOGLE

can. Another engineer riding shotgun held
a laptop showing how our car “saw” the
road with its laser, radar, and camera vision: The screen looked like the wireframe
of a video game, with yellow boxes for pedestrians, red boxes for cyclists, and purple
and green ones for other vehicles. The car
could see not just what was ahead of us,
but far off to the sides and behind us too.
“That’s what makes computers more
fun, that they can detect a million things
at one time, whereas your average driver is

probably only focused on that one thing,”
the engineer said with a grin. As if to prove
the point, the car abruptly slowed down:
It had detected a woman to our right drifting slightly into our lane.
Ten years ago, self-driving car prototypes could barely drive 10 miles across a
relatively uncluttered desert. Now they’re
expertly weaving through traffic in Silicon
Valley, Austin, and Pittsburgh. “The rate of
progress,” marveled the engineer, “is mindblowing.” They dropped me off at Google’s
headquarters, where I wandered up to a
rooftop parking lot. There, Google’s latest
prototype—so new that journalists aren’t allowed to ride in it—was tooling around: a
cute, egg-shaped little pod that was about
as big as a Smart Car, except it didn’t even
have a steering wheel.
How will self-driving cars change the
way we get around? Many urban experts
think the future of those egg-shaped cars
isn’t in private ownership. It’s in fleet deployment. Certainly, that’s what Uber
believes; last year it set up a research lab
in Pittsburgh specifically to develop its
own self-driving cars. In the not-too-far-off
future, CEO Travis Kalanick predicts, you
could call for an Uber car and a self-driving
robocar could zip up to whisk you away.
Unlike human drivers, robot cars
wouldn’t need to look up the route or the
location of the nearest passenger, so they
wouldn’t waste time dithering, as humans
do. Robot cars could also drive much more

closely to one another, packing far more
vehicles onto a street. (Computer scientist Peter Stone even created software that
would let robot cars do away with traffic
lights; instead of stopping at an intersection, they would simply weave around one
another, navigating street corners nearly 10
times faster than cars do today.)
What’s more, they’d never need to
park. At the University of Texas-Austin,
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

21


WASTED
SPACE

25'-0"

12'-0"

10'-0"

12'-0"

a behavioral scientist at RAND who coauthored a report on autonomous cars in
2014. “If they’re driving themselves, cars
could precisely put themselves on fourmeter-wide bits of pavement,” leaving the
rest of the road to some other purpose or
surface, maybe grass. “You can imagine
fairly utopian, far-off visions.”

We won’t know what’s truly possible until
there are lots of autonomous vehicles on the
road. For all the success that Google, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University have
had with their robot cars, they’ve mostly
been driven in mild climates. Nobody has
figured out how to tackle snow, which tends
to confuse today’s computer vision systems.
It’s probably solvable, but precisely when—or
when governments will be satisfied enough
of self-driving cars’ safety to approve them
for sale—is anybody’s guess.
But you don’t need fully autonomous
cars to get big reductions in parking. Already
some cars can parallel park themselves. Carmakers could soon produce vehicles that
you drive yourself but that, once you’re at
a parking lot, you send off to find a space
by themselves. Since nobody would need
to get in or out of them after they parked,
they could position themselves as snugly

18'-4"

36'-0"

How much space do we devote to cars vs. living? A study
by the Seattle-based Sightline
Institute of policies across
the Pacific Northwest found
that developers are required
to build an average of 1.5

parking spaces for every twobedroom unit—more than
half the size of the average
apartment itself. Or consider
that the average church in
America seats 400. According
to a survey of requirements
across the country, a church
that size is typically required
to have a parking lot almost
five times larger than the
church itself—and the lot sits
empty most of the week. See
more graphics at
graphingparking.com.

zing to and fro. It’s just that they wouldn’t
need to park. It would be the taxi-ization of
nearly all human mobility.
A city run on shared autonomous cars
would likely have a dramatically lower environmental footprint. That’s partly because
you’d get rid of the “circling” that plagues
urban traffic. But it’s also because high-tech
cars would be new—and, given that they’ll
probably emerge en masse about 10 years
from now, they’d be electric. A model of
city traffic published in Nature last July by
Berkeley Lab scientist Jeffrey Greenblatt deduced that emissions would be 90 percent
lower if cars were all autonomous and electric. And the truth is, it’s easier for a fleet of
robot cars to go electric than it is for individual car owners to do so. If I owned an electric car, I’d constantly be at risk for “range
anxiety”: the fear that my battery might die

when I’m far from a charging station. But
a robot fleet could optimize repowering,
sending a car to pick up a traveler only when
the car had enough juice to get to the traveler’s destination, and taking low-battery cars
out of service to recharge as needed.
“You could conceivably imagine a world
in which you don’t need to pave as much
of the roadway,” says James Anderson,

8'-6"

2-BEDROOM APARTMENT
900 FT2

1.5 PARKING SPACES
INCLUDING AISLES
488 FT2

C H R I S P H I L P OT

Kara Kockelman—a professor of transportation engineering—modeled the impact
of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles and
found that each one could replace up to
a dozen regular cars. The robocars could
drive all day long, stopping only to refuel
or for maintenance; at night, when there
was less demand, they could drive out to
a remote parking spot on the outskirts of
town. The upshot, Kockelman figures, is
that if you shifted the entire city to autonomous cars, it would need a staggering

90 percent less parking than it needs today. It’d be speedy travel: In Kockelman’s
model, when people called for a car, one
typically came along in about 20 seconds.
It’d be profitable: When she spec’d out the
cost of running an Uber-like fleet of robot
cars, she calculated it would cost $70,000
to buy and deploy each vehicle, but that
each would earn a 19 percent profit on investment every year. And rides would only
be about $1 per mile, even if just a single
passenger rode at a time—half as cheap as
today’s typical Austin cab fare.
“You could make the fleet smaller,”
she says, “and you can reduce parking
in downtown.” The streets would still be
busy—crowded, even—with vehicles whiz-


NO PAR KI NG H ER E

together as Tetris bricks, fitting far more cars
into our existing parking lots and garages.
Achieve even this small feat of self-driving,
and it could be possible to never build another piece of parking, says Samaras, the
Carnegie Mellon engineer.
Some urban thinkers told me that 15
years from now, autonomous vehicles will
have erased the need for up to 90 percent
of our current lots. “There is more parking today in American cities than they will
ever, ever need,” Tumlin says. It’ll vanish as
human driving vanishes.

“Who will be the last human driver?”
asks Samaras. “It’ll probably be our
grandkids.”

WHAT WOULD A city look like if it suddenly needed 90 percent less parking?
A few cities have experimented with
reclaiming road space. One of the biggest
such projects was in Seoul, South Korea, in
the early 2000s, when the municipal government tore up a 3.5-mile elevated highway that had covered the Cheonggyecheon
River and transformed it into a public park.
The effects on the city were immediate: In
addition to encouraging a surge in tourism,

6,000 FT2 CHURCH
4,000 FT2 SANCTUARY

the park cooled the surrounding area by 9
degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.
“Now they have this incredible green corridor with tons of space and hundreds of
thousands of people using it,” says Kenworthy. There had been 120,000 cars a day flowing through the area, and opponents of the
project had claimed that all these cars would
cram onto side streets instead. But car use
went down. We often believe traffic is like a
liquid; prevent it from going down one road,
and it’ll just flow down a nearby one. But in
reality, Kenworthy says, traffic is more like a
gas: “A gas compresses or expands based on
how much space you give it.”
New York City has seen similar experiments. Ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg closed
down several blocks of Times Square, turning them into well-trafficked pedestrian

hangouts. The most famous reclaimed
space is Manhattan’s High Line, once a
dilapidated elevated railway and now a verdant park that drew 6.2 million visitors in
2014 (2 million of whom were locals) and
hosts live events. “It’s a park, it’s a cultural
institution, it’s a plaza, all put together,”
says Robert Hammond, who spearheaded
the restoration project and now runs the
nonprofit that tends it. He suspects the fu-

ture of public parks is these sorts of “hybrid”
spaces, built on reclaimed urban space.
When land in a city suddenly becomes
freed up for new uses, it’s called “infill.”
The downside of our love affair with cars
is that on average we’ve asphalted over
31 percent of our commercial downtown
cores with parking. But the upside, Shoup
tells me, is massive potential infill. If we
wean ourselves off the need to store cars,
spots and lots could be converted into
parks, schools, hospitals, housing. Better
yet, it’s property that is precisely where
you’d want new development: downtown,
inherently walkable. “The upside of the
mess we’ve made,” Shoup says, “is that we
have a lot of land.”
Take New York City, where there are
roughly 102,000 public parking spaces
below 60th Street—taking up roughly 18.4

million square feet, a space equal to about
half of Central Park.
“San Francisco is going bananas for new
housing, and Manhattan is always looking
for space, and here we have this sitting in
front of us,” Samaras says. “That’s what autonomous vehicles can do.”

THERE ARE SOME big speed bumps on
the road to a low-parking future, though.
That’s because most of these rosy projections assume self-driving cars are likely to
be deployed en masse by ride-sharing firms
that would use them with deep efficiency,
offering such convenience and cheapness
that we’d all ditch our personal vehicles.
But there’s another route the future
might take. Shannon McDonald, an architect and historian of American parking,
recently got a glimpse of it. She flew to
Baltimore to visit her brother, who picked
her up in his new car. It included several
self-piloting features; he showed her how
it wouldn’t let him steer accidentally into
a neighboring lane on the highway, and
when he got home, the car parallel parked
itself. Such features might make self-driving
cars so alluring that everyone wants one.
“What if they’re all privately owned?
You’ve got a driverless vehicle, and maybe
you don’t share it,” McDonald tells me.
If her brother and sister-in-law had a fully
self-driving car, maybe they’d decide to go

to New York to see theater. It’s a crazy-long
five-hour drive, but who cares? They could
kick back. They would “ride all the way in
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | M O T H E R J O N E S

23