From Courtside Smoke to Gridlock: How Culture Shifts

The year is 1970. You're in an indoor basketball stadium. Far below, players sweat and struggle on the court. The buzzer blares. The net flips inside out. The crowd goes wild. You go wild. The cigarette in your hand flies out as you leap to your feet, celebrating the win.

Wait—you wouldn't smoke a cigarette, right?

But maybe you would have in 1970. It was normal back then, wasn’t it?

I might be aging myself here. Some readers born closer to the millennial divide might be thinking, Hey, I remember those days. Maybe you were in the stands, too.

Today, cigarettes have been all but eradicated from polite society. In a modern stadium, the idea of a lit cigarette flying two rows back is absurd. But they’re not gone. You still see smokers—just pushed to the margins, out on the sidewalk. One guy near our new shop lights up every day. He’s fit, clean-cut, super friendly—and smokes a cigarette every single day.

That cultural shift—from “cigarette sexy” to “cigarette bad”—is the same shift we can make with cars.

Car ads promise power, freedom, sex appeal. But reality? You’re crawling through traffic in your Toyota Venza, mud and dog hair on the floor mats, latte spilled on the passenger seat—and then, distracted for a second, you rear-end someone.

Sound familiar? The same expectation-versus-reality gap we saw between the Marlboro Man and the guy in bed with a tracheotomy tube.

Cars, like cigarettes, are more dangerous than we want to admit.

A post-car society may sound radical now—but it’s possible. And we can build it, brick by brick. Mixed-use development. Apartments above retail. Grocery stores within walking distance. Social life a bike ride or bus trip away—on clean, frequent transit.

Imagine a future without gridlock, where you don’t lose time or money to traffic. Where car crashes are rare, not routine. Where we’re not forced to choose between convenience and safety just to get around.

We’ve changed before. We can do it again.