THE FILM

REVIEWS & ONLINE PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Online Events (recordings)
Metropolitan planning council - Virtual Screening & Conversation

Nordic Innovation House - Bifrost Mobility - Life on Wheels, How will the pandemic affect the new normal in mobility?

Forbes - by Lance Eliot

LinkedIn - by Sandra Phillips

”I just finished watching a documentary called "Life on Wheels" by David Hodge and Hi-Jin Hodge.

My 3 key takeaways:
1. Road space is the most valuable resource a city has
2. It's increasingly not about the mode, it's about the entire ecosystem
3. Transportation is built in three dimensions and experienced in four

The first two I've known for a while.

The last point really hit home because it echoes Sarah Williams Godhange's "Welcome to your World". In her words: "Everything around you - from the shape of the room in which you currently sit, (...) to the width and patterns on the sidewalks or roads that got you there - is as it is because somebody made a choice. By commission or by default, the built environment is composed, which means that it could have been composed differently."

She talks about architecture but the same applies to transportation. And this movie reminded me of why now is the time to focus on this rebuild.

Anyway it's a great watch, not only for mobility nerds, so check it out on Amazon Prime.”

Traditional Building Magazine - Q & A with David Hodge, co-director of Life on Wheels

Medium - Katherine V. Gomes

Life On Wheels - Transportation for a new urban century

A film by David and Hi-Jin Hodge

Amanda Eaken - Director of Transportation, American Cities Climate Challenge, Natural Resources Defense Council

An Inconvenient Truth for transportation—Life On Wheels is both a wake-up call that our current transportation system is broken and a vision of how much better life could be. Beautifully told, through diverse voices and perspectives from around the world, Life On Wheels helps us understand how to meet our urgent global climate challenges. We need new ways of thinking about mobility, not just technologically, but at a personal level. The problem demands a global change of mindset.

Bern Grush - Harmonize Mobility Inc. - Co-author of “The End of Driving”. Toronto, Canada

Most times, when we choose to watch a documentary, it is about something for which we have only a passing acquaintance if that. Say a documentary about an ancient civilization, an unsolved crime, or the discovery of oxygen. We could also watch a documentary about something very intimate that we happen to be remarkably ignorant of, such as our digestive system or the sort of cancer that afflicts one of our family members. You watch any of these documentaries knowing you do not know much and might find it interesting or useful to know more.

A documentary about cars, roads, and congestion doesn’t seem to follow that pattern. Most of us have an intimate relationship with traffic of whatever flavor happens to fill our usually tedious hour of travel each day. We certainly think we already know enough about this thing that we either hate or tolerate — after all, traffic and congestion gets more media play than the weather. And you learn painfully more each day from each person who comes late to a meeting or date. Many are eager to tell you whose fault all this is and how to solve it.

So, who can still be curious?

Consider that like the irony that most of us know very little about how our bodies work, we know as little about how we became so tightly bound up with the automobile. We rarely see the full extent. Every interdependency. Every connection, every trap that holds us.

Or most of us.

If you are willing to consider there might be something more profound in all of this other than merely arranging our roads and transport systems better than we have done. Something more than just electric cars and better subways. If you are inclined to consider our economic, social and emotional affair with the automobile, our mid-era break-up with the family car and the potential — or even the existential need — to love our cities differently. Then Life On Wheels is the best way to inform that consideration.

Sobering is the horror of how we’ve abused these two stunning inventions — city and the car — and even more remarkable is the payment automobility has exacted in blood, treasure, time, environment, and health. Why is it that what so surrounds us — sometimes even seems to drown us — drops to the sub-conscious level of noise? The societal noise of our cities and our civilization?

The film’s voice-over answers thus: “At the birth of every culture there is a tool, a technology, an idea, a new way to fulfill our most basic human desires. It begins as a promise and becomes an organizing principle. It unfolds a series of choices, each one shaping our movement, our identities, and our lives – often in ways we have never imagined.”

We’re in so deep — like fish in water — we don’t even see it.

I confirmed this by watching Life On Wheels with two older friends, both retired office workers, life-long drivers, and very typical North Americans. I lost count of the number of times one or the other exclaimed: “I had no idea!”

For someone like me, born mid-20th-century, raised in semi-rural Pennsylvania, the idea of not-car was unthinkable. Like not-legs. Cars were simple. My father was able to repair anything that needed fixing. We were never without wheels. It never even occurred to me to ask, “what if we didn’t have a car?” I drove from 16.

When I think back about my experience with automobility, I have lived almost every frame of this film. My parents were the caricatured ‘50s mom and dad. Dad was always driving the station wagon; me and four siblings in the back. There were no seat belts. Signaling a turn meant an arm out the window.

I worked on road crews bulldozing new roads, moving creeks, erasing habitat, pouring concrete, and cheating on the drain tile when the state inspector was off-site at lunch. I sailed on Sun Oil tankers carrying crude from Texas to a refinery in Marcus Hook (I still remember the choke of sulfured air). I have owned nine or ten cars, and gotten a few dozen speeding tickets, had six or seven fender benders. Drove when I shouldn’t have. I finally stopped owning a car in 2019 after 50 years dedicated to getting around on my wheels. I can’t count the miles or the dollars. Or the hours. I often wondered how I escaped a severe crash.

I have spent the majority of my professional career surveying the planet’s surface condition, developing technology for road-pricing, parking management, and now automated vehicles.

Who would say I was not intimate with automobility?

Life On Wheels, gorgeously shot and beautifully edited — its interviewees in black suspense, freed of background distraction — taught me that I was only intimate with its first half. The half is getting from 1890 to now. I have been part of the army of innovators tweaking the systems we have, in my case, trying to improve automobility by shifting and smoothing demand through road and parking pricing. Eager to see optimized use of our cars, I paid far less attention to other modalities, to housing, to transit optimization, to active transportation, and the changing nature of cities themselves.

I knew all these things were valuable, even interconnected. But I did not fully appreciate that I had it backward. We need to optimize everything else — housing, zoning, transit, systems (and attitudes) for active transportation — before we could maximize automobility.

We can’t fix automobility without addressing the whole system. We can’t have people consider more fair use of private cars until we can attract them to better alternatives — and we have egregiously failed to do that. We have broken so many parts of how mobility and cities and society fit together. The automobility we now have is the ugly glue that holds it all together (some would say “keeps it all apart”) while simultaneously acting to pervert alternative solutions.

Will reconsidering the full spectrum of mobility and its urban-factors and rethinking how we motorize private movement — perhaps automating it and divorcing it from private ownership as is now so dominant — provide us with a way out?

If not, then what?

Bern Grush

Mark Moulton - Affordable Housing Advocate - Redwood City, California

"This powerful, full-length documentary puts you in the room with the world's brightest experts at the moment the pendulum swings back from an obsession with all things automobile. Great conversations, images, and information combine; a picture emerges of a future urban space that can be safely walkable, human-paced, and revitalized by nourishing our presence.”

Jessica Alba – Policy advisor on sustainable and emerging mobility - Stanford University

The documentary Life on Wheels could not have been released at a more ideal time. We are at the cusp of a mobility revolution and, if guided in the right direction, the societal benefits will be immense. 

When the groundbreaking film An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, it prompted millions to ask questions about climate change for the very first time. It raised awareness at an unprecedented level and brought the topic to the forefront across the globe. I believe Life on Wheels can bring the same level of knowledge to the complex subject of mobility and all the facets and forces associated with it. 

From the very first minute of the documentary, David and Hi-Jin Hodge put a spell on the audience with a – literal – crash course in how our auto-dominated societies are impacting our lives. Sobering facts mixed with reflections from dozens of brilliant minds in the mobility space, along with breathtaking imagery, keep you at the edge of your seat, wondering what comes next. 

The filmmakers take us on a journey through the darker sides of our love affair with the car. Traffic collisions, fatalities and injuries, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, congestion, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, the mental and emotional toll of being stuck in traffic, recovering from or have lost someone close in a car crash, the difficulty of getting around without a car, the high cost of owning a car – the list goes on. 

We are also introduced to several opportunities that new and groundbreaking technology promises us — driverless cars, micromobility services, transportation-as-a-service, just to name a few. The film could very well have focused on these technological advancements and ended there. However, what I love the most about this documentary is that it allows the audience to recognize that technology and innovation are not the end goals here. The real goal is to bring back the focus onto us, the people, and our public spaces. How can we ensure that technology benefits our cities and built environment, and not the other way around? And how can cities and public agencies prepare for the inevitable paradigm shift that we're beginning to take shape? I'm not going to give the solutions away – you will have to watch the film and draw your conclusions. And I think you will love this film too.

Jessica Alba studied Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lund University in Sweden in the 90s and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. With a strong foundation centered on sustainability, she merged her academic knowledge with a love for vibrant communities. Over the past two decades she has consulted and advised on hundreds of projects and policy efforts in the sustainable and emerging mobility realm. She is optimistic about the future, recognizing that as long as we promote sustainable practices, our cities and suburbs can mature beautifully through the coming mobility revolution.

Donna Costa - Strategic Advisor to Startups and Nonprofits - Brooklyn, New York

This inspiring new documentary about mobility asks the most fundamental of questions about urban transportation: how do we want to live? It examines our deeply dependent relationship with our cars and the costs of this dependency on the health of individuals, cities, society, and the environment. More importantly, it addresses ways in which we can use existing and developing technologies to mitigate these costs and improve life and social equity in an increasingly urbanized world. 

Life on Wheels beautifully shot and brilliantly edited by David and Hi-Jin Hodge offers a fresh perspective on how we get around. It uses breath-taking statistics to remind us of the impact automobiles, and transportation infrastructure have on nearly every aspect of our lives, measured in fatalities, damage to the environment, and the percentage of land dedicated to roads and parking. It then shows how technology and public policy can be redirected to make cities more accessible, human places to visit, live, work, go to school, raise families, and retire. 

This film is both illuminating and a call-to-action. It invites us to adopt a mindset less tethered to single-passenger cars and super-highways. At a time when digital technology and the externalities of urban mobility are increasingly alienating us from each other and our surroundings, this film helps us to reimagine a future where death-by-automobile is eliminated, pollution and congestion are significantly reduced, and cities support a better quality of life for all. 

I recommend Life on Wheels to anyone who has ever ridden in a car or visited a city. It will change the way you look at both.

Wm Kirk Moore - Photographer - El Granada, California

This documentary is more than I expected.

“Life on Wheels” is not only educational, enlightening, and inspiring; it is a fantastic feature-length film that WHAM, hooks you right from the startling first frame. The movie’s abundant interviews reveal ramifications of the mobility revolution that are already impacting our lives. I came away in awe of how fast and far-reaching these changes will be. I was surprised to learn self-driving cars are only a small part of the equation; a quantum shift in how we think about our lives, work, cities, health, the future, and each other will be needed to make this revolution evolve successfully. 

The movie also gave me a greater appreciation for the transportation professionals who are involved, the hard politics of imminent radical change, and the realization that my own entrenched beliefs about cars are obsolete. The concept and rippling effects of owning your vehicle may soon be history; embrace it! This movie is a much-needed wake-up call to everyone, and it should be required viewing for those who work in all aspects of transportation, including urban design, architecture, civil engineering, planning, mobility manufacturing, education, and government (from local to federal).

Full disclosure: I’m not a movie critic. I’m a photographer and appreciate exceptional lighting, composition, and focus. In movies, I desire those basics plus the well-executed transitions, timing, and audio that collaborate to tell a story better. As a bonus, “Life on Wheels” has all of these elements in abundance. High-quality production values make the marvelous shots from around the world beautiful to watch. Alluring layout & design, perfect pacing, and appealing special effects make this film beyond the usual documentary. The writing, narration, music, and sound are outstanding, the interviews and content are thought-provoking, and the editing is superb. 

David and Hi-Jin Hodge have skillfully created a compelling and complex testimony about the future, and they tell it in an artistic fashion that will appeal to many surprised viewers. Few people can elucidate the coming mobility revolution’s possible and inevitable effects as adroitly as the Hodges: SEE THEIR MOVIE!  

You will be more informed and motivated to help steer the revolution forward, so it benefits all of us, revitalizes cities, and preserves the future of our planet.

John Niles - President, Global Telematics, Seattle, Washington

"Life on Wheels" is especially stimulating for an analytical person like me who can easily demonstrate the case that the collective economic and social benefits of private cars far exceed the sum of all costs. The dominant mobility market share of vehicles described in the movie is a further demonstration of this point. The sum of costs from the worldwide fleet of one billion cars -- growing inexorably toward two billion, then three billion in number -- are laid out in the movie with far more attention than the benefits, which is the artists' understandable and fair choice given their obvious intent to highlight the aspects of private automobility that are worthy of improvement, indeed massive improvement. The movie's opening presentation on the worldwide annual body count of over one million drivers, passenger, cyclist, and pedestrian fatalities is presented in a grippingly dramatic fashion, a reminder that there is much more to do to reduce human cost. At the same time, the compelling story of the ways in which motorized mobility supports economic survival, prosperity, psychological and physical health, emotional growth, friendship, and love gets but a few nods, despite many clues that Hodge's know about these upsides, and are capable of displaying pictures and narration that illustrate them. The images of traffic jams show the general public embracing the benefits of flexible, on-demand, anytime, go-anywhere personal mobility taking hundreds of millions of car trips daily in cities that jam up limited road space. At the same time, banning cars on some urban streets and having car-free pedestrian space with cars kept out of sight are very worthy ideas completely compatible with the important role of cars in getting people to jobs, schools, and services. This bigger picture of melding access to near and far is incomplete. With the success of this first "Life on Wheels" exposition that will be so appealing to an anti-car intellectual fringe trying to grow its numbers, I hope the artists will consider follow-on movies that examine lower-density environments and the many professional efforts to make mobility safer for users and bystanders, cleaner for the air and water environment, and more accessible for the mobility disadvantaged. Life on Wheels ends with a plea for more walking and less driving, and that's great in many pedestrian-oriented environments for very short-range access. But smaller, quieter, automated cars for the sprawling suburbs and interstate highways need to come into focus as well. Fortunately, David and H-Jin Hodge are demonstrably well-qualified after this first strong effort to demonstrate a more expansive and optimistic vision of life on wheels.