Overview
Nod was not designed for cars. The oldest districts were built before the wheel won over walking, and the core of the city reflects this: the Annex's stone-footed avenues were sized for foot traffic and the occasional Carceri deciding to relocate. The Warrens are worse, streets so narrow that two Kaarn cannot pass each other without negotiation. Ringhollow's vertical shafts were carved for bodies, not axles.
But Nod is nothing if not adaptable. Its infrastructure is a compressed archaeological record of every era that has contributed population and ideas, layered on top of foundations that predate all of them. Roman road engineering sits alongside Victorian drainage and poured-concrete intersections that could have been lifted from a 1970s suburb. The further one travels from the Tower, the wider the streets become, the more recent the construction, and the more the city begins to accommodate the fact that seven million residents cannot all walk everywhere.
The Roads
Three broad categories of road exist in Nod.
The old streets, concentrated in the Annex, the inner Warrens, and the districts immediately surrounding Lake Enoch, are pedestrian by necessity. Stone-paved, uneven, and interrupted by staircases, market encroachments, and buildings that have slowly expanded into the right-of-way over centuries. Large vehicles do not operate here. Rickshaws, handcarts, bicycles, and motorcycles are the limit. The Menshen's Red Cabs drop fares at the edge of old-street districts and refuse to go further.
The middle roads serve the bulk of the city's residential and commercial districts. These are wider, sometimes paved, sometimes cobbled, sometimes surfaced with a blacktop that resembles asphalt but bonds to Noddish stone in ways Earth materials do not. The middle roads accommodate vehicles but were not built for volume. Traffic moves in single lanes with passing conducted through a system of informal priority that varies by district, species, and the relative size of the vehicles involved.
The outer roads are where Nod starts to feel like a place that has heard of highways. The districts beyond the Warrens, the approaches to the Deadlands, the caravan routes, and the arterials connecting the Cardinal Boroughs to Ashmarket and the Dockyards were built or widened to handle freight. Multi-lane roads surfaced with compacted stone or that black bonding material carry truck traffic, convoy escorts, and the military vehicles the Order maintains in conspicuous number. K-Town's roads are the most modern in the city, engineered to corporate standards and maintained by Kuron Inc.'s own crews, which makes crossing from a neighbouring district into K-Town feel like driving across motoring eras.
Vehicles
Cars exist in Nod. They are not nearly as common as on Earth, where mass production and cheap fuel has made personal vehicles a baseline expectation. In Nod, a car is an asset, a tool, and sometimes a statement.
Imports
The simplest vehicles are imports. Earth-manufactured cars and trucks brought through the Veil by Scribes, through the Bethier Portal by merchants, or carried piece by piece through gates and reassembled by someone with more ambition than sense. Imports work, mostly. Earth engines run on fuel that must itself be imported or on converted power sources, and Earthly vehicles are no more immune to the transformative arcane energies of Nod than anything else. An imported car must be maintained through wealth or raw stubbornness.
Builds
More interesting are the builds. Vehicles designed, assembled, or heavily modified for Nod's specific conditions by local fabricators. The Tinkers produce the majority of these, working from the Middens and the lower Warrens with salvaged Earth components, Noddish materials, and engineering instincts refined over generations. A Tinker-built vehicle is mechanically idiosyncratic and adapted to the actual roads it will drive on. Suspension systems account for cobblestone-to-stone transitions, frames and bumpers are reinforced to endure collisions with dangerous wildlife, and lighting rigs compensate for a city with no sun and inconsistent streetlamp coverage.
Power is the persistent problem. Fossil fuel is imported, expensive, and in the charged atmosphere of Nod can produce a caustic pollution that is dangerous to all. The primary alternative, chosen by almost all who have the option, are thaumic capacitors that store ambient magical energy and discharge it as motive force. These are not wholly reliable. They work until they don't and a capacitor failure at speed is spectacular in ways the driver does not survive. The most common compromise is a hybrid approach, conventional engines running on distilled alcohol produced from the Fields' crops, supplemented by low-grade arcane components that improve efficiency without the catastrophic failure modes of a full thaumic drive.
Freight
Nod's economy moves on trucks. Merchants Guild freight runs on heavy vehicles, flat-bedded haulers and enclosed transports that carry goods between the Dockyards, Ashmarket, the Cardinal Boroughs, and K-Town along the outer roads. Deadlands caravans still use a mix of motorized and animal transport depending on how far they are going and how reliable the roads are past the city's edge, but within Nod proper, cargo moves on wheels and engines.
At the behest of the Council, the Dockmasters inspect freight vehicles at every major entry point. This produces bottlenecks that the haulers have learned to navigate through bribery, creative routing, and the occasional run through back-alley roads and hidden paths not built for the purpose. The Merchants Guild often encourages such 'efficiencies' and pays bonuses for Haulers who can get goods where they need to go fast. This leaves Haulers caught between the Councils demand for intelligence on the movement of goods through the city and the Merchants Guild's hatred of anything that slows their trade and affects their profits.
Culture
A vehicle in Nod confers mobility in a city where mobility is power. The gate-mark divides those who can leave from those who cannot. A car divides those who can cross the city in an hour from those who spend half a day on foot or at the mercy of the transit system's unpredictable schedule.
Car culture concentrates in the outer districts and the boroughs where space allows it. The Order's motor pool is the largest single collection of vehicles in the city, maintained to military specification by engineers who take professional pride in keeping these machines running in the borderline hostile conditions of Nod. The Mercenaries Guild maintains its own fleet for contract operations. Wealthy merchants keep personal vehicles as status markers. Some Theriae groups have also adopted the culture, with lineage groups customizing their trucks and transports as expressions of pack identity in ways that blur the line between engineering and territorial display.
The Tinkers have spawned a secondary culture around the vehicles they build. Races are run through makeshift routes, and on Deadlands roads outside the city's southern edge, unsanctioned and unregulated, attracting drivers, gamblers, and the Coliseum crowd looking for entertainment that does not involve a cage. The vehicles in these races are purpose-built, stripped down, overpowered, and distinct enough that any gearhead can tell who built one just by looking at the frame. The casualty rate is consistent with a sport conducted at high speed in an eldritch shadow city crawling with monsters and infrastructure problems but that hasn't made them any less popular.