A third of Americans don't drive. So why is our transportation so car-centric?
A third of Americans don't drive. So why is our transportation so car-centric?
Anna Zivarts explains how reimagining transportation could benefit non-drivers and the climate.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.
because we hate poor people
And car makers sucessfully managed to lobby for it in the last 100 years.
Even the Netherlands was turned into a car centric country after WW2, it's just that people fought back against car centric design starting in the 1970s because they realised how bad it is for everyone.
The USA helped rebuild a lot of countries after WWII through the Marshall Plan, which is probably partly why so many ended up with car-centric infrastructure.
I drive as well, and I hate it every time. I drive because I "have too".
If there was quality rail, subway, tram, and regional bus service that was within a five minute walk I would choose it any day.
There something about being chauffeured around that so much more relaxing and stress free.
Unfortunately, the car centric argument always seems to be more public transit would take away from people desire to drive, but on the contrary it would make driving less stressful. Less cars "in your way" or on the road and local streets.
Commuting is all about avoiding crowds. I love driving, I just hate traffic. It's so mainstream so all the joy is gone.
Trains are amazing when it's not packed. You can look outside, have some drink, use your phone without getting motion sick.
Busses are pretty wild, not my favourite. If you see a bus in Belgium, do not play a dare with them. You will die.
E-bike is amazing if you have a road without cars. Which is what I do now. 28,7 km a day. Decent exercise too. The off road part is pretty fun. Bit of a game to be honest.
5 minutes is small even for many transit centric countries. Try 10.
I mean why are we still asking why? We know why. The American dream involved a house and a car. The great American road trip. The lack of high speed rail. All of that got us here. The real question is what’s keeping us stuck here? And the answer is politics. Solve the oligarchy issue and you might be able to take on the projects we’re need to do away with car centric culture. Get people in office that value infrastructure over military might, and will stop subsidizing car and gas companies. A small thing any of us can do is, when job searching, require companies to justify why a job must be in office instead of remote and unless it makes sense, don’t accept in office requirements. That last one is arguable more difficult if you’re in desperate need of a job, but in other conditions, try it.
A third of Americans don't drive. So why is our transportation so car-centric?
A critical disconnect between policy and reality.
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Just because people don't drive, doesn't mean they're not traveling by car.
Is a bus a car?
No, it's public transport. Unless you want to use a wider definition that includes train cars as well.
You mean like New York where everywhere is clogged with taxis? Rather than people driving themselves, somebody else is.
Taxis are immensely more efficient space wise than individual people owning cars.
The average car is parked 97% of the time. If we took taxis away from NYC and didn’t compensate with public transport , they’d probably have to replace central park with a massive parking lot. Not kidding.
They are, my only point was no drivers license doesn't equal not traveling by car
I think this perception is a little inversed or skewed IMO. The congestion is caused by individual cars which block the transit and taxi routes.
The Transit is needed, otherwise more cars need to be added to the road. With increased transite, more cars are removed from the road.
From what I have seen based on the congestion charges implemented in NYC as a example, it's dropped the number of personal vehicles commuting into the city at any given day. This in turn has dropped the congestion, while in turn dropping taxi commuting times.
Things like congestion charges are a artificial incentive to carpool, take transit, or split the cost of a cab. This decreases the amount of cars while keeping the amount of commuters roughly the same.
Now you could argue with more of the road now "open" or "free", what stops more taxis from being added to take advantage of a increase in demand for quicker travel.
Of course transit is needed. I prefer it. I was only commenting on why we are still carcentric even if people don't have drivers licenses, people still use uber and taxis (car centric) instead of a bus or subway. Either routes and service are not enough, or people are uses to immediate needs serviced and don't want to wait at a busstop
New York is more than like midtown manhattan. I would not describe it as "clogged with taxis".
Also there's like 3.5 million subway riders per day in NYC.
So I don't know what point you're trying to make.
Can we please focus our energy on more clear and present problems like the fascist takeover that's happening?
In the fuckcars community?
There is a long history of connection between cars manufacturers and fascists, to be fair. But beyond the history involved in them, car centric design contributes to it: Mass resistance is more difficult with physical separation, which driving promotes. Inefficient use of resources promoted by spread out design, and a requirement to buy, fuel, and maintain an expensive vehicle make people in even wealthy societies poorer, and people struggling to maintain a formerly comfortable quality of life are exactly the kind of people that fascists like to recruit, as they can often be convinced to blame scapegoat groups for their struggles and yearn for older times that the fascists can promise a return to.
Im not suggesting the one is entirely to blame for the other, you can certainly have fascists without car dependence, and cars without fascists, but they contribute to the conditions that fascism can take hold in, and make life easier for such regimes once installed.
The problems poor people have been dealing with for decades have to wait because now, YOU have problems, and they're ever so much more important than the ability of people to function at a basic level. Please, go ahead, fucking solve fascism.
One of the tests that Strong Towns offers to determine whether your town is a strong one is this: If there was some emergency (say, a fascist takeover) that required the community to gather together, would people know instinctively where to meet? In lots of low-density, car-oriented landscapes, there's no there there, no community/symbolic spaces where people would go.
Obviously, this is an analytical tool, not guide as to what would happen in any real-world scenario. It does highlight the decline of community, and the fraying of the weak social ties that hold a community together. How do we as Americans organize ourselves to resist when so many of us don't know even our close neighbors? How do we work to reduce political polarization, which is done by daily, face-to-face interaction with people who are not like us, when we have so little community interaction that's not through a windshield?
It's a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether the destruction of community is a cause or effect of car-dependency, but what's clear is that the fascists are here and taking advantage of the fact that we've fucked ourselves over with a car-dependent landscape for too many decades.
@SwingingTheLamp @orbituary So many of the protests taking place now (especially the Tesla ones) are on 5+ lane stroads where most of the passersby seeing the protest are in cars. It's a dangerous and inefficient way to fight fascism, but what else do people know how to do in Americar? So many suburbanites don't even know how to get into city centers for a protest unless the city has been gutted to provide endless free parking.
@orbituary @relianceschool You don't think Americans living in sprawl and spending most of their time driving around alone in ever larger SUVs and monster trucks has something to do with why so many of them turned to fascism?
Becau$e