It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. While I try to spend most of my year working on projects that advance civil rights, this is a day that I reserve for focus work on these long term projects. I wrote this screed a few days ago, however, in the spirit of systems thinking about equity, and after binging two years of City Nerd. If you hate cars like me, it will be catnip for your urbanist soul. If you love cars, stay, be triggered, but have an open mind.
There’s a lot to be worried about right now — inhumane wars, another year of escalating assaults on the civil rights of trans and queer folk, continued denial of bodily autonomy to half of humanity, the continued fraying of public education, the increasing uncertainty of the climate, the rising threats to bodily and mental health. I try to sleep, but often fail.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about cars.
That might seem like an awfully privileged concern. How can I be thinking about cars with all of these other things going on? Is it a technology obsession? My thrill seeking tendency? My restless need to adventure?
Its none of these things. I think about them because I’m increasingly convinced that it is cars, more than most other technologies in recent history, that are the root cause of many of the crises I listed above. As someone endlessly fascinated by the history, systems, and macro-trends of human civilization, cars keep popping up in my studies as a central part of U.S. history, and because of the dominance of the U.S. economy and culture, a central part of human history.
For those that don’t know the history, the earliest automobiles first emerged in the late 19th century when the internal combustion engine was invented. At the time, coal and steam-powered trains were the pinnacle of transportation tech, and had been for about 80 years. And before that, horse and people-powered modes dominated. The car promised the wealthy white capitalist a privileged separation from the riffraff, an independence, a symbol of power. It was a machine that served the individualist, and forced others to make way on the street, because you had somewhere important to be, and fast. The mass production of Ford’s Model T in 1908 offered this dream of power to the masses. But it also shifted U.S. attention from a massive network of interconnected, interstate rail to a vision of a massive network of interconnected, interstate pavement. By 1926, the vision was set, and Eisenhower’s 1956 interstate highway secured it: Black and brown neighborhoods, without political power, were demolished and replaced with loud, polluting, vessels of death and “freedom.” The future had arrived.
In some ways, not much has changed in the past 67 years. Once that network of roads was laid down, and our cities grew around them, they became a structural determinant of our rural and urban lives. Generations of people in the U.S., convinced by marketing, and heavily subsidized highways and fuel, that owing a car was an essential part of the American dream of individualism and freedom. Living nearly anywhere in the U.S. now essentially requires a car, as the rail network has decayed and most cities scoffed at reliable high frequency public transit that the rest of the world busily built. And so here we are about 140 years since the car was invented, with a country of road noise, tailpipes, ever expanding freeway lanes, and the promise of eternal, mind-numbing traffic.
While the roads themselves haven’t changed that much, pretty much everything else has. Take, for example, life for people in poverty in the U.S.. In most parts of this country, if you want a job — and many need two at this point due to income inequality—you’ll have to have a car to get to it. And if you can’t, because owning a car costs more than $10,000 a year in loans, gas, tolls, maintenance, insurance, and taxes, then you might not be able to work, because most U.S. cities don’t really have viable alternative transit networks. Maybe there’s a bus system, but frequencies are probably an abysmal 30 minutes, or even 60, and because buses share the road with cars and are deprioritized in every possible way, they’re chronically late, just like cars. That probably means losing your job occasionally due to transit unreliability. And if you can’t get around by bus, good luck on the stroads: you probably won’t have sidewalks and crosswalks and you’ll definitely have an increasingly high likelihood of being killed by increasingly heavy and large SUVs.
But it’s not just poverty that cars made worse. Everyone driving gets to live with the daily reminder that driving is the leading cause of death in the U.S., as we drive by the daily accidents. Because in our hustle culture, we have constantly optimized for driving faster, and when we have wealth, doing so in larger vehicles that make us feel safer at those higher speeds. That means people in smaller cars are more likely to die or be gravely injured in a collision, especially children. And pedestrians fare far worse, and tend to be folks in Black and brown neighborhoods, or people without houses. This vision of “freedom”, then is one in which we all have a nearly mandatory individual expense of $10K a year or more for the privilege of possibly dying or killing someone, all in the privacy of our own climate-controlled, high distraction elevated sound scapes.
Another “freedom” that comes with car ownership is not having to move. I can walk 15 feet outside my house, sit on my butt, and then walk another 15 feet from my free parking spot to a store front, and exert maybe 5 calories. And so the privilege of car ownership is really one that comes with the pinnacle of convenience, like a lack of daily exercise that explains most of the vastly higher rates of obesity and heart disease in the U.S. And because we don’t move as much, we aren’t as strong, and so as we age, when we fall, we are less likely to catch ourselves and more likely to break our hips. If we make it to older ages then, we are more likely to need a car to get around, because we won’t have a lifetime of movement and strength to keep us mobile.
Another “benefit” of cars is that we don’t have to encounter each other and our differences. Each vehicle, holding an average of 1.5 people, keeps us neatly segregated from our family members, our neighbors, our communities, and everyone else in our cities and regions. We only ever need to interact with each other by tailing each other, honking at each other, colliding into each other, and desperately trying to communicate with non-verbal cues to each other, such as frantic waving, flashing headlights, aggressive stare-downs, or perhaps the flashing of pistol or shotgun. More than a century of chasing “independence” and we have finally achieved it, only ever having to sit next to the people we choose to, and treating everyone else as objects in our way.
Because the roads are legitimately unsafe, we tell ourselves that having our children walk to school, or take a bus, is too dangerous. At best, parents wait with their children outside to make sure their children are not abducted by a stranger — because everyone is a stranger—or better yet, drive them to school, and wait in the car line, which stretches onto the road like a popular fast food drive through. This way, our children can avoid having to interact with each other unsupervised as they travel to school, and can avoid learning independence. They can then grow up with the false idea that a car means freedom, and perpetuate the cycle.
To make room for this lifestyle, and our larger cars, most U.S. cities are one third parking lots, and most U.S. freeways are at least 3–4 lanes wide in each direction. That means sprawl, which means living further away from work and friends, less time with family, and self-fulfilling belief that there couldn’t possibly be another way — we’re too spread out! Spain can do it because is so dense, right? Well, yes, Spain is the size of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio combined, so it is possible, but aren’t cars so much faster? Why would anyone choose sitting on a train for 3 hours, reading a book, visiting with friends and strangers while enjoying a snack and free public restrooms when they could crawl down the interstate in traffic, trying to find a McDonald’s with a parking spot for a desperately pee break. Maybe we could eat a 1,000 calorie burger while we wait for the traffic to die down while completely immobile.
The net effect of this sprawl is disconnection. No time to see friends, we’re busy driving. Couldn’t possibly meet up at the pub, we live in three different neighborhoods, and rush hour is between us. It’d be great to have a corner cafe that we could all walk to for conversation, but the cafe is in a strip mall that we all have to separately drive to off a massive 30 mile “highway” and I don’t think I have time to fill the tank and get my emissions test and catch up on life unless first I stop off and pick up a stranger so we can use the carpool lane to save 5 minutes on the road. I’m just so busy. It’s not a loneliness epidemic, its a shortage of lanes: let’s just add four more for $100 million and then we can finally meet up in a reasonable time!
Sure, maybe loneliness is caused by something else. The cost of living in the U.S., for example. How can we meet up with friends if we can’t afford dinner? Don’t blame cars, they’re expensive, but they’re not our biggest expense. That’s housing. Housing prices aren’t expensive because cities are one third parking lots and freeways instead of housing, they’re expensive because of —homelessness? And anyway, our houses have to be bigger, because where else would we park our cars?
Oh, and the carbon. Right, that whole thing. Yes, cars are one of the biggest sources of carbon output, and U.S. drivers are the biggest source of car ownership, and so technically 140 years of driving are one of the only reasons that billions of people will be displaced over the coming decades as summers boil our skin and winters destroy our energy grids and sea levels wash away our beautiful coastal cities globally. There is that. But hasn’t it been worth the convenience of social isolation, declining health, asthma, erosion of communities, and death?
I live in Seattle, which is one place in the U.S. where car ownership isn’t quite necessary. Most of my trips are on bus, scooter, or foot, and I love it. I love the freedom of movement, the sounds of nature on the trail I ride on, the opportunity to build in exercise into my daily commute. I love the my bus, even though it only comes every 15 minutes, because I can blissfully disconnect from the road and read a book, catch up on email, or people watch. I love our light rail, and the way it connects the vibrant spine of Puget Sound, from the wealthy white suburbs and its horrendous park and rides to the rich multicultural foodscapes of the south sound at a fraction of the cost and time of driving. Transit in Seattle is not good, but it is good enough and getting better and far better than the auto hellscape of most of the U.S.
What would be good then? There’s no need to ban cars entirely, but I would mostly ban them from cities, where they do nothing but harm. Replace them with dense underground metros, free, fast streetcars on every road, protected bike lanes, and generously wide pedestrian sidewalks on every street with retail and housing and endlessly creative street vendors. Off street high density housing around every corner, all a block a way from a dense network of transit options to navigate quickly to anywhere in the city. A nationwide network of high speed intercity rail, making any trip to a neighboring state a quiet, cozy half day adventure, and may even cross country adventures in a single day with a connection or two. Save the flights for the transcontinental journeys, where there are no other viable options. Rural towns get all of this too, just at a smaller scale, so that teens aren’t trapped at home or dependent on wealthier friends to taxi them to hijinks. And ensure frequent rail service from the nation’s small towns to its city hubs.
All of this is obviously possible. Much of the U.S. used to have it before we ripped it all out and replaced it with less efficient, more harmful freeways. And most of the rest of the developed world already has it to varying degrees. Its just that most people in the U.S. have never seen these worlds, or lived the lives they make possible, and so they fall back to the American myths, like the U.S. is too large, or trains are slow, or road trips would no longer be possible, or its too expensive. It is our failure know other worlds and our failure to imagine that has led our vision of transportation centered on a technology that only seems to bring illness, isolation, poverty, homelessness, and death, and the occasional thrill.
Of course, I am a hypocrite. I own a car. It is mostly for my wife, who is a car-loving Californian who would not tolerate Seattle weather without the ability to navigate it in a seat-warmed cocoon. She works a few miles away from our home, but because the buses have to share our roads with cars, the ride is a door to door 45 minutes, and she prefers the 20 minute drive in traffic and the 20 minutes of walking to and from free parking. That is a rational choice, for a Californian, where cars are one’s private third place. I love her, and I want to stay married to her, so the compromise was a quiet, zero emissions electric vehicle that weighs twice as much as a guzzler, and is therefore more likely to kill anyone we collide with on our city’s dense streets.
But if Seattle was the world I described? No one would want or need a car. Not even my wife. We would have three grocery stories within three blocks of us. I would have a choice of cafes on foot. I could get to all my friends in 20 minutes for $1. I could get to family by train in Portland a couple hours. The streets would be quiet with the murmurs of people and conversation, instead of the rumble of tires and concrete and beeps and alarms all night long while we try to sleep. I would be more fit, release less carbon, and be less ashamed of my country’s constant failure to build a better life for its people. We could build that future, but it means undoing 100 years of urban design failure. And it means changing 350 million American’s notion of freedom from one of independence at everyone’s expense, to one of shared prosperity at a fraction of the cost.
If you’d like to join in building this future, or just learn more, consider resources like The Urbanist, CityNerd, or find actionable projects in your region, like Seattle’s Lid 5. The federal Department of Transportation has a nice list of funded projects from the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
