I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the curse of car dependence, and whether there’s another way for us to live.
Middle-class American life is built around the car. The assumption is that everyone owns a private vehicle and uses it to drive everywhere they go. Alternative methods of transit, like bike lanes, mass transit, and even sidewalks and crosswalks for pedestrians, are an afterthought at best. When this assumption is baked into the layout of towns and cities, the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make driving easy and everything else all but impossible, so of course most people choose to drive. The consequences are pollution, gridlock, deaths in traffic accidents, and all the other ills of car culture.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We used to have walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, and if we so choose, we can start building them again. In a suburb in Arizona, there’s an urban experiment in progress which aims to prove that life without cars isn’t just viable, but better.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
When you look at places where people want to live, they look very different.
These desirable places aren’t sprawling suburbs fed by rivers of highway traffic, or impersonal strip malls and chain stores, or wastelands of concrete with buildings set far apart from each other.
They’re towns and neighborhoods that are built on a human scale. They’re charming, character-rich, and most important, walkable.
They have public green spaces, like parks and gardens, with shade trees and fountains. They have pedestrian-friendly boulevards where people can stroll, and public squares and plazas where they can sit. The boulevards and the plazas are lined with buildings that have small businesses like cafes, restaurants or bookshops on the ground floor and living space above.
We haven’t built places like this in a long time. But in Arizona, the builders of Culdesac are trying to start doing it again.
…and that’s an immediate “no” from me, and probably from most people I know. I don’t live walking distance, or even a half hour drive, from any of my friends. I don’t live walking distance, or even an hour’s drive, from my parents, or parents in law. I don’t live in the same COUNTY as most of these people. I don’t live walking distance or even a half hour drive from anywhere I can paraglide, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can kitesurf, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can rock climb, don’t live walking distance from anywhere I can whitewater kayak. I don’t live within a half hour drive of a hospital.
Obviously I could live in one of your walkable cities and not have a car… but the massive reduction to my quality of life would be completely unacceptable, and “boulevards and plazas” and shade trees and fountains don’t cut it as an alternative. The only way you’d get me – or someone like me – into a place like that is by force. Which I assume is the plan, much as it is the plan with electric cars.
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened Nokia and Motorola with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to smart phones and stop selling what are now referred to as “feature phones”?
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened Sony and Panasonic with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to flat screen, and later HD, and later 4k TVs, and stop selling CRTs?
We all remember, don’t we, when the government threatened battery manufacturers with massive fines if they didn’t pivot to Li-ion batteries and stop selling NiMh, NiCad or standard alkalines?
Oh, no, hang on – none of that happened. Those things came along, and were extremely rapidly adopted, because they were better. Nobody had to threaten any punishments for not moving to the new thing.
Except when the new thing is electric cars, that seems to be different.
Will walkable neighbourhoods be much, much cheaper to live in, to make up for the massive reduction in quality of life that they require? I think I can guess.
My guess is that they may be… to begin with. Once you’ve got a captive population who no longer have the means to move about independently, costs will rise. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until the costs are as high, or higher, than living anywhere else. It’s the Uber/Amazon business model – run at a loss until all the viable alternatives have been supplanted, then turn the screws on your captive customer base. Because what are they going to do? Move? In what? It’s not like they’ll be able to afford a car any more, even if they were allowed to own one.
Sounds dystopian to me.
Years ago, the “not-so-big” architect Sarah Susanka featured some car-less communities in her books. A quick search showed lists of car-less communities, including Denver, Seattle, Honolulu, Long Beach, Washington DC and Chicago.
Anecdotally, a decade ago I taught a seminar at the university of Vermont, Burlington. I really enjoyed the nearby pedestrian-only area with its shops, restaurants, and businesses. On more than one warm summer evening, I joined colleagues at a local restaurant and had a drink or two while listening to a band, then walked back to my off-campus apartment chatting with other pedestrians.
Also anecdotally, my son and his wife live in a neighborhood with a central shopping center, elementary school, ice rink, gym, and any number of walking paths winding through the community. There’s a train station that’s a bit of a hike (or a quick drive), and once there they can travel to a number of local places. They have cars to get to work, but they don’t use them on the weekends because they can easily walk to the grocery store, restaurants and cafes, a gym, a swimming pool in the summer, a liquor store, ahaircut place, and nature trails.
In contrast, where I live used to be farmland until the 1980s. You need a car to get anywhere–in part because there are no sidewalks and anyone foolish enough to walk the unlit, winding country roads is risking being run over by oblivious idiots in bloated oversized vehicles.
Hi, I live in the Netherlands, famous (among urbanists) for the love of the bike. Not because it is in our DNA, but because choices in the the 70s improved our bike infra, we biked more, so infra kept kept on improving, etc
The Netherlands has many cars per capita. The owning of a car is not expensive. Using a car is expensive. Which means for short trips we use the bike. For longer trips there is (quite good-especially in busy cities) public transport, and then a OV-fiets at the end for the last mile.
For visiting friends and families in smaller towns, or for most trips to and from work, car is still very much the number 1 choice.
We are now, after 50 years of investing in bike infra, building car-lite areas really close to trainstations. Still tremendous pushback from people that insist on car transport everywhere.
I live in a big city, would love nothing more then to only have to use metros-trams-trains and bikes. This is not possible.
So I understand sonofjrblakes response, even though we need to have firm visions of what we hope to achieve, if we are to achieve anything at all.
I have a couple of interesting youtube channels on this topic.
– Canadian that moved to the Netherlands, can see both sides of the car-equation: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
– Dutchie with many short videos on our ever improving infra https://www.youtube.com/@BicycleDutch
– Organization that hopes to achieve in the USA what is the topic of this post, a how to on the specific American situation https://www.strongtowns.org/
I share the vision of a car light society, but it needs to be done with the buy-in of 40-60% of the population to have any chance at actual succes. Again, it took us 50 years to reach where we are, and it will take 50 more to wean us of cars,…
This: “Once you’ve got a captive population who no longer have the means to move about independently,” is nonsense.
Cars do NOT allow you to move around independently. The amount of infrastructure needed to make you feel that way is insane. Roads, parkings lots, highways, oilfields, stroads (Strong Towns), gasstations, traffic lights, insurance industry, etc. etc. etc.
We hide the cost of this infra, we don’t see the vastness of this infra, because it has been ingrained in us from birth. But for you to feel free to drive around where you want to go, (which feels free, I know, I share that feeling) there is an immense network of interconnected services needed.
I live in Toronto, and have managed to never own a car in my life. Toronto’s public transit system certainly has at least its fair share or problems, but it’s workable, and a lot of downtown would be even less usable if everybody had to use a car to get there.
The city has also been doing a fair bit of work on ‘intensification’… new apartment and condo buildings are prioritized along existing public transit lines to make it easier for someone to live there without needing a car. There’s been work on rebuilding the neighbourhoods focused around affordable housing to also explicitly include most of the basics (grocery stores, school access, parkland) within the same area so a lot of what they need is literally within walking distance; most of that is happening in areas where the city already owned and subsidized most of the housing, so it’s easier to do. We already sadly have a good deal of experience in what doesn’t work when building affordable housing.
Is it enough? Not even close, but there’s at least headway being made. The 1970s-1980s in Toronto had a lot of transit construction on hold or even backsliding, it wasn’t until more recently that it really started to be a priority again. And getting developers to actually help with this can be a difficult task, especially when the province often has different priorities to the city. (Which is worse when parts of the city, especially the port lands down at the waterfront, are literally owned by the province.)
But there are a number of parts of Toronto that were explicitly made to be accessible on foot or by bicycle, and that’s mostly been an increasing trend.
Hi, Roland de Bruijin, I have good friends in Rijssen, which is only 2 hours by train to Amsterdam.
I agree that 100% car free for 100% of life is not possible now and never will be for the average person, but it would be nice to be able to go through a day and not be dependent on a car for daily tasks. On one side, my grandparents got off the boat at Ellis Island, settled in NYC, and neither one ever had a driver’s license. My mother never had a driver’s license until she got married and left NYC. My son and his wife (not in New York!) both work in different town from where they live, so they both have cars, but they can spend the entire weekend without getting in a car because the things they want to do is right there–restaurants, grocery, gym, etc., plus miles of nature trails to walk or hike and a community center that has occasional events. Last weekend was the community street festival where they had bands and children’s rides and vendors selling everything from food to clothing to books to gifts–all along the main street (central to all the other streets).
Ooops–on the nature trails, they can walk or BIKE, not walk or hike.
Also, the community has an elementary school and a middle school, so children from age 5 to 13 can walk to school along the sidewalks.
@sonofrojblake is just providing an example of what I talked about in my column: when society is built around cars, obviously people end up living in spread-out, isolated places connected only by roads. Then, when we suggest society should be less car-dependent, people start hollering, “But how will I live if I can’t drive everywhere I want to go?!”
This is exactly how right-wingers want people to act: not discussing problems and solutions in good faith, but reacting to every possible change with knee-jerk rage and paranoia so intense it blinds them. “Captive populations”, seriously?
Let’s flip the problem around and try looking at it this way: we have “captive populations” now. If you live in a car-dependent area with no mass transit, and you’re too poor to own a car, you’re completely trapped. It goes to show how people who spread this kind of conspiratorial thinking are usually fine with the bad outcomes they allegedly fear, as long as they’re not the ones suffering them.
Look, private vehicles obviously aren’t going to disappear completely. There will never be a mass transit system that can take everyone to every possible destination. But we should treat cars as the luxury they are, not the default means of transportation for everyone, and design cities that give their inhabitants as many options as possible.