In Defense of Car-Centered Society
sweatofthebrow.blogspot.com
sweatofthebrow.blogspot.com
If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.
If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.
Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.
Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.
In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.
If you choose a lifestyle that requires more to be spent per capita on roads, utilities, and public services then you should pay for that cost.
Suburbs themselves should also have variety. People love small towns, but instead of a mix of small towns with vibrant dense centers surrounded by less dense housing options, we just build sameness stretching in all directions.
To me, the fundamental reason behind suburban failure is the lack of affordable housing in the city, forcing city mice to move out to suburbia, bringing their city mice habits and expectations with them. Build more housing in cities, and suburban problems will work themselves out.
But we tend to resist upzoning existing low-density development that is now in the density gravity well of the expanding city, keeping housing prices artificially inflated.
I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor
Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.
now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.
If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.
That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).
If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.
This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.
This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.
Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?
This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
Over 100 people a day in the US die in traffic incidents. And that’s not counting survivable but traumatic injuries.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
But no, all of them. Low usage causes service cuts, which cause low usage because you can’t rely on transit, causes delays because there isn’t enough service to make up for failures and there isn’t enough investment for grade separation and maintenance, etc
I put my headphones on and read on my phone. It's never stressful.
- EU 7.7t
- USA 16.5t
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/state-and-lake-cta-s...
Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.
You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.
They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.
How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.
It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.
If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.
State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.
As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
At some price it's a great thing, but at what price does it become a bad thing? The price has already doubled before construction, what if it doubles again once construction starts?
With remote work, will the system ever need to carry as many people as it did in 2019?
This station, once rebuilt, will be in place for another hundred years, just like the last. When it comes to permanent infrastructure upgrades that directly address real needs for residents, my upper limit on price doesn't really exist. A $500M train station really isn't a big deal in the grand scope of the total Illinois transportation budget (which will mostly be spent on far more questionable projects like expanding highways)
There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
I say this as someone that enjoys the long slow walks. They are amazing. But if the goal is to get to the store/office and back, on foot is not as convenient as in a car.
The only times this is not the case, is when something has made the car not possible. Usually this boils down to "it can be prohibitively expensive to park a car at your destination."
I do think anecdotes are effective here, so: from my old SF apartment I could bike or ride Muni to the office. I generally chose to bike, but both options were more convenient than driving. The speed of driving and biking were both limited mostly by traffic and traffic lights, so biking was just as fast as driving. Both the traffic and the traffic lights are necessary because other people also want to live and work in a similar place as I do. But since my office was downtown in an urban, popular area where land value is high enough that parking is not a good use of land, if I drove I would have had to park a few blocks away (for a high price) and walk. Since bike parking is so much more space efficient than car parking, I could easily park my bike in my office. Taking the train was faster than either option; if it rained I would simply take the train.
I think you are not correct that a car is a strictly better option for all tasks. I think the convenience of not having to deal with all the things that make driving difficult is extremely valuable, and I think the things that make driving difficult are unavoidable because driving scales extremely poorly.
However, I couldn't ignore that I was virtually alone in my office for having taken transit in Atlanta. In Seattle, I'm assuming more of my colleagues were using it, but as you went up the pay ladder, cars became the norm. Overwhelmingly so. And yes, traffic was bad in both places, but if I wanted to be home to office in the least time, I left early in a car.
And I want to be clear that I don't think they are strictly superior. Certainly not for single people. But the biggest question I have to ask about taking a car somewhere is if I have the money for the gas. To get there by transit takes considerably more thought. (Or luck, if you are on a main transit point at both locations, I suppose?)
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
I agree that places should be made as convenient as they can be for walking, as well. I just get annoyed with so much of the discourse assuming you can design the cities so that a car is not more convenient. It is almost always a massive convenience. Obnoxiously so.
They also don’t need to make non-car options more convenient for all people, or even most people. The larger the share of non-car trips the better things get even for those who still drive, even if that share is going from 10% to 20%. Less congestion and pollution. Fewer traffic accidents. More density of housing in places that have high demand, reducing housing costs.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Essentially, my assertion is that you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design. (Unless, of course, you consider parking costs part of city design?)
Absolutely. The amount of space taken up by parking, and its related cost, and things like congestion charges, are part of city planning.
And you can still significantly reduce the number of cars and car-trips without eliminating car ownership. A household with one car used occasionally when it’s convenient needs less parking and driving space than one with two cars driven daily.
Yes the financial component is part of it. Building dense walkable urban developments makes car ownership more expensive and non-car options cheaper and more convenient.
Some would argue that in many places car ownership is being subsidized by the way we develop and tax.
Some households will still have cars, but households are not the same as individual people.
And I think there are plenty of places where the majority of households don’t own cars. You can say they would if it was cheap and convenient enough, but that’s the whole point we’re discussing. Not dedicating so much development and infrastructure to cars will make them less convenient and more expensive options than the alternatives for at least some of the population.
This is related with the housing discussions. People have somewhat convinced themselves that cheap standalone houses are the goal. Which, I suppose there is no reason that can't be the goal. But compare average home size in pretty much any US city with some of these walkable cities you have in mind.
When I do that, I start asking how related those two things are. And I'm growing rather convinced that people have built up a mental idea that they can live with all of the benefits of both worlds, without contending with the contrast between them.
For example you could say that most people who live in Manhattan would choose to live in a 2000sqft+ detached home if it was financially feasible to do so.
But because there is limited space, high demand, and city policy allows high density, such a home is not financially feasible for almost anyone in Manhattan.
And of course that applies in sprawling metro areas like Houston as well. Forcing large swaths of single-family zoning despite the market forces means that housing supply can’t grow with demand, so cost of housing increases.
I'm pretty young now, and I could afford a car. I expect that I will probably buy one at some point in the future. But I can easily live my life without one for now, so I have decided to save that money instead. If I lived in Houston, I don't think that would be the case.
None of my friends that I know in NYC own cars. All of my friends that live in my hometown own cars.
All of which is to say, it amuses me to find myself defending that people will buy cars. I am not trying to push it as the correct answer. I personally think people should understand the expense of owning a car far better than it seems most people do. I just also can't deny that a car is far more convenient than not, if you can afford one.
Make a city that doesn't require a car, and people that aren't compelled to use one won't.
My anecdote is everyone I know from Chicago doesn't take transit. Not many people, and I'm certainly not in a young group of folks from there.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/chicago-il/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
I am trying to be clear that I am not opposed to transit and such. As stated elsewhere, I went over a decade without a car in Atlanta, GA. And this is not including my time in college. So, I am all for it.
But I also remember a comedian saying "at least he was above the poverty line, I don't ride the bus." And my girlfriend at the time shot me a very nervous look because I did ride the bus. I happened to think the joke was hilarious. And it shaped a lot of what I paid attention to with regards to driving.
I know affluent people in Copenhagen. They own cars. They are basically only used on the weekend, for travel outside of Copenhagen.
Amsterdam has 0.45 cars per household. So lots of households own cars, even in Amsterdam. But the miles driven per household per day is less than a quarter of what it is in the States.
Again, I'm largely inline with what you are speaking towards. The only change I'm making to the discourse is that, if you want fewer people owning cars, you pretty much have to make it more expensive. You can't just make the city more walkable. You have to make it expensive to own cars.
As I say downthread, this is inline with cheaper dense housing. If you want cheaper dense housing, you wind up with smaller living units. Often without dedicated parking allotments for all residents.
Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.
> you get more people out of cars by making them expensive than you do with city design.
The city design is the prerequisite. If you don't have transit etc, people will own cars no matter how expensive the cars are (within reason, of course). Households in rural Denmark without access to transit own cars despite it being 2X as expensive as elsewhere.
Once you have transit, cranking the price becomes a much more effective mechanism.
But I point to Atlanta as easy evidence that having transit cover hot spots is clearly not enough. I used it daily for over a couple of decades to get to a job where I was among the only people that used transit. Amusingly, this was among a crowd of folks that loved preaching the virtues of transit. As soon as they made enough money to afford a car, they got one.
Even in Seattle, with what seems like nicer transit to me, I see plenty of people getting a car when they can afford it.
Tokyo, famously, has strict rules on if you can register a car. Despite that, it is amusing that the silly AI answer still ends with "though car ownership remains higher in some affluent neighborhoods." Which was somewhat obvious to see when touristing the place.
This can be seen easily in NYC. The new congestion tolls on roads has shifted people from driving to transit. Not by any new physical design of the city, but by making it cost more to drive.
As noted in another thread, I do take it as a prerequisite that you have to have transit.
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
Back when I was in Seattle proper, I can agree. As I say elsewhere, I'm actually a major fan/proponent of transit and walking. Thought it was amazing that the elementary school would walk the kids to the science center for field trips. But I couldn't not see that as you get people that can afford a car and home to park it, they used their car more.
My point: cars are not always convenient, you just live in a place specifically designed to make them so, whereas i don't.
Edit to add: 5 mile radius is what like 75 sq mi? That's half the entire area of the city. A full one half of the entire city i can access quickly and easily without touching a car. And i can still take trains to the other half while anyone driving that far will be making a terrifying trip on the expressway.
For the kinds of people that want space, though, it is a very short radius. For families with kids that they want to do activities, it can be crippling.
I think it is fair to argue that many of the things that make me support that statement are themselves very problematic. I largely agree. But that is also largely against the point I was intending.
My point is only that you will get more and more people actively driving as long as you don't take steps to keep it specifically expensive to do so. NYC is the poster child example for what I mean, here. Has good transit by US standards. Still saw measurable increases in use from congestion pricing for tolls.
Being more clear, here. My point is not that you can replace design considerations with pricing strategy. My assertion is that you can't ignore pricing strategy with design considerations. And the opportunity/convenience cost of vehicles is such that you have to be somewhat aggressive on that control, as you have to cut into the natural benefits of a modern car.
My template for this thought is largely NYC's congestion pricing success. And knowing that Tokyo does a pretty aggressive policy of not letting you register a car if you don't have off street parking. Which is very expensive.
The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.
All this is to say that I believe the discussion of this initiative is complicated by the framing that the current way is a problem and this is The Way to fix it.
I also think the evidence is extremely compelling that car-centric society is a problem, that driving has real external costs that we have ignored (deaths, injuries, pollution, noise, inefficient land use, high infrastructure costs) and further that our reliance on cars has been the result of subsidies that themselves tipped market forces (by government hand!).
I agree that there is a hurdle to overcome when discussing this stuff because driving is such an essential piece of many people's lives. I think there are a lot of arguments that can help convince people that there are gradual improvements that we should make that would make their lives better---I'd recommend the Strong Towns book as a good option for market-oriented people.
This is a superficial, selfish, ignorant take. Instead, smaller and walkable villages exist that have enough of everything close by without having to be Houston, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, or tiny town texas where groceries and hospital are 30-45 minutes away. The closest I've seen to this is Davis CA. There are probably others but not many. 90% of Americans will rationalize meat-eating, owning guns, and ICE vehicles until the end of time because "me, me, me" entitlement.
PS: I live in hill country in close proximity to SATX not entirely by choice. I wished there were public transportation, bike highways like the Netherlands, and more essential services nearby.
That Not Just Bikes video felt like a personal attack... lol
The author took the idea of 15- minute walkable cities and presented it as if someone pushes for everyone to live in them, and give up cars entirely.
No! I want my damn air conditioning, my music, and to be away from the smelly masses. Trying to force me to be around others is authoritarian bio power. Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it. Singapore people pay 100K+ for a shit car in a place with the best mass transit in the world and virtually zero crime for a reason!
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
A lot of North American cities are bad places to live without a car, even though the population density should make that a reasonable option since there is not room for everyone to drive and park a car.
So much of the argument for cars, housing, indedpendence, "freedom", boils down to this simple sentence, "I want my".
Yes, this is why a small apartment in Manhattan is so cheap and a large house in the middle of Iowa is so expensive.