Nearly a third of us can’t drive.
That’s the reality. There are people like me who can’t see well enough to drive, and a lot of other people with all kinds of disabilities–physical, sensory, mental health and chronic health conditions–that make driving unsafe. There are also people who are too young to drive, people who can’t afford to drive, people who don’t know how to drive, including immigrants from other countries where driving wasn’t so wrapped up in notions of adult- and person-hood. And there are people who have aged out of driving: 35 percent of women over the age of 75 don’t drive.
Not being able to drive or afford to drive also impacts younger women. In communities with reliable bus or train systems, these routes and schedules were designed to prioritize the needs of people traveling to and from work. But for many caregivers–a disproportionately high number of whom are women–travel involves lots of other trips beyond the commute: dropping kids off at child care or sports, getting groceries, running errands. For caregivers like me who are unable to drive, what would be a fifteen-minute drive to the dentist becomes a two-and-a-half-hour journey with three bus transfers.
Of course, “nondrivers” isn’t a strict binary. Someone can be a nondriver most days because their household has one car and their partner needs to use it. They can have a chronic health condition that flares up and prevents driving, or they can only safely drive in certain conditions or on certain familiar roads. Or maybe their car is broken and that spare part will have to wait until the next paycheck.
But the American notion of independence is tightly wrapped up with the idea that driving equals freedom. If you’re too young to drive, just wait. If you’re too poor to drive, you better hustle. And if you’re like the rest of us where driving just isn’t safe, too bad.
When I talk about how many of us can’t drive, I’ve started to anticipate a lot of pushback. Are there really that many nondrivers? Kids and youth shouldn’t count! They’re not old enough to drive!
But kids should count—16 is a construct we invented for when we allow people to test for a driver’s license. There’s no magical thing that happens at 16 where a child suddenly emerges from a cocoon and needs to go places. Kids much younger than 16 travel places all the time; we created the school busing system because we recognize we can’t always expect parents to drive them everywhere.
And when kids can’t safely or comfortably get somewhere on their own, the responsibility of chauffeuring usually falls to moms, eating up their afternoons and weekends. Not every family has the resources or flexibility for this chauffeuring. Research by Rutgers Professor Dr. Kelcie Ralph found that young adults who grew up in a family without a car completed less education, had lower incomes, and faced more unemployment than their peers who were raised in families with consistent car access–even when controlling for family wealth, residential location, family composition and race. Car dependency is bad both for families with car access and for those without.
Let’s pull back for a moment and consider why there is such resistance to acknowledging that driving doesn’t work for so many of us.
First off, people who can’t drive or afford to drive are more likely to be Black, brown, and Native American. Decades of structural racism in housing and land-use policies, and a profound underinvestment in transit systems that were seen as primarily serving poor and non-White populations, mean that the transportation options available to people outside of driving are abysmal.
This bias against nondrivers is even enshrined in state constitutions. From Washington State to Alabama, constitutional amendments adopted in the last century prohibit gas tax revenue (the main transportation funding source) to go to transit. The resulting underinvestment in transit means that in most places in our country, the only way to get places if you can’t drive there yourself is to ask for a ride.
I think that’s the world my parents envisioned for me as I grew up. I could just ask them for rides. As I got older, I could ask my friends, and then I’d get married and get rides from my spouse.
If you ask anyone who’s had to rely on favors to get where they need to go, it gets old, fast. In Washington State, our Legislature funded a study about the mobility of nondrivers and the researchers were surprised to find that while relying on rides was a major source of mobility for nondrivers, the emotional burden of asking for those rides was a significant deterrent, especially for women, low-income and disabled people.
When we insist on visibility as nondrivers, our presence demands a reckoning of the costs and moral efficacy of car dependency. Rather than being ashamed about our disabilities or the lack of resources that prevents us from driving, we should be proud of our status as nondrivers. Instead of a future of congested drive-thrus, oceans of parking lots and freeway-ramp spaghetti nests, our existence tips the scales in favor of communities designed in ways that work better and are healthier for all of us.
Right now, in most communities in the US, getting a coffee, taking a kid to sports practice, or attending a medical appointment require getting in a vehicle. The distances we need to travel, and the segregation of where we live from where we work, go to school or recreate mean that we are locked into car dependency, whether or not we can afford to drive or are able to. Additionally, even if the distances aren’t too great, the environment for traveling outside a vehicle is too often unsafe and miserable, a maze of missing sidewalks, unsafe crossings, and deafening traffic noise.
What if, instead, there were a coffee shop and a grocery store within walking distance of your home, and to get there you didn’t have to sprint across a multi-lane arterial and trudge to the front door across vacant acres of parking lot? What if the sports field or school wasn’t on the outskirts of town but rather easily accessible by biking paths or the bus so that your seventh grader could get to soccer practice on their own? What if when you wanted to go to the mountains or the beach, you could catch the bus, enjoying the trip with a glass of wine and a good book? When I picture the kind of community I want to grow old in—the kind of community I want my kid to inherit—this is what I think about.
And it’s not an unachievable dream. We know that our current system of car dependency excludes so many, and pushes up the cost of living so that many more families are teetering on the edge. The good news is that we aren’t locked into it. Over the last century we painted ourselves into this corner, where personal cars became the only option for access. Over the next hundred years, guided by the vision of nondrivers, we can paint ourselves out, bit by bit, creating communities where cars aren’t necessary.
Anna Zivarts is a low-vision parent, nondriver, and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024). Anna launched the Week Without Driving challenge and directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington, where she organizes to bring the voices of nondrivers to the planning and policy-making tables. Anna sits on the board of the League of American Bicyclists and serves as a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Public Health and Transportation.
Car centric culture is isolating, enraging (traffic jams anyone?), expensive and terrible for our planet, and dang if it isn’t baked in to this country very thoroughly. The sheer size of the US and relative sprawl of its cities poses a huge challenge, as does the realities of housing economics. We would look like a much different country if our urban infrastructure pre-dated the car. Honestly, we would have all been better off not colonizing the US to begin with.
Seattle’s Metro does an admirable job of getting people around. Yes, there’s plenty to complain about, but in lots of mid-sized cities the bus routes run once an hour.
“The distances we need to travel, and the segregation of where we live from where we work, go to school or recreate mean that we are locked into car dependency, whether or not we can afford to drive or are able to.”
having been socially engineered
by the Profiteers who cannot
forsee a future sans our cars
powered by fossil fools’ ex-
travagant shortsighted de-
pendency on their planet-
destroying product (oil)
perhaps it’s past time
for their profiteering$ to
help Subsidize the next gen-
eration of mobility oh and btw
alleviate climactic Disaster inflicted
upon us by their explicit Denial of their
Products’ culpability in reshaping our Weather
now if only they hadn’t
Captured law-making to
suit Their needs wants and
desires we might’ve had a Shot
but
the Apologists
for Enormous wealth
capture’s ubiquity – visible
daily, Hourly here @tS will help
see to it Humanity & the planet’s
Biosphere suffer so those Few can live
like the Pharos
with all us little
Serfs to ‘live’ like
vermin on crumbs
and scurry Nowhere.
The problem is, once you are away from the inner-city density where most food and retail stores and parks are a 10 to 15 minute walk, this implies a complete re-engineering of suburban neighborhoods.
Walk to Trader Joe’s on 17th and Madison from 12th and Howell? Great! Take the #7 bus to Safeway on Rainier Ave S from Columbia city? OK.
But living in Kent, Mercer Island, Lynnwood, Federal Way, or even more distant suburbs, the retail nodes are few and far between.
Extended light rail will help a few neighborhoods, but the rest will still be car dependent.
As a whole driving sucks and it is getting worse. I do lots of chauffeuring for those after school activities that correlate with greater achievement in life. Existing public transit wouldn’t allow for most of these activities. Unfortunately, baking in the need for cars isn’t a thing of the past as shown by attempts of the oil lobby to prevent public transit being developed:
How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
For a car-less society to function, we need not only functional systems, but systems where the users feel safe and the equipment is clean and well-maintained. I was talking to a co-worker just yesterday, and I asked her why she drives up from Fife rather than taking sounder, and she said she’s heard too many horror stories about having to walk through “clouds of meth smoke” at King Street Station. She also said that the Link trains have drug paraphernalia left on them all the time, and since no one checks fares it’s all homeless people.
She was being ridiculous, of course, and I was surprised that she sounded like a Seattle Times commentator, as she’s quite a rational person. It just goes to show that the transit agencies have to be vigilant about security and aggressive in responding to dopey urban myths.
Modern American suburbia predates the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and modern, lower-pollution industry. Back then, you didn’t just want to get out of the crowded, polluted industrial cities, your health depended upon it, and in turn, car-dependent suburbia was your escape. Zoning laws ensured a neighbor couldn’t just start a pig farm next door to you.
Now, with Americans moving back into the cities in large numbers, the Stranger won’t stop complaining about the resulting high cost of living in Seattle.
Making our cities so driver-centric has also made America very ugly in general too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TIPkGpuPmE
@a.b.
thanks for the update: “How the Koch
Brothers Are Killing Public Transit
Projects Around the Country”
fossil
fucking
fools. I guess
I shouldda guessed
they’ll be in their Mines
what a Shitstain
they’re leaving
this planet
perhaps one day
they’ll Delve
too Deeply
@a.b.
thanks for the update: “How the Koch
Brothers Are Killing Public Transit
Projects Around the Country”
fossil
fucking
fools. I guess
I shouldda guessed
they’ll be in their Mines
what a Shitstain
they’re leaving
this planet
perhaps one day
they’ll Delve
too Deeply
You would think with all the taxpayer resources we’ve dumped into public transit; users would stop complaining about transit options and commuting in general.
Transit is highly usable for city and suburban dwellers. True, you will have to plan and allow more time to reach your destination, but what a Godsend compared to pumping hard-earned dollars into your stinky, energy inefficient and overpriced metallic monster.
The economics of price inflation and electric vehicles are improving our environment and quality of lifestyle as we speak.
Location is everything. If Polly needs to get into Seattle, even on Sunday, she can grab a bus about a block away, going north or south and head to either Eastgate or Renton Park and Rides, then grab a 554 or 106 into Seattle.
The argument can be made that people in rural areas require a car or truck, due to the long distances from populous areas, and this is an operational reality that must be incorporated into mass transportation discussions.
Women should carry a firearm and bear or pepper spray as a precaution.
There have been regrettable incidents of fondling and harassment—just read the news—so women can be forgiven if they optout of mass transit and take an Uber or rideshare with someone they know.
With fuel prices soaring and Global Warming escalating, mass transit makes more sense every day, and driving may become the province of the wealthy.
Polly sold her car (although she keeps a modest Toyota Pickup for hauling) burned her bra, shaved her privates, and embraced the careless, braless, hairless generation, and you should too.
Well-written article. When my wife and I moved to Seattle 25 years ago, we picked a neighborhood, Roosevelt/Ravenna, that allowed us to walk for most everything we needed, from coffee shops to grocery stores, and was well connected by bus to downtown and the Eastside, where we worked. We had our children get to school via bus and to activities by bike, bus or walking.
This was possible because we were high enough income we could afford a big enough house in an inner Seattle neighborhood. This is an option everyone should have, but that requires building more subsidized and market rate multifamily housing. Roosevelt has seen a huge growth in multifamily housing in the last 25 years, and has gotten better connected with the light rail stop. However, with one exception, it is nearly all market rate, and mostly geared towards singles and childless couples. We can do better.
Housing-as-Commodity
Eventually results in some Few
having All the homes getting Fat
from the rent and the Majority Unhomed.
can you say
american dream?
How an American Dream
of Housing Became a
Reality in Sweden
The U.S. once looked to modular construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing at scale, but Sweden picked up the idea and put it into practice
As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible.
Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian grandmother, an architect herself, pointed him to an intriguing answer to this conundrum: modular housing projects built in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s. Rupnik was awed. Sure, prefab complexes, and especially Soviet bloc housing, could be ugly and too homogenous, but the process created millions of housing units in a flash.
Hooked, Rupnik started researching modular housing for his doctoral dissertation. In the archives of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he stumbled upon a reference in an old journal article that took him by surprise: an industrialized housing initiative called Operation Breakthrough that built nearly 3,000 units between 1971 and 1973 — in the United States. How had he never heard about it?
–by Francesca Mari
Photographs and Video by Amir Hamja
June 8, 2024
oodles More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html