Interesting...to me driving is a skill, a challenge, and a responsibility that we should understand not everyone can do responsibly. I think a vice is not the right word for me because driving does have a utility vices don't have.
However that's the fundamental reason why I'm an urbanist - housing seems like it can be solved with sprawl (yes environmental impact but) much of the environment can be solved with science (maybe), small businesses and pleasant neighborhoods do feel like "luxuries." But realizing that the most dangerous thing we do in our lives is a required daily activity, and that taking away someone's license essentially sentences them to a life of poverty and exile from the economy means we have to keep bad drivers on the road?
Driving is useful, it can even be fun, even in an urbanist paradise it can be freeing and open up other recreational activities. But fundamentally, it should not be required because it is a skill that both introduces fatal danger and requires a level of maturity that the average 16 year old does not possess.
It's one of the reasons I fully support and endorse driverless technology becoming commonplace. Personally, I'd rather live in a place where you could access most things on foot rather than via driverless cars, and where housing was more prevalent than parking lots. There is an environmental argument here but electric cars make it less pressing than climate change, so it feels more like a luxury argument.
Interesting argument but the decision to drive is less a lifestyle choice as alcohol consumption for many. I live in greater Seattle, and the difference between driving and taking public transportation is approximately 3 hours round trip. That on top of all the scary stuff you described made it nearly impossible to do it consistently.
Agreed. That's part of why this is so difficult! I would say our built environment has built a dangerous, difficult, vice-adjacent activity into normal life, which forces us to passively accept its costs.
I’m in LA now, with a friend who wanted some company on a short vacation. I made a number of trips to LA during my career. My last trip there was in 1995. I remember getting off the plane at LAX, hopping into my rental, and launching myself into the six lane highways without blinking. Now, here as a passenger, I can’t imagine myself day after day dealing with this environment. It’s not much better in the Northeast. I’m 75 now in a country not made for old men. When it comes to driving, I would prefer not to.
I turn 70 this year. I would prefer to drive less too. There is a lot of housing density being built in my area. I'm hoping that as more people move in, there will be an increase in bus service.
I continue to think the way to think about it is: basically *all* actions in some way involve externalizing costs onto others, that's literally why we have government to both *limit* and *mitigate* said impacts as best as possible. Driving doesn't strike me as dramatically different from cultivating a farm, in the general sense: it requires resources ultimately enclosed from the commons, and its operation impacts the surrounding area somewhat directly based on proximity. Said impact intensity varies depending on many factors, which a key element being the conscientiousness of the farmer: in a vacuum, the "efficient" option is to maximize personal gain and to externalize as many costs as possible onto others. So we have a complex series of regulations that limit the allowable use of said farm to limit the negative externalities, and we try to build a healthy market economy so that the benefits can disseminate through mutually beneficial trade.
Cars are the same, in broad strokes. The key differences are that the their externalities are a bit weird: some are *much more intense and localized* while others (like pollution) are even more broadly diffuse and difficult to track than farming. But instead of trying to build a process that tries to meaningfully limit or mitigate these, we just basically accept a pretty substantial baseline and, as a society, are *deeply* allergic to any attempt to improve any of the existing structures to better align costs with those who incur them. I don't really think this is any nefarious scheme, it's more just innate conservatism: we've internalized the ways the current system benefits us in general, so the idea of a fairer system feels like it must be threatening something we currently take for granted.
I think a big part of this is that most people generally can't conceive of a circumstance where they're unable to take advantage of the the benefits of the system, and the people who do get this are either coded as weirdos or are literally some disadvantaged group with all the baggage that entails. We don't charge people enough to cover the day to day costs they impose with their driving, but we also definitely don't have a means to make the victims of traffic violence whole. I think if you hit someone with your car and you're determined to be even partially at fault, there should be some mandatory license suspension period, and said license shouldn't be eligible for reinstatement until you've at minimum made the victim and the community whole for any costs incurred. We *should* be harsh on these kinds of mistakes, and that should be part of the justification for both building safer streets and for providing alternatives. And I hate the idea of tracking as much as anybody, but I do think cars operating on public streets and roads should be tracked much more comprehensively than they are, with that data being used for accountability and cost fairness. A car with an illegal cover on its license plate should be impounded or booted on sight, we cannot tolerate people trying to evade vehicular accountability.
This is pretty well-thought out. You're probably right on the innate conservatism point, but I'd submit a more rational reason we don't expend much political energy imposing the external costs of the car on drivers is that it would amount to a very regressive tax. Since we aim to have a progressive tax system in the first place, it simply wouldn't be efficient to impose a regressive tax on cars and then try to balance it out by imposing more progressive taxes elsewhere. It's more efficient just to accept a certain degree of automobile accommodation as a government function, the same way we don't impose the costs of public libraries on book readers.
I have to radically dissent on the license plate issue. As far as I'm concerned there isn't a single person who signed the Declaration of Independence who wouldn't regard license plates in and of themselves as casus belli for revolutionary war. We don't respond to street crime by making pedestrians wear visible ID tags on their asses and foreheads. We shouldn't give the government the power to spy on us warrantlessly through license plates, either, which is used almost exclusively to enforce laws that have far less to do with public welfare and public safety than the laws violated by street criminals on foot. When you have a neighborhood with rampant robberies and murders with cameras placed all over solely to enforce speed limits and full stops at stop signs at vacant intersections, society's priorities have gone haywire.
But, at least for me, it isn’t just driving, which I can no longer do for medical reasons. I feel the same impatience, frustration, annoyance as a passenger in a car.
So it’s the car. And it seems to me that the cushier, the more cocooning, the car, the more it affects me.
I do think that, in urbanist circles, it isn't specifically referred to as a vice, but it is talked about more that way & isn't discussed as immoral. Urbanism tilts more toward being an actual engineering practice than an intellectual movement, and the engineering side knows that automobiles are a useful part of the transportation network. They're just not being used responsibly by all, and a big part of that is elected officials setting, and then doubling down upon, unrealistic expectations. People will argue with "urbanists" about things politicians said they supported that engineers said wouldn't really work.
(Transportation planning, btw, is lousy with obedient-types who are terrible at the practice. Their background mostly leans traffic engineering and highway planning, and the highway/expressway is the hammer applied to all nails, screws, bolts, welds, glue bottles, etc. These roles usually report up to a mayor or a governor who is a wealthy person who wonders why their chauffeur is always running late, and is never worried if all the people in residential areas have a reliable train/bus commute each day. The structure of power matters here, and is very different from some other fields where we expect strong engineering accountability)
The other angle to consider here... and this does touch upon a moral discourse... is that most people who engage in dysfunctional arguments about automobile use came from the interest group of environmental protection first. Environmentalists have MUCH more of a sense of moral injury and despondency about how humanity (and not just one society but nearly all) plans to ruin things for today's profit. Many of the most fierce anti-auto advocates sway easily back-and-forth between "car driving practices kill & parking sucks" and "carbon emissions and rubber dust is destroying the human race and the planet". On the logical points they are not wrong. This is still a really poor way to carry out advocacy, and is usually a signal that the person on the other end has social skill deficits typical of DSM-classified disorders. Even on a basic level, putting aside more complicated diagnoses of ADHD and ASD, it's been well-noted that people interested in climate science are profoundly depressed and grieving because of the constant stream of dire news about climate change - why shouldn't they be? - and of course that impairs their ability to have a conversation with Joe Baggadonuts who loves his 8mpg SUV and his daily 2-hour commute.
On the climate change concerns with moral weight, the federal government should have stepped in decades ago. Its a little late for that. But in regards to traffic safety and urban livability concerns, local governments can do simple, logical things to rebalance traffic from a planning nadir in the 60s and 70s. It should be especially simple and popular because most drivers in an urban core are NOT locals, and the tilt of municipal government for the history of the U.S. is that every locality is allowed to be a tyrant to outsiders.
Why should, say, community boards in Manhattan think so considerately of drivers from Pennsylvania? I am sure there are a bunch of weak points in-favor - PA residents sometimes eat in NYC - but it comes down to three things:
* PA drivers impose definite spatial/infrastructural costs on Manhattan residents
* Manhattan residents don't get anything from PA taxpayers remotely resembling settlement
* If you are a Manhattan resident who somehow gets their hands on a car, you have no claim to anything where the PA commuters live. They can literally lock all public restrooms, ban camping in parks, refuse your admission to the municipal pool, etc. and nothing can be done.
The last point is particularly interesting because all of the municipalities in all of the outlying counties of NYC do this - something that NYC-based cyclists know quite well, and are used to a near spitting-in-face reaction from residents of towns where we stop for coffee - and I will project that to pretty much any area in the U.S. because these are how things work & most people consider this fair. But then the exception to this is the spatial demands imposed by drivers outside of cities upon residents of those cities. To merely reduce the spatial concessions with a reasonable policy regime - congestion pricing, residential parking permit systems, mass-transit provisions, roadway space reclaimed for safe walking and cycling, whatever else increases trips while decreasing VMT among trips - is seen as outrageous, to the extent that several top politicians in New Jersey are clowning themselves daily over it. A web search for "Gottheimer congestion pricing" is a real trip. And a great illustration for the "vice" talking point.
But back to the central point, that policy regime has few moral arguments. That is all practical. The near-universal response to it is full of affront, and zero bargaining or compromise (never mind respect for the "urbanist living in an urban area" position), and often invokes Constitutional rights of travel (is that even a thing?). And this comes back to urbanism being more of an engineering thing than a moral thing.
I am oversimplifying a few things here... obviously environmentalists can be urbanists too & urbanists tend to allow environmental arguments to help make policy cases all the time... there is also stuff like Stop de Kindermoord & Families For Safe Streets, where activists (akin to MADD) argue for road policy changes specifically/only for traffic safety purposes, and they are NOT always urbanists (some can be quite NIMBY) or environmentalists and they are not concerned with things like VMT or carbon emissions. Last but not least, I am clearly omitting the "urban NIMBY" from this discussion, although they're a small minority. But from a discourse standpoint, the fact that all these groups, inclusive of urbanists, make great points in slowing traffic, reducing LoS, converting parking and travel lanes, reducing VMT, reducing emissions and reducing tire use and reducing car manufacturing, increasing walking and transit use and whatever micro mobility options there are... the automobile drivers indeed are sieged by the logic. But then that only amplifies my point that politicians should have stepped in a long time ago to coordinate this better, before residents of all types were coached into making decisions that put them at odds with logic and with other citizens.
Sorry, but this is the kind of take that has me wondering whether urbanism itself is a vice with an alcohol-like effect on the brain. Cars are technology. Like any technology, they can be used for good and ill. But why single out the car uniquely for opprobrium? I am sussing out two arguments in this post.
The first is traffic deaths. That doesn't move the needle. Have you seen the numbers on how many people died working on the railroads in the 19th century? It was as dangerous as Civil War combat. On a per capita basis, I believe also worse than modern traffic deaths, at least in the same realm. We solved that problem by making trains better, not by condemning trains.
The second argument is one I'm more sympathetic to and which I've found insightfully expressed by you in the past, the anxiety produced by sitting in traffic, missing lights, etc. But my first response to that is - compared to *what*? I'll take missing a red light over missing a subway every time. My second response is that this isn't even a car problem, it's a road problem. The car's capabilities are suppressed by bad road design and bad traffic engineering. (Your Moment of Libertarianism: That's because cars are designed by the private sector and roads are designed by the government.)
There is a third argument you didn't bring up in this particular post but which I assume you'd agree is the reason you're writing about this at all, which is the effect cars have on cities. You can't have cars without parking, parking lots are ugly, neither parking lots nor highways can exist in dense environments, etc. That is a much broader subject, too many issues there to unpack in a short comment. For now I'll observe that no city has ever been built that didn't accommodate the prevailing transport of its day, and nobody ever complained, "We're building our cities for horses and buggies, not humans!" So this is another problem I will submit has to be solved in some fashion other than blaming, or turning back the clock on, the car.
I'm not into car culture, and I don't consider driving to be immoral. For me, driving is just another form of transportation. In our daily lives, we need to get from point A to point B on a regular basis. If convenient public transportation options are not available, people are going to drive. If the bus service around here was more frequent, and ran later on Sundays, I'd choose it over driving any day of the week.
Great take. I’ve been thinking the same thing, cars are a drug Americans in particular have been hooked on for 100 years. I read articles on walkability, debate transit policy, encourage walking, but behind the wheel, I’m hitting the gas when I see yellow. I’m mentally calculating how I can shave 1 minute off waze’s estimated arrival time. My fault, but, there is something about the car, the wheel, the lights are changing… every street in America is Daytona.
I still prefer comparing a car to a gun, or maybe a knife - a tool that can also be a weapon.
It's dangerous, and we don't want anyone using it irresponsibly.
But it's necessary for some (many!) people, and can be fun to use, too. (Think hunting for food vs. target shooting.)
When we make it necessary for everyone, then we forget how dangerous it is.
Interesting...to me driving is a skill, a challenge, and a responsibility that we should understand not everyone can do responsibly. I think a vice is not the right word for me because driving does have a utility vices don't have.
However that's the fundamental reason why I'm an urbanist - housing seems like it can be solved with sprawl (yes environmental impact but) much of the environment can be solved with science (maybe), small businesses and pleasant neighborhoods do feel like "luxuries." But realizing that the most dangerous thing we do in our lives is a required daily activity, and that taking away someone's license essentially sentences them to a life of poverty and exile from the economy means we have to keep bad drivers on the road?
Driving is useful, it can even be fun, even in an urbanist paradise it can be freeing and open up other recreational activities. But fundamentally, it should not be required because it is a skill that both introduces fatal danger and requires a level of maturity that the average 16 year old does not possess.
Fair view
It's one of the reasons I fully support and endorse driverless technology becoming commonplace. Personally, I'd rather live in a place where you could access most things on foot rather than via driverless cars, and where housing was more prevalent than parking lots. There is an environmental argument here but electric cars make it less pressing than climate change, so it feels more like a luxury argument.
Vices have utility, at least subjectively. People don't do them for no reason. Whether they are *worth the cost* is another matter, as with the car.
"Master it—tame it—and if our minds cannot abide that, maybe we should really think twice." 💯
Interesting argument but the decision to drive is less a lifestyle choice as alcohol consumption for many. I live in greater Seattle, and the difference between driving and taking public transportation is approximately 3 hours round trip. That on top of all the scary stuff you described made it nearly impossible to do it consistently.
Agreed. That's part of why this is so difficult! I would say our built environment has built a dangerous, difficult, vice-adjacent activity into normal life, which forces us to passively accept its costs.
I’m in LA now, with a friend who wanted some company on a short vacation. I made a number of trips to LA during my career. My last trip there was in 1995. I remember getting off the plane at LAX, hopping into my rental, and launching myself into the six lane highways without blinking. Now, here as a passenger, I can’t imagine myself day after day dealing with this environment. It’s not much better in the Northeast. I’m 75 now in a country not made for old men. When it comes to driving, I would prefer not to.
I turn 70 this year. I would prefer to drive less too. There is a lot of housing density being built in my area. I'm hoping that as more people move in, there will be an increase in bus service.
I continue to think the way to think about it is: basically *all* actions in some way involve externalizing costs onto others, that's literally why we have government to both *limit* and *mitigate* said impacts as best as possible. Driving doesn't strike me as dramatically different from cultivating a farm, in the general sense: it requires resources ultimately enclosed from the commons, and its operation impacts the surrounding area somewhat directly based on proximity. Said impact intensity varies depending on many factors, which a key element being the conscientiousness of the farmer: in a vacuum, the "efficient" option is to maximize personal gain and to externalize as many costs as possible onto others. So we have a complex series of regulations that limit the allowable use of said farm to limit the negative externalities, and we try to build a healthy market economy so that the benefits can disseminate through mutually beneficial trade.
Cars are the same, in broad strokes. The key differences are that the their externalities are a bit weird: some are *much more intense and localized* while others (like pollution) are even more broadly diffuse and difficult to track than farming. But instead of trying to build a process that tries to meaningfully limit or mitigate these, we just basically accept a pretty substantial baseline and, as a society, are *deeply* allergic to any attempt to improve any of the existing structures to better align costs with those who incur them. I don't really think this is any nefarious scheme, it's more just innate conservatism: we've internalized the ways the current system benefits us in general, so the idea of a fairer system feels like it must be threatening something we currently take for granted.
I think a big part of this is that most people generally can't conceive of a circumstance where they're unable to take advantage of the the benefits of the system, and the people who do get this are either coded as weirdos or are literally some disadvantaged group with all the baggage that entails. We don't charge people enough to cover the day to day costs they impose with their driving, but we also definitely don't have a means to make the victims of traffic violence whole. I think if you hit someone with your car and you're determined to be even partially at fault, there should be some mandatory license suspension period, and said license shouldn't be eligible for reinstatement until you've at minimum made the victim and the community whole for any costs incurred. We *should* be harsh on these kinds of mistakes, and that should be part of the justification for both building safer streets and for providing alternatives. And I hate the idea of tracking as much as anybody, but I do think cars operating on public streets and roads should be tracked much more comprehensively than they are, with that data being used for accountability and cost fairness. A car with an illegal cover on its license plate should be impounded or booted on sight, we cannot tolerate people trying to evade vehicular accountability.
This is pretty well-thought out. You're probably right on the innate conservatism point, but I'd submit a more rational reason we don't expend much political energy imposing the external costs of the car on drivers is that it would amount to a very regressive tax. Since we aim to have a progressive tax system in the first place, it simply wouldn't be efficient to impose a regressive tax on cars and then try to balance it out by imposing more progressive taxes elsewhere. It's more efficient just to accept a certain degree of automobile accommodation as a government function, the same way we don't impose the costs of public libraries on book readers.
I have to radically dissent on the license plate issue. As far as I'm concerned there isn't a single person who signed the Declaration of Independence who wouldn't regard license plates in and of themselves as casus belli for revolutionary war. We don't respond to street crime by making pedestrians wear visible ID tags on their asses and foreheads. We shouldn't give the government the power to spy on us warrantlessly through license plates, either, which is used almost exclusively to enforce laws that have far less to do with public welfare and public safety than the laws violated by street criminals on foot. When you have a neighborhood with rampant robberies and murders with cameras placed all over solely to enforce speed limits and full stops at stop signs at vacant intersections, society's priorities have gone haywire.
A very interesting analogy.
But, at least for me, it isn’t just driving, which I can no longer do for medical reasons. I feel the same impatience, frustration, annoyance as a passenger in a car.
So it’s the car. And it seems to me that the cushier, the more cocooning, the car, the more it affects me.
I think this is a good way of thinking about it.
I do think that, in urbanist circles, it isn't specifically referred to as a vice, but it is talked about more that way & isn't discussed as immoral. Urbanism tilts more toward being an actual engineering practice than an intellectual movement, and the engineering side knows that automobiles are a useful part of the transportation network. They're just not being used responsibly by all, and a big part of that is elected officials setting, and then doubling down upon, unrealistic expectations. People will argue with "urbanists" about things politicians said they supported that engineers said wouldn't really work.
(Transportation planning, btw, is lousy with obedient-types who are terrible at the practice. Their background mostly leans traffic engineering and highway planning, and the highway/expressway is the hammer applied to all nails, screws, bolts, welds, glue bottles, etc. These roles usually report up to a mayor or a governor who is a wealthy person who wonders why their chauffeur is always running late, and is never worried if all the people in residential areas have a reliable train/bus commute each day. The structure of power matters here, and is very different from some other fields where we expect strong engineering accountability)
The other angle to consider here... and this does touch upon a moral discourse... is that most people who engage in dysfunctional arguments about automobile use came from the interest group of environmental protection first. Environmentalists have MUCH more of a sense of moral injury and despondency about how humanity (and not just one society but nearly all) plans to ruin things for today's profit. Many of the most fierce anti-auto advocates sway easily back-and-forth between "car driving practices kill & parking sucks" and "carbon emissions and rubber dust is destroying the human race and the planet". On the logical points they are not wrong. This is still a really poor way to carry out advocacy, and is usually a signal that the person on the other end has social skill deficits typical of DSM-classified disorders. Even on a basic level, putting aside more complicated diagnoses of ADHD and ASD, it's been well-noted that people interested in climate science are profoundly depressed and grieving because of the constant stream of dire news about climate change - why shouldn't they be? - and of course that impairs their ability to have a conversation with Joe Baggadonuts who loves his 8mpg SUV and his daily 2-hour commute.
On the climate change concerns with moral weight, the federal government should have stepped in decades ago. Its a little late for that. But in regards to traffic safety and urban livability concerns, local governments can do simple, logical things to rebalance traffic from a planning nadir in the 60s and 70s. It should be especially simple and popular because most drivers in an urban core are NOT locals, and the tilt of municipal government for the history of the U.S. is that every locality is allowed to be a tyrant to outsiders.
Why should, say, community boards in Manhattan think so considerately of drivers from Pennsylvania? I am sure there are a bunch of weak points in-favor - PA residents sometimes eat in NYC - but it comes down to three things:
* PA drivers impose definite spatial/infrastructural costs on Manhattan residents
* Manhattan residents don't get anything from PA taxpayers remotely resembling settlement
* If you are a Manhattan resident who somehow gets their hands on a car, you have no claim to anything where the PA commuters live. They can literally lock all public restrooms, ban camping in parks, refuse your admission to the municipal pool, etc. and nothing can be done.
The last point is particularly interesting because all of the municipalities in all of the outlying counties of NYC do this - something that NYC-based cyclists know quite well, and are used to a near spitting-in-face reaction from residents of towns where we stop for coffee - and I will project that to pretty much any area in the U.S. because these are how things work & most people consider this fair. But then the exception to this is the spatial demands imposed by drivers outside of cities upon residents of those cities. To merely reduce the spatial concessions with a reasonable policy regime - congestion pricing, residential parking permit systems, mass-transit provisions, roadway space reclaimed for safe walking and cycling, whatever else increases trips while decreasing VMT among trips - is seen as outrageous, to the extent that several top politicians in New Jersey are clowning themselves daily over it. A web search for "Gottheimer congestion pricing" is a real trip. And a great illustration for the "vice" talking point.
But back to the central point, that policy regime has few moral arguments. That is all practical. The near-universal response to it is full of affront, and zero bargaining or compromise (never mind respect for the "urbanist living in an urban area" position), and often invokes Constitutional rights of travel (is that even a thing?). And this comes back to urbanism being more of an engineering thing than a moral thing.
I am oversimplifying a few things here... obviously environmentalists can be urbanists too & urbanists tend to allow environmental arguments to help make policy cases all the time... there is also stuff like Stop de Kindermoord & Families For Safe Streets, where activists (akin to MADD) argue for road policy changes specifically/only for traffic safety purposes, and they are NOT always urbanists (some can be quite NIMBY) or environmentalists and they are not concerned with things like VMT or carbon emissions. Last but not least, I am clearly omitting the "urban NIMBY" from this discussion, although they're a small minority. But from a discourse standpoint, the fact that all these groups, inclusive of urbanists, make great points in slowing traffic, reducing LoS, converting parking and travel lanes, reducing VMT, reducing emissions and reducing tire use and reducing car manufacturing, increasing walking and transit use and whatever micro mobility options there are... the automobile drivers indeed are sieged by the logic. But then that only amplifies my point that politicians should have stepped in a long time ago to coordinate this better, before residents of all types were coached into making decisions that put them at odds with logic and with other citizens.
Sorry, but this is the kind of take that has me wondering whether urbanism itself is a vice with an alcohol-like effect on the brain. Cars are technology. Like any technology, they can be used for good and ill. But why single out the car uniquely for opprobrium? I am sussing out two arguments in this post.
The first is traffic deaths. That doesn't move the needle. Have you seen the numbers on how many people died working on the railroads in the 19th century? It was as dangerous as Civil War combat. On a per capita basis, I believe also worse than modern traffic deaths, at least in the same realm. We solved that problem by making trains better, not by condemning trains.
The second argument is one I'm more sympathetic to and which I've found insightfully expressed by you in the past, the anxiety produced by sitting in traffic, missing lights, etc. But my first response to that is - compared to *what*? I'll take missing a red light over missing a subway every time. My second response is that this isn't even a car problem, it's a road problem. The car's capabilities are suppressed by bad road design and bad traffic engineering. (Your Moment of Libertarianism: That's because cars are designed by the private sector and roads are designed by the government.)
There is a third argument you didn't bring up in this particular post but which I assume you'd agree is the reason you're writing about this at all, which is the effect cars have on cities. You can't have cars without parking, parking lots are ugly, neither parking lots nor highways can exist in dense environments, etc. That is a much broader subject, too many issues there to unpack in a short comment. For now I'll observe that no city has ever been built that didn't accommodate the prevailing transport of its day, and nobody ever complained, "We're building our cities for horses and buggies, not humans!" So this is another problem I will submit has to be solved in some fashion other than blaming, or turning back the clock on, the car.
I'm not into car culture, and I don't consider driving to be immoral. For me, driving is just another form of transportation. In our daily lives, we need to get from point A to point B on a regular basis. If convenient public transportation options are not available, people are going to drive. If the bus service around here was more frequent, and ran later on Sundays, I'd choose it over driving any day of the week.
Great take. I’ve been thinking the same thing, cars are a drug Americans in particular have been hooked on for 100 years. I read articles on walkability, debate transit policy, encourage walking, but behind the wheel, I’m hitting the gas when I see yellow. I’m mentally calculating how I can shave 1 minute off waze’s estimated arrival time. My fault, but, there is something about the car, the wheel, the lights are changing… every street in America is Daytona.