Transportsubstantiation

In suburbia, a human being becomes a car

In a piece about parking and perceptions of the built environment back last year, I came up with a line that I found amusing:

“In Catholicism, a piece of bread becomes the body of Christ. In suburbia, a human being becomes a car.”

And maybe that’s actually worth revisiting. It’s not a novel observation that in some ways motorists view their cars as prosthetics, or extensions of themselves. When you rely on anything a lot, I guess, you view it in some sense as part of you, or at least as part of your identity. I think urbanites probably do that with public transit, though maybe not quite to the same degree.

But I do think there’s something more than that going on here: specifically the way in which car-dependent land use patterns basically turn people into traffic. The way car-dependent land use turns mobility in general into traffic. Any sort of getting from A to B demands a car trip, and so the land use pattern basically forces traffic congestion. And in turn, that leads places to feel “crowded” at what are objectively very low densities.

What this means at a practical level is that it doesn’t take that many people, all relying on cars for everything, to cause that awful friction of getting anywhere quickly. What it means more abstractly is that by twinning people to car trips, you can’t welcome new people and build new housing without dumping more cars on the road. And so in a very real way, people come to mean cars. I’m not even sure how many people out in car-dependent suburbia even realize that the land-use pattern they inhabit has gotten them to make this logical leap. That more abstract point is what I’m really trying to zero in on here.

A little diversion: this is similar to an insight I saw on social media that I wrote about here, making the interesting point that in the absence of the car, a “crash” would be, say, two people bumping into each other, or someone slipping and falling off a bike. The idea that a “crash” has to be a potentially violent and bloody affair isn’t down to anything inherent in the idea of two mobile people colliding: it’s specifically down to how the automobile intensifies and amps up the danger of a collision. How it takes ordinary, human, low-stakes things and twins them to friction, discomfort, risk, and injury. (Of course, trains and airplanes do as well, but don’t collide or crash anywhere near as often.)

So I wrote this newsletter because a commenter suggested a couple of weeks ago that this idea that suburbia turns people into cars needed an actual name, maybe playing off Catholicism given my analogy. So I present to you transportsubstantiation: the process by which suburbia turns a person into a car, for all intents and purposes. It is not observable, and it isn’t literal, at least depending on your definition of that word, but it is real. And it explains why you might say to someone in suburbia, “We should build more housing,” and they might reply, “But we have enough traffic already!”

And that’s the thing. They’re not wrong. Transportsubstantiation is a miracle nobody wants.

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Related Reading:

Decongest Yourself

Parking Anxiety

Urbanism and Perception

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