What I Mean By "The Car"

A clarification, and an apparent contradiction that's really a complement

Sometimes I get comments on pieces here—like this one, or this one—that I think misunderstand what I mean when I talk about “the car.” And while I think I’ve explained this here and there, I know what I mean, and don’t always spell it out.

For example, I received an email from a notable New Urbanist in response to a piece talking about the dominance of the car, and he noted this: “The founders of the CNU [Congress for the New Urbanism] were not anti-car. We were motorheads who  wanted to slow suburban sprawl for a lot of reasons, one of which was to keep scenic rural roads that we like to drive on from becoming congested arterials.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Almost so much sense that sometimes I forget it’s actually a point that has to be drawn out and not just a plain observation. (Although I have drawn it out before, when talking about dense urbanism as a means of preserving a real countryside.)

I was thinking about this again, reading a recent piece from Jennifer Tiedemann over at Discourse Magazine, on road tripping. I love road trips; a large share of the pieces I write here and ideas I come up with happen while I’m in the car, driving around some place, sometimes just taking the long road and seeing what I see.

So I read this:

Road tripping is a quintessentially American experience, because it is a natural extension of America’s love for the automobile itself—a fundamental expression of freedom and individualism. The open road is about experiencing life on one’s own terms. You aren’t limited by a public transportation schedule or flight delays; your route, your timing, your stops along the way—they’re all up to you.

When you open yourself up to where the road might take you, you’d be surprised at what you might find. There’s a serendipity inherent in the road trip that can’t quite be duplicated by any other kind of travel. Indeed, one recent survey found that more than three-quarters of road-tripping Americans “have found hidden gems along the road that they wouldn’t have seen if they were traveling another way.”…

But the road trip is much bigger than flora, fauna and topography: It’s the fact that all the little things, all the differences you see from north to south, east to west, contribute to defining what America really is. From dreamy sunsets to neon signs, from seafood on the coast to BBQ brisket at a gas station, from historic sites to abandoned roadside motels—all of it comes together to comprise the American story. None of it, no matter how small, is a waste of your time.

And I don’t see any contradiction between any of that and any of what I write here about urbanism and cars. A lot of urbanists would, and a lot of car lovers would, but I think it’s a mistake to view these things as being at odds with each other. The car does give you incredible freedom to explore wherever you want (yes, the roads need to go there, but they can be narrow and unpaved—those are some of the best!).

The problem comes when we plan our land use around the car as the default mode of everyday transportation. That is a distinct thing. That kind of driving isn’t “freedom.” Sitting in traffic on a congested six-lane road lined with the same big-box stores and chains as everywhere else? We put up with it. We like these sorts of places for certain reasons. But nobody thinks that’s the best way to design a place.

Think of how many people say something like, We might stay in the city if there was less crime, or if we could afford it, or if the schools were better… This isn’t a preference against cities. It’s a preference for cities as they could be.

But it gets even worse when you try to reorient legacy cities around the car. These are places whose patterns predate the car, and the only way to make driving easy and convenient in a city is to diminish the character of the city.

In other words, context is important. “Cars destroy the city” is not a judgment against cars; it’s an observation. But that observation ends at the city limits. Likewise, the car as a symbol of freedom is true, but it is contextually true. It’s only when we try to make these observations fit into an ideology that they become signifiers of “hating cars” or “hating cities.”

Sometimes I make this observation: we typically ban pedestrians and bikes on Interstate Highways. That is—or would be, if we did it—analogous to banning cars in the densest urban cores. It isn’t about “liking” cars or fighting a “war on cars”—it’s purely about which mode of transportation is appropriate in, and scaled to, a given land-use pattern or built environment.

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Another note on environments in which driving is basically required.

A friend of my wife’s, in Arlington, is looking to move into a larger place. The only way to afford a place is to move west, out into low-density suburbia. (Again, this is why we often confuse people moving to suburbia for an affirmative preference for it; often, there just isn’t any other option.) She doesn’t drive or own a car. She’s looking at townhomes—other than small, aging condos, the only thing she can afford—and most of these townhomes are in dense immediate neighborhoods but not connected to much of anything. A surprising number of them are adjacent to office parks.

It’s really shocking, when you think about it, that without a car, it’s simply not possible to access a grocery store, a doctor or dentist, a dry cleaner, or a discount department store, much less any of the old neighborhood mainstays like a bakery or hardware shop. Basically, you can maybe reach a few stores with an unpleasant walk that doesn’t feel at all designed as a path residents will be expected to take.

Otherwise, it’s pay for an Uber, deal with long bus rides if they actually go where you need them to, and lots of Amazon and grocery delivery. Another thing we don’t typically think about is how a first or second automobile, and more driving in general, offsets some of the affordability of housing in the suburbs.

Urban housing prices “include” some transportation costs, because of walkability and generally pretty cheap transit that will get you to lots of places. Suburban housing “unbundles” transportation—but then demands it in its most expensive form.

In an ideal world, this would have no political or culture-war valence. There would just be an understanding that of course the car is an awesome innovation and has a place, but that it’s absurd to effectively force people to drive almost everywhere for daily tasks. The mere fact that this does have a political valence tells me we’ve been getting all of this very wrong.

So I can’t speak for everyone, but when I talk about “the car,” I might mean the experience of driving in a typical American built landscape and what it does to us mentally, or I might mean our reliance on the car for everyday transportation and our choice to build places under that assumption. But I don’t mean “the car” in the abstract or in every case. How on earth should it be contradictory to say “Road tripping and exploring this great big country is fun!” and also say “It would be nice to be able to walk to a grocery store”?

I’m going to be writing about this again, but Europe is instructive here. Europeans have, to a much greater extent, resisted and even rolled back the dominance of the car. Their cars are smaller, they drive less, their cities and even suburbs are more dense, walkable, and mixed-use. But Europe loves its cars! Look at the countries where the world’s supercar manufacturers are based.

You can appreciate the car as a machine, as a tool of adventure or leisure, as one of many ways of getting around. You can have supercars for race tracks, and tiny “city cars”—that’s what the Europeans call them—for everyday urban use. And you can have built environments that accommodate automobiles, but which do not privilege them or require them.

And you can have all that and also have the great American road trip.

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Related Reading:

Virginia Visions

Back in Time on Small Roads

New Jersey Driving

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