According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.
because we hate poor people
I mean why are we still asking why? We know why. The American dream involved a house and a car. The great American road trip. The lack of high speed rail. All of that got us here. The real question is what’s keeping us stuck here? And the answer is politics. Solve the oligarchy issue and you might be able to take on the projects we’re need to do away with car centric culture. Get people in office that value infrastructure over military might, and will stop subsidizing car and gas companies. A small thing any of us can do is, when job searching, require companies to justify why a job must be in office instead of remote and unless it makes sense, don’t accept in office requirements. That last one is arguable more difficult if you’re in desperate need of a job, but in other conditions, try it.
Becau$e
A third of Americans don’t drive. So why is our transportation so car-centric?
A critical disconnect between policy and reality.
You mean like New York where everywhere is clogged with taxis? Rather than people driving themselves, somebody else is.
Taxis are immensely more efficient space wise than individual people owning cars.
The average car is parked 97% of the time. If we took taxis away from NYC and didn’t compensate with public transport , they’d probably have to replace central park with a massive parking lot. Not kidding.
They are, my only point was no drivers license doesn’t equal not traveling by car
New York is more than like midtown manhattan. I would not describe it as “clogged with taxis”.
Also there’s like 3.5 million subway riders per day in NYC.
So I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.
The article of “1/3 people don’t have drivers licenses so why are we so car centric”. People still use cars (as taxis) without a drivers license. Having no license does not mean you solely rely on transit.
I’m pretty confident that most people moving around NYC are not taking a taxi on the daily. I’m guessing you don’t live here.
You missed the point of what I was meaning. The article was eluding to people without licenses should mean leas reliance on cars. But Uber exists, taxis exist, car pool exist. Just because a person doesn’t have a license does not equal not traveling by car.
Just because people don’t drive, doesn’t mean they’re not traveling by car.
Is a bus a car?
Not having a driver license doesn’t mean not driving. It just means driving without a license in many cases, often also without insurance.
In some cases, these are immigrants who cannot get a driver license without having a legal status. IMO, we should make it easy for these people you get a license and insurance.
In other cases these are bad drivers with suspended or revoked licenses due to serious violations. The rest of us would benefit by their having a public transit option that works.
There’s no way those numbers change it drastically from “about a third”.
We should not make it easier to drive, we should make it easier to get around without needing to drive.
Yeah, that’s kind of a weird way to look at it because the inverse is also true: having a driver’s license also doesn’t actually mean someone drives. I don’t own a car, but have a license. I walk or take the bus for most of my transportation needs, but renew my driver’s license so that I have the option to rent a car for the rare situations where it makes sense.
Can we please focus our energy on more clear and present problems like the fascist takeover that’s happening?
In the fuckcars community?
The problems poor people have been dealing with for decades have to wait because now, YOU have problems, and they’re ever so much more important than the ability of people to function at a basic level. Please, go ahead, fucking solve fascism.
One of the tests that Strong Towns offers to determine whether your town is a strong one is this: If there was some emergency (say, a fascist takeover) that required the community to gather together, would people know instinctively where to meet? In lots of low-density, car-oriented landscapes, there’s no there there, no community/symbolic spaces where people would go.
Obviously, this is an analytical tool, not guide as to what would happen in any real-world scenario. It does highlight the decline of community, and the fraying of the weak social ties that hold a community together. How do we as Americans organize ourselves to resist when so many of us don’t know even our close neighbors? How do we work to reduce political polarization, which is done by daily, face-to-face interaction with people who are not like us, when we have so little community interaction that’s not through a windshield?
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether the destruction of community is a cause or effect of car-dependency, but what’s clear is that the fascists are here and taking advantage of the fact that we’ve fucked ourselves over with a car-dependent landscape for too many decades.
Geography is extremely pertinent. I want for us to ensure our Democratic freedoms before our conveniences.
In the fuckcars community?
@SwingingTheLamp @orbituary So many of the protests taking place now (especially the Tesla ones) are on 5+ lane stroads where most of the passersby seeing the protest are in cars. It’s a dangerous and inefficient way to fight fascism, but what else do people know how to do in Americar? So many suburbanites don’t even know how to get into city centers for a protest unless the city has been gutted to provide endless free parking.
There is a long history of connection between cars manufacturers and fascists, to be fair. But beyond the history involved in them, car centric design contributes to it: Mass resistance is more difficult with physical separation, which driving promotes. Inefficient use of resources promoted by spread out design, and a requirement to buy, fuel, and maintain an expensive vehicle make people in even wealthy societies poorer, and people struggling to maintain a formerly comfortable quality of life are exactly the kind of people that fascists like to recruit, as they can often be convinced to blame scapegoat groups for their struggles and yearn for older times that the fascists can promise a return to.
Im not suggesting the one is entirely to blame for the other, you can certainly have fascists without car dependence, and cars without fascists, but they contribute to the conditions that fascism can take hold in, and make life easier for such regimes once installed.
@orbituary @relianceschool You don’t think Americans living in sprawl and spending most of their time driving around alone in ever larger SUVs and monster trucks has something to do with why so many of them turned to fascism?
