Is Americans a “car culture” or are they “car dependent”? Do they drive because they love driving, or are they in an unhealthy relationship with a substance it would be happy to do without? Obviously there are plenty of Americans who do love their cars, but here’s more evidence that there are fewer of them than you might think, and that the common “car culture” frame is misleading us.
A new study by Nicole Corcoran and others did a nationwide survey with a striking finding:
We find that nearly one fifth of urban and suburban US car owners express a definite interest in living car-free (18 %), and an additional 40 % are open to the idea. This is in addition to the small share (10 %) of urban and suburban US residents currently living without a car.
Five key factors are associated with interest in car-free living: having prior experience living without a car, using alternative modes of transportation for at least five percent of trips, lower car dependence, riding transit regularly, and having less enjoyment of travel by private car. Further, we find that car owners interested in car-free living are a diverse group, with few significant associations between interest in car-free living and key socioeconomic or demographic variables.
Given the sizable unmet demand for car-free living, we conclude that planners should allow and facilitate car-free and car-lite developments. In practice, this can be done by embracing zoning reform, investing in alternative transportation infrastructure, lowering parking requirements for development, and encouraging mixed land uses, including in residential neighborhoods.
I wish they had dropped the word “infrastructure,” because the fastest things we can do to make car-free live possible for more people is to expand the provision of public transit service. That means actually running more buses and trains, not just building facilities for them.
I expect to refer to this study frequently, because it pierces the illusion that public transit faces a “cultural” challenge in the US. Public transit’s problem in the US is that it isn’t very useful. That’s something we can measure, and change.
Don’t worry about trying to change a culture. Change the facts and the culture will follow.
Good point, but few will read it when it’s not on top of the page. I nearly missed it.
“Culture”, in the U.S., much like the word “class”, is a euphemism. It stands in for a concept that Americans want to avoid discussing, but saying the word “culture” gives the appearance of a dialogue without saying something meaningful — or instigating violence.
I think one of the useful, helpful things about changing the facts is that it takes the obfuscation about “culture” out of the conversation.
Public transit’s costs and benefits are both primarily local (as opposed to something like intercity rail or airports, which exist interaction with faraway places beyond the normal workday commute/labor shed), so services should reflect local needs. Most of the costs of transit are operations: the stuff you cannot avoid and must pay in order to keep what you have (labor, maintenance, fuel, dispatching, service yards, call centers, communications). This is the big hurdle, because transit cannot make money because in order for it to be useful, a lot of unproductive service must be run (peak > weekday midday > weekend daylight > weeknight > weekend night > overnight) as well as coverage services that support ridership services.
Getting a stable subsidy source is important to make a service useful, which means different things to different people. For people who don’t work 9-to-5, it means having bus service available predawn or past sundown. For people living on other people’s schedules (work, school, appointments), it means service frequent enough to show up and go and arrive at both ends in a reasonable amount of time. A frequency of 15 minutes is the point where people will make spontaneous trips and command the schedule to memory, and generally results in the least time wasted in terms of endpoint connections, and still reasonable to make with timed transfers.
“Alternative transportation infrastructure” in North America includes sidewalks and signalized crosswalks, which are lacking in much of the post WWII development, and are a prerequisite for transit riding. There’s not much point in “actually running more buses and trains” in suburban areas if, once you step off the vehicle, you can’t safely walk to anything or cross the road to catch the return trip home.
I agree with Jarrett, to a point. Working in Canada (similar municipal politics, travel patterns, and economy to the USA) there is certainly a cultural or political dimension around urban transportation, at the provincial and municipal level. Generally provincial politicians that form governments are from rural or suburban areas. These folks call lots of the funding shots and increasingly make direct decisions at the municipal level; many of them don’t have a real interest or understanding of transit, beyond maybe some flashy projects and suburban expansions (Doug Ford in Ontario, Danielle Smith in Alberta, Francois Legault in Quebec, Tim Houston in Nova Scotia). These are centre-right to right politicians who fight the pro-car culture war because that’s where they see the votes.
There is absolutely a decent, unmet demand for car-lite or even car-free living, or even just using the car a bit less. But for planners to ‘allow and facilitate’ this demand by investing in active transportation or transit is very hard. Many cities are at or near budget crisis levels. Bike lanes are cheap but they are seen as fringe and not valuable (and they cause congestion!!!!! j/k) Adding transit service is expensive, and many agencies are still struggling to hire operators. Hell, some agencies are lucky to hang onto their existing service. Building transit infrastructure (rails, transit priority, what-have-you) is expensive. Creating transit priority from existing streets usually means taking space from cars – which means big push back and maybe a provincial veto in favour of general traffic. Even if on-street transit priority gets built it may be minimal or the process just grinds on over years. Some otherwise great projects end up with light rail projects on solid corridors, but with so little transit priority that they are slower than the buses they replace (see Finch LRT in Toronto, Ontario).
The vast majority of people in North America drive for most trips. There are some cities that buck this trend: New York, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Washington, Montreal, Vancouver and a few others. Working on the ground even small changes towards sustainable modes are either too expensive or too controversial, because so many people drive that it’s hard to move money or road space over to transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes. We can pretend that isn’t cultural, or just rename it as politics. Regardless, it is very hard to get modest, basic projects going year in, year out. Even Montreal, Quebec, the leading cycling city in North America is seeing a push back on further bike expansions – where this goes remains to be seen, but it’s a real issue. Outside Seattle, Vancouver and (maybe) Toronto and Montreal I just don’t see aggressive plans to expand transit infrastructure, or dramatically expand or improve service.
Yes – most North American cities should focus more on transit service and less on infrastructure. Yes – North American cities should focus more on surface transit and transit priority instead of ‘flashy’ projects that are long and expensive. Yes to mixed use, yes to sidewalks, yes to less parking. All of these are fine ideas and many planners are aware of them and support them. But the politics (or culture) are hard! Builders don’t always want to build transit friendly, mixed-use places and sometimes banks don’t fund them. Or, sometimes builders do want to build the right thing but just do a mediocre job as there’s so little knowledge and precedent to build for walking, cycling, and transit.
And the construction costs for transit in North America are a further problem. Lots of useful, much-needed projects that would bypass a lot of the politics of road space are too expensive to seriously consider (Second Avenue Subway in New York City, Pink Line Metro in Montreal, and any number of good proposals in Toronto). This is downstream from big problems with PPP and design-build, plus the related problem of hollowed-out public agencies who struggle to plan, evaluate, and oversee projects.