#car-dependency

#car-dependency

Because so many American cities are so heavily car-dependent, most U.S. residents have no choice but to pony up the cash and drive anyway. Indeed, even when gas prices climbed above $5 a gallon in 2022, driving did not plummet; a Time magazine analysis at the time found that 'the only time that fuel consumption really took a hit in the last 23 years was during the pandemic.'

Fionnuala May has lived on Mountjoy Square in Dublin's north inner city for 43 years. That puts her out of step with most Irish people. As a nation, wedded to our cars, we've fallen out of the habit of living in towns, says the president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and county architect for Fingal.

Researchers at the University of Texas-Arlington found in a new meta-analysis of 26 earlier studies that vehicle miles traveled would increase if U.S. cities made a major shift away from human-driven automobiles, with the papers collectively predicting about a 6-percent bump in average VMT. Worse, they'd still increase more than 5 percent if people shifted away from personally owned cars towards shared autonomous taxis instead.

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The real and perceived need for personal cars on college campuses introduces traffic congestion, crashes, parking demand, and fiscal burdens. Students tend to take travel habits into the world after graduation.

If you have a car, you end up driving everywhere because you're on a track of having to move your car. You use it to drive to work because you have to move it anyway.

Neil Young's new single, "Let's Roll Again," calls for American automakers to build electric cars but misses a broader point about reducing car dependency.