Gable Patterson 4/30/26
It may sound odd to say on an urbanist website, but cars are great!
They are unmatched in terms of point A to B flexibility and for moving a plurality of items. They also provide a measure of privacy that other modes have difficulty matching.
In the US, the day you get your driver’s license is a rite-of-passage. It provides independence of movement and signifies a measure of trust (or at least resignation) from your family. It is a coming-of-age moment immortalized in American culture.
It’s no wonder then that cars seem so inseparable from American society. We have so many fond and iconic memories attached to cars: Road trips, drive-in movies, picking up fast food with friends, and a good carpool music/ karaoke sesh just to name a few.
In the gilded stage of our high school and college years, cars seem all but essential to building friendships and experiencing community.
But as we grow and graduate, the promise of community begins to fade and becomes replaced with something else: commuting.
Suddenly, you find yourself alone, stuck in an endless line of traffic commuting in and out of a large city. Your adrenaline spikes at every person who cuts you off, putting your body into a stressed fight-or-flight mode every day, raising your risk of chronic obesity and cancer. You find yourself arriving to work and to your home angry and stressed. This is the normalized life of the American adult.
Everyone has horror stories from their commutes. I-75, I-4, I-95, the DC Beltway, I-25 are just a few of the major highways I have had the displeasure of experiencing. But there are many others. Everyone has a tale to tell about these roads we use for our commutes and few people think about them in a positive light, unless you happen to live in a rural & traffic light setting.
If you’re lucky, you merely experience chronic elevated stress and higher risk of disease from these sorts of commutes. If you’re unlucky, you get into an accident: sometimes with deadly consequences. Chances are, you know of someone personally who was injured or died in a car accident.
And yet we think of this high-stress and unsafe mode of commuting as normal. We act as if it is the only option. We keep muscling through our awful commutes, hoping that the 6 month construction project to add yet another lane to our 8 lane highway is finally going to fix our commute.
It never will. Cars are never going to be an effective option for transportation into and around our cities because they are a wildly inefficient mode of transit. 1 person in each car, each taking up an average of 14-15 ft means miles and miles of wasted space and unhappy people. It’s a pretty bleak way of life.
So what do we do? The solution is not one thing. It is many things. Cycling, walking, buses, and trains to name a few. The solution is sharing the load of commuters in major cities between multiple modes that are more efficient.
So why did I sell my car?
First and foremost: my mental health! Since giving up driving for my commute I have found myself a calmer, healthier, and happier person. I don’t arrive places feeling angry, but peaceful, or excited.
Second: cars (EV’s excepted) pollute our cities, contribute to climate change, and create a need for destructive oil drilling. (Even EV’s require destructive Lithium mining). We don’t have to have smog be an accepted feature of cities like LA and Denver. Pipelines through native land are not necessary either. These are products of our driving choices. While our energy sector has made amazing progress to include renewable sources, transportation remains the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. It’s time we did our part to catch up.
Third: driving is incredibly expensive. Cars are a constantly depreciating asset. You have to pay for gas, pay for repairs, pay for insurance: at what point are cars no longer worth having? Unfortunately many places in the US do not have adequate transportation infrastructure to allow for any other choice, so we are sometimes locked into these expenses. I had multiple problems with my car to fix that were worth more than its value. It’s almost as if they are made to break, so that we keep buying more 
So should you sell your car? Not necessarily. Cars can still bring joy and build community. They’re still fantastic for trips across our beautiful country, for getting food with friends, for taking kids to games and extracurricular events. And if you’re in a rural setting cars can be your only option! The majority of transportation emissions are not coming from rural settings either.
But cars are simply not good for commutes into and around cities. They are not good for the places everyone is trying to get to and through en masse every day. We need to stop using cars for our commutes so that cars can be fun, community building modes of transportation once again.
And chances are, if you live in an urban or even suburban area, you’d find a better community outside of your car! Cycling, scootering, roller blading, and riding trains with friends is MUCH more fun than sitting by yourself.
Let’s choose to support multi-modality: many different ways of getting from here to there. Let’s build the bike lanes, the train lines, the bus lanes, and make them useful for where people need to go. Let’s build transit oriented development so that population growth is handled responsibly, and doesn’t endlessly sprawl and destroy our natural wonders and rural places.
Cars are great, but they are not great for commuting. For your own good, your city’s good, and the world’s good, it’s time to consider a different mode of transportation.