Think Outside the Glove(box)

I enlisted in the War on Cars in the first grade, when a speeding driver killed my beloved tortoiseshell cat outside our house. Well through high school, I hotly insisted that I was never going to become the kind of person who drives a car, sneering at the vehicular aspirations of my comrades.

Unfortunately, I live(d) in a car-dependent community, so when I turned 17, just like everyone else, I picked up a driver’s license and an old beater that I drove for several years until it died and I replaced it with another old beater, and so on down the line until I achieved that brief middle class aspiration of a car note (since paid off) and a Prius that I drive (resentfully, thinking longingly of trains) on my peregrinations through Northern California. I treat the car as a necessary evil, grudgingly providing it with basic husbandry such as “oil changes” and “tires” and purchasing increasingly expensive “car insurance.”

I hate cars. I hate the noise, I hate the pollution, I hate seeing beautiful communities marred by roads, I hate what they do to the bodies of children and cyclists and animals and other living things. Fuck cars, okay? This is not going to be an essay about how I stopped worrying and learned to love the automobile, because I despise cars with every fiber of my being, loathe every minute I spend behind the wheel, and feel like part of me is dying inside when I am in the passenger seat. IMO the only good car is a dead car.

Americans, though, man, they love their cars. Especially the Dodge Child Crusher 9000s and the Ford Compensator 6900s, obviously, but really, any car. Big and fast is best, of course, especially if it has a modified exhaust system or a lifted body, but as our highways slowly swallow up the world, increasing numbers of lanes sprawling across farmland and Black neighborhoods, Americans will take anything on four wheels. (Or 18, as long as it keeps to the right lane.)

So when you say you’re not a car fan, you tend to attract an, uh, negative crowd.

And urban planning conversations about how we deal with the stain of cars despoiling our landscape tend to attract a very particular kind of aggressive crowd that is distinctly unpleasant, filled as it is with absolute dirtbags making everyone’s life a living hell and often actively undermining the cause that they claim to be for.

Over here in the War on Cars camp, people can be a little strident. In the Cars are Great, Actually, Let’s Have Them Ruin Everything camp, you have an entirely different set of assholes. And both sets of assholes tend to eclipse the perfectly reasonable people trying to get the work done, creating artificial divisions and alienating people who understandably have better things to do than be screamed at by assholes.

So, a few things here. One, there’s the world we could live in, and then there’s the world we currently live in, things that often get confused in urban planning debates or screaming matches on the internet. In the world we currently live in, there are people trapped in car-dependent communities who need cars in order to fulfill the basic needs of their lives. Buying groceries. Going to work. Taking their cats to the vet, where they behave like demon-possessed little fuckfaces and have to get sedated for their bloodwork. Driving people to abortion appointments in the places where that’s still an option. You know, the usual.

❝ Car ownership is both a cause and consequence of poverty.

In my community, there is, technically, a bus. Strictly speaking. It exists. The closest station to my house is 1.4 miles away, which doesn’t sound that bad except that I live up a very steep hill, and did I mention that one of my legs doesn’t work super great? That’s a lot, especially if it is pouring down rain or you are hauling heavy groceries or have an enraged cat coming out of the K-hole in an alarmingly flimsy plastic box that you need to get from point A to B.

Sure, I could ride a bike. See above.

The point is, I and a lot of other Americans live in car-dependent communities, where infrastructure privileges the automobile, sometimes to the point of making other modes of transit dangerous or impossible, whether it’s a city with giant-ass six lane roads that are incredibly dangerous to cross or shitty bus routes and schedules that are functionally useless for many residents (surprise, racism plays a profound role in transit planning). In 2017, 86 percent of trips in US cities were happening via private car. Uber is trying to reinvent the bus. That’s the world we live in right now, a world where we need access to cars to survive. Forced car ownership and transit poverty are very much a reality.

Car ownership is both a cause and consequence of poverty. Low-income communities of color suffer most from traffic deaths, pollution, and other harms caused by cars. We often hear that low-income people “need” cars because of their living circumstances, which is often true in the sense of the immediate world we live in, where they are more likely to live in car-dependent areas, but cars are actually super expensive to own, which fucking sucks when you are a poor person. Car ownership cost an average of $12,872 in 2023 (this includes costs associated with financing). The average price of a new car is almost $50,000. The used car industry is scammy as fuck. Auto loans are an absolute exploitative nightmare. Those pavement princess pick-ups that prowl the well-paved streets in search of victims can cost $80,000 or more.

Oh, and before you start (I saw you!) by the way, claims that restricting car access harms businesses are simply not true.

Foreshadowing: One group of people in particular is less likely to drive — disabled people. Some of whom cannot for various physical and legal reasons, others of whom cannot because, as previously mentioned, owning a car is fucking expensive. Still, others simply do not want to drive. (And car dependence is associated with decreased accessibility, fyi.) We’re also at increased risk of traffic deaths thanks to issues such as a lack of sidewalks that force people into the street and the aforementioned pavement princesses blocking sidewalks and curb cuts. So, put a pin in that for a moment.

This doesn’t have to be the world we live in, though. In fact, visionaries are having all kinds of cool and amazing conversations about a world that deprioritizes or even, dare to dream, eradicates cars. In no particular order, some cool things you can do to get cars the fuck out of your community or at very least force them to share space safely and equitably include:

• Slow Streets, which discourage cut-through traffic in residential neighborhoods and also force people to slow the fuck down.
• Modifications to the road designed to force drivers to go slower, and not just speed bumps. Tactics such as narrowing roadways, using better signage, adding bulb-outs at crosswalks (also an accessibility plus!), or adding chicanes, which also break up the visual look of a street and make it more attractive (in my humble opinion).
• Actual barriers to protect cyclists and pedestrians, not sharrows or flimsy plastic posts.
• Creating a rich network of nodes and transit options to support not just micro-neighborhoods within communities, but also connections between them. Building an environment and economy based on community, so that a city becomes a vast web of car-free options and one in which people can live, play, and work in more centralized locations, not spend hours on dismal commutes.
• Making it easier to access information and join meetings about local infrastructure, such as, for example, not holding Transportation Committee meetings at 2pm on Wednesdays. And encouraging people to join neighborhood and city organizations that work on urban planning issues, including car taming.

There’s a particular sector of car defenders who likes to drag me into these conversations. Or, well, the specter of me: A generic “disabled person” who absolutely categorically needs cars to go everywhere and anywhere, how dare you imply otherwise.

Eliminating parking minimums? Disablist. Congestion pricing? Disablist. Pedestrian and cycle-friendly neighborhoods? Disablist. Turning parking structures into housing? Disablist. Restricting vehicle access to make residential streets safer? Disablist.

These people want you to know that disabled people need cars, are absolutely wild for them, just screaming and jumping up and down for the things, while ignoring those of us who, again, cannot drive, along with those of us who hate cars just as much as the sprightly urbanists in their spandex shorts do (albeit sometimes for different reasons and with more breathable fabrics). They are heroically riding to the rescue to save us from the evils of the anti-car lobby, a thing I, at least, neither asked for nor need. And in addition to using us as pawns to advance the pro-car agenda, these knights in shining exhaust pipes are often very effective at convincing disabled people that there is an existential threat to our independence and ability to navigate the world posed by proposals such as: “Hey, maybe San Francisco should have a car-free JFK Drive so people can enjoy Golden Gate Park without being constantly assaulted by whizzing traffic.”

Their arguments tend to boil down to: “Well we need cars here right now, therefore we need cars forever.”

But…do we? Do we, though? Do we need cars right here right now? Or do we need to live in a more exciting, visionary world where we actually do not need cars? Because that has to start somewhere, and it sure can’t end with what is, in most of this country, a wholly inadequate public transportation infrastructure.

“Buses exist!” Some people will say, to which I say yes, they do! Only some bus routes suck, not all buses are accessible, some drivers will cruise right on past wheelchair users because they don’t want to make the bus late by stopping for them, and some bus routes have absolutely dismal hours. We need to make buses better.

Likewise, as a die-hard train enthusiast who will opt to take a train over all other modes of transit whenever possible, and who is therefore, a person who is aware that trains exist, I am compelled to note that trains, too, are plagued by inadequate infrastructure and investment. The closest commuter train is two hours away from me (by car) and yes, I do drive to the station and take the train to the ferry and then into the city, but uh…driving is still required.

But, bikes! (See above.)

And your own two feet! (See above.)

We are being presented with this weird, false dichotomy of “cars everywhere” or “no cars anywhere, ever,” when in fact — and you are not going to believe this — there is a secret, third thing, which is “provide people with a rich array of intermodal transit alternatives that include a range of options supporting different people’s needs, abilities, and lifestyles.” Like, make it really convenient and easy not to drive, and make it kind of a pain in the ass to drive. Invest robustly in accessible transit options and infrastructure. Create built environments that nurture and support the building of community.

And also? Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining. Most of the people who screamed about car-free JFK Drive in San Francisco, insisting that it was the most disablist thing ever, don’t give a fuck about disabled people and haven’t engaged in any meaningful policy or social advocacy to improve our lives. They ignored the fact the route currently being reclaimed from cars is actually incredibly nice to walk, bike, and wheel on, and that there is a shuttle designed to make sure that disabled people who want to get around Golden Gate Park can, in fact, get around Golden Gate Park and enjoy the delights of a warm day watching the herons catch gophers and taking bets on when Karl the Fog is going to roll in. That’s because some of the people involved in car-free JFK, and, in fact, some of the city employees in the planning department are — wait for it —disabled and specifically included the disability community throughout the planning and implementation of the project. Long-time disabled transit advocates were involved in this process. One of those city staffers, my comrade Maddy Ruvolo (hi Maddy!), is Kind of a Big Deal when it comes to disability-focused urban planning! It’s almost like the City of San Francisco identified and listened to lots of constituencies while working on this proposal!

Meanwhile, anti-car advocates have an obnoxious tendency to pretend disabled people don’t exist, or are dismissive about our requests to be included in these conversations.

I will happily carry the standard of the war on cars because, again, fuck cars. But the fuck-cars movement is also one that could do a much better job of communicating its aims and goals and welcoming disabled people who are totally friends to the cause when we are actively included in the conversation. The car-free or car-reduced movement can be accessible, and is in fact improved by accessibility. I would love to see this movement take advantage of disabled people’s incredible diversity and breadth of experience to build out really cool proposals for reducing car dependence that actively, from the jump, address the implications for the disability community. Take that energy you use for screaming at each other on the internet and use it to debunk lies the pro-car crowd wields to leverage disability in their goal to, I guess, keep ensuring that beloved pets and children and, oh yeah, disabled people keep getting murdered by drivers.

❝ Disabled people are used as pawns by people who don’t give two fucks about us, but do want to use us as leverage. Both sides of car conversations are guilty of this.

Stop doing shit like building prototype car-free communities that are clearly inaccessible, or acting like everyone should just get an e-bike to solve all their problems. Start thinking with your galaxy brains about what a community designed for universal access could and should look like. Start thinking about proactive, inclusive communication that signals investment in disabled people. Design for inclusion.

And fellow disabled people… I’m sorry, but some of you need to engage in more critical thinking in these conversations. If car advocates are warning you that the sky is falling, look up to see for yourself. Do a little research. Get involved in meetings around urban planning, whether it’s attending (remotely or in person), submitting written comments, or requesting one-on-one time with planners and decision-makers. Don’t believe everything you see on Facebook. Because the fact is that the media are really terrible about reporting on accessibility in general, and certainly in urban planning contexts. There may be very cool things happening, including opportunities to actively contribute to policy discussions, that you are missing because you took a claim at face value. Get engaged in this conversation! Band together! There are some amazing disabled people working on car-free advocacy right now and their voices should be a lot louder in this conversation!

This is just one of many arenas of policy and society in which disabled people are used as pawns by people who don’t give two fucks about us, but do want to use us as leverage. Both sides of car conversations are guilty of this, and we need to retake control of our place in this. Disabled people are autonomous humans with our own thoughts and needs, not tools to be used to derail urban planning conversations and justify hewing to a status quo that is terrible for everything, or people to be disregarded when our needs are inconvenient.

Vehicles of some form or another are always going to be a part of the landscape, but we could be grownups and have a conversation about what that looks like. We don’t have to let car lovers con us into believing that they’re looking out for our best interests — or let car haters refuse to engage with very valid concerns about integrating accessibility from the start.

Urban planning faces existential threats to policy and funding in the best of times, but building robust, people-friendly infrastructure is about to become more urgent than ever. We can build the communities we want, if we’re willing to listen to each other. It’s more important than ever to recognize that this is a two-way street, but we get to decide which direction we want to turn.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copy-edited by Nicole Froio.