Why are our cities so car-dependent?

For the past few months, I’ve lived without a car in Durham, North Carolina. I’ve walked into downtown to meet up with friends, biked to the nearest grocery store, taken the bus to my office, and taken the train to visit family and friends up North. In doing so, I’ve saved money on would-be car payments, included some cardio into my commute, and connected more with Durham and the surrounding region.

Although this has been a personally rewarding experience for me, this certainly hasn’t been an easy feat given just how car-centric the region is. Walking is difficult when there isn’t a sidewalk to use. Biking can be dangerous when there aren’t any protected bike lanes, relegating me to a shoulder or precarious road-sharing with cars. Transit in the Triangle can also be unreliable at times, complicating my commute around town.

This isn’t a coincidence. The Research Triangle region developed rapidly during a time when cars were the primary form of transport in this country, and the results of its urban design reflect such car-dependency. Walkscore.com gives Durham on average very low marks on walk, transit, and bike scores, indicating that cars are the only viable transportation option for the most part. That being said, my neighborhood scores much higher on their walk score metric than most other parts of town, meaning that living car-free in my part of Durham is marginally less of a challenge.^1

Durham is not an anomaly in this sense. Far from it – cities all across the United States struggle to offer their residents reliable transportation alternatives. Why is this? 

That question is far too loaded to answer in its entirety in just one blog post, or even just by one person. However, it certainly doesn’t hurt to take a stab at answering it.

The short answer has to do with the density of our communities and how it’s depreciated over the years. 

Aside from a select few of our largest cities, many communities in the United States lack dense housing. From there, you’re hard-pressed to find such housing at an affordable price. However, there was a time where large cities and small towns alike were densely populated and easy to navigate on foot. You were within 15 minutes walking distance of just about everywhere you needed to get to, and this country’s robust streetcar and train networks could get you anywhere further than that as recently as the 1940’s.

The streetcar network in particular came to define transit in early-20th century urban settings. Streetcars allowed the population to spread just beyond the packed city center, but still reside in dense neighborhoods that retained this 15-minute walking distance.

Baltimore Streetcar Network- c. 1913^2

Even medium-sized cities like Durham had streetcar networks that connected the city, oftentimes better than the existing transit infrastructure does today.

Durham Public Service Company Streetcar - c.1925^3

However, the mid-20th century saw the rise in suburbanization and car culture, and in turn the fall of dense housing and the streetcar. A post-war boom of single-family housing construction on the outskirts of major cities brought predominantly wealthy White families out of the city and into the suburbs, perpetuating the phenomenon of urban and suburban sprawl in metropolitan areas across the country. 

Because of the dominance of single-family homes with spacious lawns, winding subdivisions, and wide roads, car ownership became a necessity for suburban life, as it still is to this day. This ‘White flight’ drained the tax base of major cities nationwide, leading to less funding for robust public transit among other services and more reliance on cars to get into and around metropolitan centers. Many cities adapted to accommodate the new dominant mode of transportation, resulting in the sea of parking lots amidst urban freeways we observe today among American cities and suburbs alike.

Suburban neighborhood near Houston, TX^4

The suburbs, along with the freeways that have gutted many of our major cities’ downtowns, have cemented cars as a necessary mode of transportation just about everywhere in the United States. Instead of a 10-minute walk down the street, your grocery run might look like a 10-minute drive to a grocery store’s sprawling parking lot. Many of our suburban downtowns are little more than car-centric shopping centers and strip malls.

Lakewood Shopping Center in Durham - c. 2018^5

Nowadays, housing in the United States primarily consists of either tiny apartments in urban areas with heavy car traffic or spacious single-family homes separated by large yards and 100-foot wide roads with no sidewalks. There’s a lack of dense housing in between (referred to by urbanists as ‘missing middle housing,’ a concept I’ll dive into in future posts) such as duplexes and courtyard apartments that enable walkability and increased transit use while accommodating people’s spatial needs. It’s this sort of housing, along with other creative methods of housing such as accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and mixed-use developments that offer a promising way forward for neighborhoods where single-family homes dominate the landscape and relegate us to cars as our lone transportation option.

The urban sprawl that we have observed across the United States over the past 70 years is perpetuated by the housing we build and the neighborhoods we design. People are far less likely to walk, bike, or use public transit to their destination if it takes half an hour to walk through their subdivision to the major road. Reliable public transit cannot be a reality when the wealthiest families in the cities flee for the low-density, car-dependent suburbs and take their tax dollars with them. The socioeconomic and racial factors of this migration cannot be ignored as well. Only in recent years have suburbs become more socioeconomically and racially diverse. This is despite a strong legacy in many suburbs of restrictive covenants, single-family zoning, and other mechanisms aimed at preventing low-income and non-White families from moving in.

Is this to say that anybody who owns a car is a horrible person that is complicit in the crimes of suburbanization? Absolutely not, far from it. Cars are still a vital resource for many, particularly in rural communities and areas where public transit options are scarce and commuters have little choice. My charge is against the systems put in place that have restricted our options to car dependency and the negative impact that has on our communities, particularly those that have been historically persecuted and discriminated against in this country.

This post has had quite a wide scope, and I haven’t gotten too into specifics at this point. I plan on discussing walkability, zoning laws, the suburbs, and other urbanism concepts more in-depth on this page. I hope I’ve given you an idea of the various systems in play that have made our communities so car-dependent as I explain in future posts what we can do to rebuild our cities around people instead of cars.

Sources

1. ‘Durham, NC Walk Score,’ Walk Score. https://www.walkscore.com/NC/Durham.

2. ‘Map of the United Railways & Electric Co. of Baltimore,’ Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection: McGraw Electric Railway Manual Maps, 1913. University of Texas at Austin. https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/mcgraw_electric.html.

3. ‘Five Points Boarding House,’ Open Durham. https://www.opendurham.org/buildings/five-points-boarding-house.

4. Dewan, Shaila (2013). ‘Is Suburban Sprawl on Its Way Back?’ New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/sunday-review/is-suburban-sprawl-on-its-way-back.html.

5. Graham, Ben (2018). ‘Lakewood Shopping Center sold in foreclosure, plans to revitalize underway,’ Triangle Business Journal. https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2018/10/19/lakewood-shopping-center-sold-in-foreclosure-plans.html#:~:text=Brodyco%20won%20the%20rights%20to,in%20Durham%20County%20Superior%20Court.