Jonathan Leo loves his cars, but doesn't go for them. He lives in San Diego and works for the Navy, so he takes the city block to work as often as he can. Then, over the weekend, he uploads his 2012 Mercedes Benz C250 of some of California's leading roads.
Cities around the world are redefining the role of cars. Specifically, and especially in American cities, they try to get more people to travel like Leo does.
This is because, in many cases, policymakers have realized that they cannot continue to grow by adding more people using cars as their mode of transportation, let alone reducing the endless grid and poor air quality that exists today. To take just one example, the recently published Boston Globe series of reports to the awe-inspiring volume of the city that includes not only Boston & # 39; s conundrum, but our many growing metropolitan areas:
People will no longer be able to travel faithfully in a region cursed by its own achievements … The question is now in the middle: Can Boston Greater continue to prosper – or even work – without reconsidering its relationship with the car?
And the answer is as simple as it is true: Not for long.
In addition to the months-long investigative journalism, there is a desire to have a template for these conversations, a template where it is pro- and anti-car. Cars are the worst or the worst thing that has happened to mankind. Similar to many other discussions, presented as a binary option with no middle ground.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Certainly, of course it is not In this way. Travel is about equality, about options, the concept of people like Leo in a positive way.
I reached out to Leo and other car enthusiasts who describe themselves in an uncomfortable environment: a Facebook group that deals with the car New Urbanist Memes for Oriental Teens, better known as NUMTOT. It's a place for people (not only teens) to share stories, memes, and other good things about "new urbanism" ideas such as multi-family homes, pedestrian zones, and nature walks such as biking and public transportation.
In short, there are many things like this:
But not all of its 177,000-plus members fully integrate the car. I won't name you, but some of your favorite auto bloggers are NUMTOT certified. Like car aficionados of all walks of life.
I reached out to Leo and the other NUMTOTs because one of my blogs was posted to a group – which I was urged people in Manhattan to stop taking the Ubers to the State Building and use the subway – with the title "The most abundant article from a source that is not a statistic."
This sparked discussion in comments about the relationship between car lovers and public transit. Leo was one of them:
Check out the car here! I love traveling, hating traffic and I think we need alternate routes, bus routes and Trains! I absolutely love my car. I don't want to put up with hating me because I have to deal with cars and parking every day.
Another, Kyle Metscher, said:
Check out the car here. I would rather drive a good, well-crafted, competitive and leisurely machine, instead of crawling with a large concrete slab in the middle of a city with a boring econobox.
What Lee Metscher and others I have talked about in this article have told me, if not clearly then at least spiritually, that one can become a car lover while still fighting for – not to mention often using – public transportation.
Danny Harris, executive director of Translation Alternatives, a New York City-based non-profit company that offers equitable travel solutions, echoed those speeches.
"You can be an automotive enthusiast and be an environmental expert," Harris said. "You can be a car enthusiast and be an urban person. You can be a car enthusiast and take care of community life. We don't compete."
To some, this may sound like a complete overhaul, of course, that car enthusiasts have a large crowd. To some, this would be totally absurd and totally misleading about what it means to love cars. That's why it's important to acknowledge that loving cars are not – well, they shouldn't mean hating all other modes of transportation.
In fact, there is a very good reason we have many historical examples of motorists to be among those who have invested heavily in ensuring that we have a solid public transportation system.
Powerful public transportation will give people the choice – the freedom – to use whatever modes they desire, the narrow lanes of people who want to drive, like Leo's weekend protectors on his Mercedes.
One person who loves both cars and public transportation, 22-year-old University of California Santa Barbara student Ryan Driggett, put it differently. From his perspective, most people do not like to drive, but they should. "They are as passionate about their regular car as I am also my washing machine."
When looking for a more sensible travel destination, people often look abroad, and especially in Europe. They are asking for the popularity of Meeting prices in London, Of Paris street food, or The city without the Oslo car to show how.
But one does not need to look at the ocean or even in other countries to see the possibilities. One only needs to look back on time.
America once had a moderate transit stand, one with free will and similar freedom in the 1940s – in fact, transportation itself was widely distributed across the country at this time – until the coalition government put almost all its responsibility behind the vehicles.
A few decades after the Model T, cars were still widely used by families for leisure and recreational activities. As written by historian Kenneth T. Jackson & # 39; s Crabgrass Frontier, the history of suburbs – which is just a matter of moving around like a house – an inexpensive car quickly replaces a family outing at a subway stop but less traveled:
Offering more freedom and luxury than the old and uncomfortable streets, the car replaced the truck and bus ride at will. As a basic mode of travel-to-work, acceptance was slow.
Jackson cited a study of 68 cities in 1933 that found that though the popularity of Model T was "a pedestrian or a public transporter." Historian Joel Tarr has found the same. By the end of 1934, 45 percent of Pittsburgh's income earners, for example, owned a car, but very few used it for transportation; 28 percent travel to work, 48.8 percent to motor vehicles, 1.7 percent to passenger trains, and “just 20.3 percent to driving. The story, Jackson writes, was similar in many American cities.
Those numbers look very different today. According to The Census Bureau & # 39; s American Community Survey, 78.4 percent of Americans drive alone to work. Nearly 5 percent of Americans take public transportation, even though 30 percent of New York City's public transport operators. To put this in perspective, the same number of Americans work from home as using public transportation. About twice as many American carpool people.
In Pittsburgh directly, comparing that to 1934, 55.5 percent of the city's population travels by car to work today, more than double the value from 85 years ago. Currently, only 17.9 percent take public transportation, and 10.7 percent travel. Across the entire province, 71.5 percent of people driving a car are operating, nearly the same as the national average.
These figures tell the story of inequality. With Jackson's details at length in the Crabgrass Frontier, beginning in the 1950s the suburb became America's largest neighbor and car for its transit system, because suburbs are not sufficiently compact for effective public transportation.
This was no accident. Jackson concludes that this was not a market-driven process of people voting for their favorite lifestyle, but the result of a massive, social engineering project across the country with the full weight of the coalition government rising at the rate. Since the publication of Jackson's book in 1985, the findings have been reinforced by generations of urban studies historians.
First, there were the houses. "No United States government agency has had a worse and stronger impact on Americans over the last 100 years than the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)," Jackson wrote. FHA sizes are set in many fields and even for home specifications. In part that's why the whole bottom area of the century looks and feels the same way.
Worse, the FHA entered the neighborhood based on race, a few neighbors got low marks and were marked in red (hence the term “redlining”). The FHA will only provide home loan loan insurance for home loans in well-established neighborhoods, which, because of the standards the FHA has set for itself, mean high-risk communities outside the city limits.
As a result of these deliberate policies, in the 1960s, it was easier and cheaper for white people to earn income in the white suburbs, and it was almost impossible for non-whites to do the same. This, combined with years of construction requirements and many size restrictions, meant that FHA guarantees were mostly transferred to single-family homes, not urban apartments. And those landlords receive many tax breaks that they did not rent, including but not limited to reducing the interest on the mortgage. These government policies, written by Jackson, made having an underground home cheaper, in many cases, than renting an urban apartment.
Not only did the government make policies that discouraged people from buying suburban homes, but paid for the roads to the destination, at a time when they were not paying for the mass transit system they did not.
In the mid-1950s the Eisenhower administration began its $ 101 billion highway project that, among other benefits, provides faster access and egresses from cities to more distant cities.
As part of the Interstate Highway program, the government created a gas tax, a possible income that could be used for something other than the construction and maintenance of the highway. This has included a government subsidy that the government has supported almost all of the road construction and almost no mass transit, which was often regarded as a private enterprise that has to work for its benefit. Another U.S. Senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisccin, found that, prior to the 1960s, about 75 percent of transportation spending on highways while only one percent went to metropolitan transportation.
In the past years, these inequalities have recovered a little, but they remain. While the 2016-2020 FAST Act is enacted $ 305 billion
The story of the postwar American war, in terms of navigation, is completely lost. The matter of complete and complete dedication to cars, followed by enough negative feedback from local, state, and federal governments that adhered to what we currently consider status quo of highways, a grid, an endless sea of red lights, and a fear of change.
So, we are in a situation now, where car ownership is not a decision but, for all Americans, a necessity.
"In the 20s, the car became part of who we are," a the latest edits in The Guardian are frustrating, before concluding that "the automotive culture as a whole needs to be deployed."
But, what does it mean, The Guardian, or anyone else for that matter, when they talk about violating the "automobile culture?" Entrants are not wholly inappropriate to pay attention to such announcements, since they rarely come up with an explanation of which part of the "car culture" they want to stop.
Harris, executive director of Transaction Alternatives, said he couldn't talk about everyone using the phrase, but for him, it's not about making people who love cars stop loving them. It's about letting those who never give up need one.
“At least when I talk about automotive culture and break it,” Harris tells me, “I think most people are completely unaware that their lives are given to this system above them but about how they live, how they move around, what they put first, what they choose to fight for or not. ”Here, he is not talking about a culture of enthusiasm. He talks about what we have called the culture of travelers.
Harris likened passenger culture to social addiction, which is rife with billions of dollars in marketing efforts to try and differentiate his coterie with another nearly identical casket that does not show that their equipment is being used the way Traffic is. Breaking the automotive culture, Harris believes, requires approving almost all Americans to completely rely on cars to operate for reasons outside their control.
Sadly, Harris emphasized, it is not about removing all cars from the public, or telling people to stop being lovers. After all, Harris grew up learning the Motor Trend; once lusted after the & # 39; 66 Mustang.
“Breaking car culture does not remove cars from people,” he said. "It gives people safer, more equitable, and safer alternatives … I don't think our intention is for people to drive, not to overlook their interests or needs. But instead, we actually offer them real, safe, equitable and safe options."
Getting to that point, restoring that balance, requires rethinking what our roads and roads are meant for. Instead of estimating everything about how many cars can get in the traffic light cycle or how highways can be climbed, Harris wants to focus on driving and not just on cars. In rural or urban areas, that may not change much. But in crowded places, it might be.
Essentially, what everyone I spoke to in this article fits in is a simple suggestion: Make the drive and the choice, and return the roads to the people you love.
In some cities like New York and previously used capitals, this has been going on to some degree. New York City Council Speaker and 2021 candidate as Mayor Corey Johnson, for example, invades the term "Motor culture." Yet the majority of Americans still cling to human traditions. Time to uninstall.
Entrants can, in turn, lead a more demanding path, because they have everything they can afford. The only way to drive freely is when the roads are open.
Correction 2:36 p.m.: An earlier version of this article said that Leo drove the 2012 C230. His C230 was actually his previous car, a 2005 one. His current car of 2012 C250. I will not excuse this mistake and lose my journalism license.