Don’t Ban Cars; Ban the Car Monopoly

(Source: Unsplash/Dan Gold.)

Recently, I was listening to a podcast where the guest lamented efforts to take away cars and “force people to depend on public transit.” This sentiment runs deep in some circles. Anybody who has waded into the debate about transit reform has eventually come across the panicked or angry look on someone’s face when they consider the possibility of living without a car, or any political barrier against driving. What should be a conversation about wise public investment and stewardship can quickly become a debate about private property and free choice. 

I get it: for decades, cars have been promoted as the ultimate ticket to freedom and social participation. Along the way, they have become much more than modes of transit. They’ve become status and fashion symbols. They’ve become part of our personality and in some cases, our very identity. And, in many cases, they do make it easier to get around on our own terms. 

Rethinking Cars As Liberators

Are cars really the symbols of freedom and liberation that they promise to be, though? The philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich didn’t think so for two reasons. First, because they function like a radical monopoly, a situation where “a technology or service becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product.” Doesn’t this perfectly describe how cars function in most of our cities? Without a car, participation in cities becomes much more difficult, if not impossible altogether. 

Second, Illich suspected cars as “liberators” because of how car-oriented patterns of design altered the landscape of the city, such that it became impossible to get around without one. In other words, car-based design creates a problem that only cars could solve—at an extremely high cost to users. In most cities, we cannot get around without a car because that’s how the cities have been designed. We only have to add up the cost of payments, insurance, repairs, and gas…not to mention the opportunity cost of what we could be doing with all that time and money to get a feel for the high cost of driving. For Illich, this approach to transit extracts value from citizens while excluding others altogether. 

Scenes From Waco

I’m reminded of this a few times a week when I borrow my husband’s car to conduct a series of errands in our town of Waco, Texas. What might look, on the surface, like a normal event in my daily life is actually a race against time and frustration. Traversing the city from store to store, hunting for parking, getting in and out of the car, backing up nervously, hoping to not hit or get hit, waiting at stoplights, trying to turn across four lanes of fast-moving traffic… I have timed it and I now know that I have, at max, three hours before I lose my patience. 

I wasn’t always this way and I know for many people, running errands is actually fun and relaxing. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to realize that most of the anger has to do with becoming more mindful about the cost of car-based design and a strong feeling of powerlessness. It’s not lost on me that having to drive around for hours and spend money on gas is mostly a result of how our cities are designed. There’s nothing inherent in the errands themselves that requires such expenditures of time and money—it’s simply a result of sprawled-out design. 

The frustration also has to do with poor design decisions. It is soul-draining to spend hours staring at ugly stroads lined with garish billboards, to see the insane number of trees that have been poorly planted or that have been hacked apart to make space for utility lines, to see the exposed sidewalks and faded bus stops with no shade in the Texas sun.

But the most frustrating moments unfold when I see people trying to get around town without a car. It’s so hard for them to do so safely and comfortably and, as a result, they’re cut out from really participating in the city. Here are a few scenes from the streets of Waco. 

Recently, as I waited to turn left at a stoplight, I watched an older man crossing Valley Mills Road, one of the most dangerous stroads in the city. He made it across and then turned left to cross Bosque. Perhaps his timing was off, perhaps he was too hot to wait for a crossing signal, or perhaps the signal told him to cross at the same time it told me to turn left, but I will never forget the look of horror that crossed his face as he struggled to run across the street, panicked at the sight of rapidly approaching cars. 

A few days earlier, I was heading out to a café when I spotted two women in electric wheelchairs slowly moving down the sidewalk to my right. Clearly, experience had taught them to be extra careful: they had taped orange flags to the back of their chairs. They needed those flags, because the sidewalk eventually ended and then they were sharing the road with cars, most of which were driven at much faster speeds than the posted 30 mph limit. 

The other day while walking back to my car, I watched a little boy hop toward his car with his mom. As kids often do, he just kept hopping behind the car and around to the other side, oblivious to his proximity to the street. I see children run through parking lots all the time, my throat tightening, worrying about a driver whizzing by and hitting them. Or I’ve watched parents grip their children’s hands extra tightly as they leave the grocery store, their eyes wide and earnest as they scan the parking lot for threats: massive pickup trucks, impatient drivers, confusing intersections. 

Seniors. Children. People with disabilities. The poor. These are the “least of these” when it comes to the “users” of our city streets. They are the least vocal, the least political, the least organized. Yet they are the ones who hardly get to reap the so-called benefits of auto-based design. They are the ones who are the most vulnerable yet seem to be considered last, if at all, in the way our cities are designed.

This, ultimately, is why I can’t buy the notion that cars equal freedom. Cars and car-oriented design give everyone an element of freedom except for them.

Truly equitable transportation reform would take this kind of monopoly seriously and seek to make the joy of movement available to everyone, no matter if they could afford a car or not. This kind of reform would focus less on confiscating private property and more on expanding options so that more people can participate. 

After all, this is how transportation used to work in this country. For decades, cars existed alongside other modes of transit like streetcars and bikes. People enjoyed the freedom to choose between various options. It seems to me that this is a reasonable goal for what we could return to. Dismantling a radical monopoly is not about taking people’s cars from them, rather, it’s about expanding the options available to people, eradicating price distortions so the real cost of each option becomes clear—and then leaving the choice up to them.

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