According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.
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Kind of a dumb headline. The obvious answer is “because 2/3 of Americans do”
That’s not a dumb headline at all.
- America’s car centrism is so bad that other options often functionally don’t exist in a lot of areas, completely disenfranchising those who don’t drive. 33% is a staggering amount when you consider how awful micromobility and public transit are in the US.
- “2/3 of Americans do” isn’t the entire picture. If we start with “33% of Americans don’t drive”, logically we know there’s an additional chunk hidden in that 66% who wouldn’t drive if decent alternatives existed. We can see from countries in Europe where those alternatives exist that that’s a very sizable chunk of people.
- Treating “drive/don’t drive” as a binary also doesn’t reveal the whole picture. For instance, there would surely be people who would still drive with decent alternatives but would prefer public transit when they go out drinking, bicycling when they go to the park or to their nearby job, etc. 1/3 of people don’t drive at all, but guess what? Most people still walk places in some capacity, and car-centric infrastructure hurts their ability to do that.
I drive, but most of the time I ride a bike, skateboard, or walk because driving is mostly just more frustrating on average.
