12 Readers on the Question of Cars

Like most of my friends in 1995, I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday. My stepdad had hordes of busted-up cars on the front lawn, and he gifted me a royal-blue 1976 Volkswagen Scirocco that barely ran. Even though the car was a total POS, the excitement and joy I felt at driving that car by myself will always be one of the best feelings I have experienced in my life.

That first night, I picked up my friend Cody from his shift at the North Seattle Arby’s. He didn’t have to take the bus home that night for once. I put a battery-powered boom box in the back seat (there was no radio in the car, of course) and played a Led Zeppelin tape at full blast, reveling in my newfound freedom. Even now, it’s hard to imagine a time when I have felt freer than at that moment.  

The car would die if it idled for even a second. I could barely slow down to a full stop before I had to rev the engine. The driver and passenger seats weren’t even bolted down! If I gunned it at the bottom of a big hill, we would literally flip into the back seat, laughing until tears fell from our eyes. I remember the smell so vividly. Sometimes, I’ll get a whiff that reminds me of it, and I am transported back to flying down the street, my car packed with friends. My soul stirs with the sound of laughter and the crackling of the fuzzy boom box. I remember how many times we would go for drives just to drive.  

I had to learn a great deal about automobiles to make sure the car kept running and didn’t kill us. The number of times I locked my keys in there, or left the lights on until the battery died, is laughable. But I was never once embarrassed by the state of that car. As far as I was concerned, I was the envy of all my friends, rich as a sultan, and as free as a bird.

I’ll be nostalgic about it until I die.  

I’m 16 and I’ve wanted to drive for as long as I could remember. I’ve been driving on my own for about three months. Even before I started driving myself, I considered the act of owning and driving a car emblematic of the independence you receive as an adult. Being able to drive yourself to school, to sports practice, to anywhere you wanted to go seemed too good to be true. I held these aspirations close, and no one rebuked me, thus my life was shaped by this modern, American version of independence. I saw teens living their best lives on TV and in movies, and they all had one thing in common: cars.

I live in a sprawling and rather car-dependent suburban area, so I can never walk anywhere. I can vividly remember my summers before my 15th year complaining or wandering around the house aimlessly because I didn’t have a job yet, and my parents and brother were gone for the day. None of my friends reached out, yet I still watched their lives continue on through a screen while faking my own in the same way. I remember one instance where, in a burst of confidence, I tried to ride my bike three miles to a local ice-cream shop and almost got run over by a car.

Now I can drive myself. I’m independent; I get to choose what music to play! I finally got what I wanted. But I still go everywhere mostly alone. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself an extrovert. I see my friends as often as I can in and outside of school, but the thing is, nothing changed. We don’t carpool, because it’s too out of the way and everyone else drives alone anyways. Driving my own car wasn’t the magical switch I’d been looking for after all. Maybe it wasn’t as much me that was the problem, but the infrastructure that surrounded me.

Goddamn I love cars! I realize they are polluting and occasionally murderous, but the convenience and freedom can’t be denied. Plus driving is just so fun! My commute is short, and at work, I get to drive a fire engine. Code 3 with lights and sirens! Running red lights! Wrong way down one-way streets to attempt to help society! It’s pretty great.

Cars have been a key part of my identity for more than three decades: My first car was a hand-me-down 1981 Ford Escort. Since that first car, I’ve owned the quirky (1987 Nissan Pulsar), the blue-collar (1977 Chevy pickup), the classic (1965 Chevy Bel Air), the sporty (1991 Nissan 300ZX), the practical (2006 Toyota Tacoma), the baby-mover (2008 Lexus RX350), and now, the grown-up (and first new) family car, a Mazda CX-5—with turbo! Some had custom wheels or paint. Almost all had custom sound systems.

My cars were my peacock tail, my rack of antlers. They enabled my life, which has been a pretty good one. I asked my wife to marry me in our car, and she accepted.

They also enabled some unsavory behavior: I used to pick up prostitutes, after a night out drinking, for years. Until the last time—when the prostitute turned out to be an undercover cop. I’ve been (at times) incredibly reckless, and (very often) incredibly lucky, behind the wheel. By the grace of God I never hurt anyone … and now I have a career where I drive fast (but not so recklessly) to help people in need.

Life is weird. And cars are awesome!

Last September, I gave my car to my college-town-bound little brother. I now live car-free in Minneapolis. I’m 25 and did not get my license until I was 19. I am now a passionate cyclist, scrappy public-transit enthusiast, and bold pedestrian. And I love it.

When I bike to work, I’ve shown up positive and awake, coffee optional. Figuring out how to get somewhere new is an opportunity to plan a pleasurable route. In summer, my friends and I take to our bicycles and hop from concert to park to bar to apartment. Cutting gas, insurance, and car payments out of our budgets, in whole or in part, gives us disposable income we can still afford to spend locally—and foolishly. Rather than letting it restrict us, there’s incredible freedom. You hardly worry about where to park, and, if folks behave responsibly enough, no one has to be shunted to the role of designated driver.

The day-to-day is a joy. My diet has to be up to the challenge of biking 80 miles a week in the summer, and 30 a week in the winter. And the conditioning and fresh-air perspective have expanded my imagination when it comes to travel and leisure; my brother and I are planning to bike across Minnesota, the long way, once he graduates. It would be a rather constrained road trip, but feels like a downright adventure on a bicycle.

In Minnesota, folks lampoon us car skeptics with the complaint that it’s winter for (an exaggerated proportion) of the year. I don’t want to be glib, but when I’m riding a fat-tire bike in fresh snow, I’m usually matching the speed of any responsible driver on city streets. Being free of the anxieties, expenses, and constant gripes of driving and car ownership is a seriously underrated luxury.

I aspire to have a family and realize that someday my weekends won’t revolve around the question of what pleasure we can find on quiet wheels. But I hope I can stay car-lite—walking to the grocery store, instilling active living and community in my children. We live in a world of people, places, and things. It can be hard to see them—or appreciate them—in a moving metal box.

My family lives in a fairly dense suburban environment that was first developed about 100 years ago as a “streetcar neighborhood.” I live pretty close to my office and I ride my bike year-round. I also live nearby a bus line that runs directly to my office with no transfers.

About once a week, not having a car is a big hassle. Getting to work when it’s pouring rain, trying to get to a doctor appointment in a different part of town, stopping off for a work event in a different part of town on the way home from work, leaving for a business trip from home to the airport, etc. It’s a real pain.

Going to work, I have no issue using public transportation and no issue riding my bike, but both of them can be inflexible from a schedule standpoint in that both incur additional non-value-add time, roughly an hour each day—and that’s for someone who pays through the nose to live in a part of town where most of what I need is close by.

I’m struck by the strong downward pressure on my quality of life that comes from not having access to a car, and I empathize with people who don’t have the money to buy a car if they need one to manage their routine. I also feel a profound sense of guilt burning fossil fuels. I’ll never buy another gas-powered car. So I’m proud of being car-free, but somewhat conflicted.

For me, a vehicle is a ticket to adventure. When I was 7 (1967), my parents hooked up a rented U-Haul trailer to the back of a six-cylinder Chevy truck, threw three kids in the back, and drove us from Reno, Nevada, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We navigated some 6,000-plus miles of highway, dirt roads, permafrost, sinkholes, mosquitoes, and wildlife. We camped out in national parks, roadside rests, KOAs, and gravel pits. In subsequent years we toured Canada, drove to Mexico City, and made it to most of the national parks. That upbringing fueled a love of the outdoors and the vehicles that could get me there.

In my younger years, I loved my 4x4s. They enable you to get stuck in more remote places!!! Grandkids and gas prices changed my preferences over the years. We still own a Chevy truck. However, my current adventure vehicle is a Subaru Outback. It can navigate dirt roads, is great in the snow, averages 25 mpg, and has plenty of room to sleep in the back. Can’t wait for the hybrid version.

I went to the University of Michigan to become a mechanical engineer because I loved cars. My parents were immigrants from India, and every 4th of July we’d go on a road trip and they’d say how wonderful superhighways were and how they made America so great. We loved trains too. We never saw a conflict. You could love trains and cars. Most of our family vacations were road trips. There were a lot of them. And cars were incredibly cool.

In Ann Arbor, I didn’t need a car for most of my daily needs. A bike worked better. Then I joined the Air Force and had a two-year stint in Japan, where I had a similar relationship with cars. I now live in an inner-ring suburb of an overpriced metro. And I don’t hate cars. I appreciate them. I can’t imagine a lot of my outdoor adventures without them. But I much prefer walking, riding a bus or train, or even biking for most of my regular needs. What happened? I got old.

I now view cars as a tool, not the toy they were. I now view working on my car as a chore, not fun. And I had enough acquaintances die in accidents that I realized the dangers. I still think cars are incredible machines—a number of ingenious systems that all work together. I still love Detroit. But there are a lot of neat machines out there, and most are less dangerous. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine taking a bus to go backpacking or trail biking, so there’s a happy medium.

Car culture has reconfigured the landscape to accommodate drivers, as opposed to pedestrians. It has hollowed out small towns and many large cities by sucking commerce from downtown to the banal, ugly world of strip malls, vast parking lots, and endless suburban sprawl. It has atomized society by isolating commuters who would once have enjoyed random, face-to-face interactions on foot or public transport. It has poisoned the atmosphere and exacerbated global warming. Once a convenience, cars are now an expensive necessity. Car culture itself is a textbook example of path dependence—an optional mode of behavior that grew so dominant, it’s the only available mode.

Oakland, California, has bent over backwards to accommodate the livelihoods of criminals. In the hectic adjustment, I’ve had two cars stolen from my driveway after an earlier heist of four tires at a public-transit parking lot. Now I am a devoted Lyft customer. It’s a hot trend here.

At 15, I got my first job, aiming for enough money to buy a car by my 16th birthday. I wanted to be as independent as possible from my family. Within a few weeks of my birthday, I paid $1,300 for an old Mazda and learned how to keep the car insured and fueled. Over the next five years, I drove Frankie (so named because his blue paint matched Sinatra’s famous eyes) more than 80,000 miles, shuttling myself and friends to jobs and activities, going on school trips, and traversing the 500 miles between college and home. That first car taught me a lot about financial responsibility and how to literally navigate my own life.  

Even back in 2004, when I started college, I found these qualities lacking in many of my peers. The rare individuals who had purchased and maintained their own cars before college generally seemed more likely to embrace and handle their new independence.

My second car, a used Audi A6, taught me resilience and the value of due diligence. Shortly before I started law school, I purchased Rita (so named because she was beautiful, troubled, and destined for tragedy, like the character on Dexter). On the drive home from the dealership, she broke down, beginning a parade of maladies that drained my savings in six months, completely overlapping with the first year of law school. I’d bought a lemon at a stunningly inopportune time in my life. It was a painful lesson, but better learned at 24 than 54. I offloaded Rita quickly, and have owned practical, reliable cars since. After all of this, I really don’t enjoy driving. I yearn for the days when public transportation will obviate the need for me to own a car, which will be better for me and for the planet.

I grew up on a farm. At 5, I could steer a tractor up and down the rows of baled hay so my dad and a hired man could throw them on the wagon. I could drive our truck at 10, and if my parents were away, my twin brother and I would whip into town for a Dairy Queen. Fast-forward to high school, where we had an excellent driver’s ed instructor. The lessons were during our Ontario winters, and often involved practice pulling out of skids on empty but ice-covered parking lots. A useful skill! I am a senior now and back in the country, dealing with long country driveways, ice, snow, freezing rain, and whiteout conditions. They don’t faze me, or at least not yet, because of all that early driving experience.

My family emigrated to Detroit from Poland when I was 8 years old. My father still works for General Motors there. My mom had never had a driver’s license before we moved. Every well-meaning person helping our family to settle in would be quick to tell her that “if you’re not going to learn how to drive, you might as well go back—you can’t survive here if you don’t drive.”

Despite growing up in the Motor City, going to the North American Auto Show every year, and being frequently encouraged to become an engineer by my parents (the Detroit equivalent of immigrants pushing their kids to be doctors or lawyers), I never took to caring about cars. After college I moved to Chicago, then New York, and happily adopted a car-free urban life along with my Millennial cohort—we were killing cars, in addition to marriage and golf. I took it a step further and went to urban-planning school—became the kind of person who peddles 15-minute cities. I made killing car culture my actual job.

When I left New York and moved to L.A., I held strong(ish) for six months before I got a car. It was liberating to drive everywhere—eastside to westside, Malibu, day trips to Death Valley. I worked for the public-transit agency in L.A. You might think that I was a bit of a sham, but most of my colleagues drove to work. Like the many Angelinos who support tax measures to improve transit, we wanted better transit for L.A., but we wouldn’t be taking it to work ourselves. It wasn’t my fault. How else was I supposed to get to the beach and take selfies in the desert on the weekend? As a bonus, my relationship with my dad was on the up now that we had oil changes and cabin filters to talk about.

A few months ago I got a job offer in San Francisco, at an urban-design firm that’s all about building bike-friendly, walkable cities. While I was hesitant to give up my winter tan, the opportunity to reclaim my urban cred in S.F. was a bonus. All the driving in L.A. was getting old, and I missed taking the train to work and walking to get my morning coffee. I moved to the Bay but kept my car. I’ll need it to go on day trips and keep those hiking selfies going.  

The shameful secret not seen in those selfies: I’m three months into living in S.F., in a central, well-connected neighborhood, and I have yet to take public transit. I’ve been walking more—I walk to the gym and to get my coffee, just as I had imagined, but for all intents and purposes I’m stuck on driving. I drive to work many days, even though it’s less than two miles away; I drive to the grocery store; I drive 10 minutes to go on Hinge dates.

I’ve thought about taking the bus or train—I’ve checked routes, but every time I’ve chosen to drive. I always have an excuse: It’s raining; I’ll have to carry things; it’s late; I’m tired. Did L.A. ruin me? Probably not. I’m learning a new city and settling in. Driving feels safer—even though it literally is not—in a new environment. It’s allowed me to see a wider swath of the city in less time. As the weather gets nicer, and I learn the transit routes better, I will settle into a routine that will likely include using transit often.

People choose travel modes based on what is available to them and will maximize personal utility for a particular trip, not based on ideology alone. Like everything else, our ideas around cars have become politicized and positioned as yet another reason to polarize us against one another. As we sit and stare at our crumbling transit systems, the smog hovering above cities, or the annual car-related death tolls, picking a side—pro-car or anticar—isn’t going to help much. The solutions are likely to lie somewhere beyond the corners we’re backing ourselves into. They will require all of the tools and political will available.

If we’re all hovering at the ends of the spectrum, we may fail to see the most impactful solutions available to us. If we approach these challenges with curiosity, seeking to understand rather than debate, we may just come up with new and surprising systems to allow us to safely and sustainably move around and between places.