It's amazing how much engineering in the US caters to cars and conflicts with municipal regulations. One road near my office is 4 lanes plus a center turn plus bike lanes, so 7 lanes, engineered to autobahn standards so it's pretty easy to go 70, but the speed limit is 40 (and should probably be 25 taking residences etc... into account). We were driving in Costa Rica not too long ago on the pan am highway, the speed limit was 30, and it was pretty much not safe to exceed 30. The road was a strip of asphalt laid on the terrain as it was found. The ground was not flattened, widened, deepened, substrated, prepped for a thick road over the top that could handle any rig at any speed.

More biking and more walking for short trips = reduction in obesity rates, and reduced BMI.
Car sharing is the logical way to save money, and reduce car dependence for longer trips.

And with gas over $4/gallon, it amazes me even more to see the plethora of SOV trucks. Yes, they are very macho and popular- and get 15 to 20 mpg. Consumers buy gas inefficient vehicles and then complain about high gas prices - oh well.

If I could get downtown from White Center in less than 90 minutes on transit, I'd almost never drive into downtown/Capitol Hill/Ballard/etc. But, that's not possible with our current transit system.

So, given the choice of sitting in traffic in my car for 20 minutes and burning $0.75 worth of gas, or spending $2.75 and suffering through 90 minutes of the misery that you can count on experiencing on board any south end bus route, I pick the car every single time.

Cars aren't the problem. Shitty transit service to outlying neighborhoods is the problem. I'd love to see the Stranger send someone to live in Burien or White Center for a month without a car, that would be a fun read.

"...it’s the car and oil companies who are to blame, with their ludicrously unrealistic ads."

If I allow myself to succumb to manipulative advertising in the face of overwhelming evidence of the negative impact of car ownership on myself and others, then I am also partly to blame.

Yes! Though of course I use them, public transport being sub par where I’ve lived since I left Sydney decades ago, however I’ve never gotten a license. had a motor bike for a bit, crashed, that was the end of that. Did try to learn to drive, but some minds are not geared to all that precision.
Yeah, it limits one’s movements, then I’ve always got a few creative things going on @ home & I reared kids for decades. At that time, it was safe for kids to go off around the villiage I lived in. Or at least, I believed it so.
I walked about as a kid, away from parents.

Why would there ever be an honest ad for anything? That's not the point.

Perhaps the dumbest article Matt the car-hater has ever written, but I’m sure he’ll eclipse his idiocy soon. Completely obsessed with his fanatical viewpoint with no ability to see a different perspective. Do cigarettes transport people? Do they allow for independent and rapid commuting? Do they provide some people alternative housing? What a fucking lunatic.

Matt, I recommend Chesterfields for your anxiety.

I love the analogy of smoking. Seemingly unquestionable, but totally a recent, human convention. I own cars and rely on them, but my imagination isn’t so stunted that I can’t picture a better way. I can. I wish it existed. Cars are only freedom if you ignore how dependent they make you on gas or charging stations, mechanics, road builders, etc. etc. Great piece!

@10,

Good point. Capitalism incentivizes manipulation. And before everyone comes roaring in w/ examples of manipulative socialists, of course countless such examples exist. But at least those individuals and examples are recognized as corrupt, whereas the advertising execs in our system are rewarded for exploiting the system to their benefit. Good times.

The real solution isn’t ads, though. We need to end the hidden subsidies for cars. Tax the manufacture of massive trucks and all private vehicles to recoup the enormous societal costs of roads and emissions. Create guidelines for size and safety to end the arms race that is The American Big Car Demolition Derby. Put the money into building AWESOME public transit (not the shitty kind for poor people we begrudgingly fund in this car-obsessed culture). Is that a “war on cars?” Boo fucking hoo - cars have been waging war on all of us for 100 years+.

@11,

Eh, I think he makes some perfectly legitimate points in noting that the full range of consequences relating to vehicle ownership aren't widely knows (and certainly not widely propagated.) I own a car and as an outdoor enthusiast couldn't imagine not owning one, but even I was pretty taken aback by the 3,700 daily death figure. It's an international statistic that I just googled to corroborate and is pretty striking, even in that context. The cigarette analogy isn't perfect for the reason you mention, but it's relevant within the context he's presenting it.

Unless this country gets on board with massive public transportation projects so that it's possible for EVERYONE, no matter where they live, to take public transportation to and from work (easily, not with 5 bus transfers) WE NEED CARS. We created this society. We made it so that nearly everyone needs a car. You can't punish people for having cars when the society in which they live EXISTS SOLELY TO SUPPORT CARS.

i have never owned a car. I used a car when I live in NJ after I graduated from college. Then I moved to Jersey City Heights where I took a bus to the PATH train to NYC and the subway. Then I moved to Brooklyn. I used the subway system for living/working and when I had to go back to Jersey I took a bus from Port Authority and when I had to go home to upstate NY I took an Amtrak train.

Then I moved to Seattle (2002) and realized I had moved to a city that pretended to have a public transportation system and it was a nightmare. I lived on Capitol Hill. I mostly walked to my jobs and took buses everywhere else. I joined Flexcar and used that car sharing service for longer drives or shopping trips that required more than two bags of groceries. I had friends with cars. Seattle may be different now with the light rail (I don't know), but when I lived there, outside of my living/working life, I needed to either endure the shitty bus system or drive or ride in cars to get around. Seattle is NOT a place you can easily live without a car (unlike NYC which IS). When I got sick I could no longer drive and had to give up having a license. Being disabled, however, and no longer able to use any public transportation (including paratransit because there is none where I live), I have to ride in a car if I want to go anywhere - including all of my doctors' appointments.

This country is made for cars. Some people literally drive multiple hours a day to commute to and from their jobs (for many reasons - mostly because where they can afford to live there are no jobs and where there are jobs they can't afford to live).

Instead of punishing car owners, how about we punish every place in this country that does not have a public transportation system to serve the people who live there. That would make way more sense.

And beyond really good public transportation options this country truly needs a train system that allows one to travel anywhere in the country via train - without it costing thousands of dollars or taking days or weeks to make the trip.

None of the above is going to happen. The United States is a car culture.

As for any and all saving of the planet that could have happened if that were not the case? We're so far beyond that it is irreparable.

People don't need to drive in real cities because real cities have good public transit networks. Mudede's comment about how rich people ride the subway in big cities, while poor people ride the subway here is telling. We have one rail line. When we built light rail, we avoided the most dense neighborhood in Seattle, and Southcenter, where people might actually want to go because... ¯(ツ)/¯? And then when the Capitol Hill station opened and ridership shot up, everyone got really surprised. We can't build public transportation like we've been doing it and THEN make it hard to own a car, that jusy punishes people. Instead, we need to push hard on making public transit excellent.

People already hate driving through Seattle. When you listen to suburbanites, they call Seattle a festering shithole, because they can't wedge their enormo-F150s through anything narrower than a football field. (Look at Bellevue's streets, then look at some of the narrow, twisty, beautiful streets in Capitol Hill. Suburbanites can't deal, their heads explode) You don't need to penalize drivers further, you need to give them a better alternative.

The thing is though, there's no alternative like there is in Boston, or Amsterdam, or Tokyo, or any actually large city.

I've said it before, Seattle is polite and ineffective. We have a long history of half-assing things, having them fail because they're half-assed, then tearing them down. Penalizing cars first winds up half assing the problem. Taxing the everloving shit out of the rich and using that money to (among other things) build decent public transit QUICKLY. We're half-assing it by taking forever, having land values rise out of the range of affordability, then giving up. (And we will give up. Ballard's transit station is gonna suck donkey shit because it'll be too far away from where you want to go, for instance)

@12
Fair enough.
I had to use up my Federally- mandated rants by year's end.

@20 In all fairness, there are a lot of reasons beyond narrow streets to think Seattle is a festering shithole.

Obviously written by someone with no kids who need shuttling to/from daycare, school, or after-school activities. Nor with any elders in the family with needs involving transportation, especially on short notice. Cars provide many positive services for many, probably most people~ quite unlike cigarettes which provide no positive benefits to anyone, except postponing nicotine withdrawal to smokers.

The comments on this thread are better than the article. I find lots of irony in The Strangers positions on certain things. Cars, roads, gas powered lawn equipment - super bad and should be banned outright. City sanctions drug injection sites, shoplifting. harassing elected officials in their private homes - that's ok. it really is a mad, mad world sometimes.

"No, you can’t have a public park, a hundred empty cars need to sit there instead."

I thought you supported affordable housing?

@29 It's not selfish to place a value on your personal time and/or safety. The reason most people take public transit in the large urban cities where it is ubiquitous is because it is the better option not because they have some higher sense of moral purpose than those of us here in Seattle. TS and the rest of the urbanists in Seattle like yourself are not going to win people over by shaming them onto transit. The only way you will convince people to take transit instead of driving is by making it an improvement over driving and even then it won't change the fact that some transit lines have safety issues but that is a different thread.

LOL, Matt has clearly taken up/been saddled with Ansel's old beat: half-baked outrage click-bait articles poorly disguised as muck-raking. He even uses the same topic for his methods.

@31 of course you are shaming them. When you call people selfish or lazy for driving without actually knowing why they are driving that is an attempt to attribute behavior that is generally looked down upon in society to the action of driving a car. No one wants to be labeled these things so your intended action is to get them to change their behavior via labels. Pretty much the definition of public shaming but I think you already actually knew that.

Ever had a contractor show up at your house to fix or install something? Did they take the bus to get there? Ever had to drop kids at daycare by 8:30am and be at work at 9:00am? What bus did you take? Ever had to shop for a week's worth of groceries for a family of four? How many hours on the bus did that take? How many bags did you manage to carry?

The fact that you have a lifestyle that allows you to be carless is super. Pat yourself on the back for that. But if your ideology boils down to "everybody should be just like me and the world would be great!" then at least consider that you may be the asshole.

My no car story.
I bought an Xmas tree at Chubby and Tubby's in 1985-ish. I took it on the bus from Aurora to Downtown, drug it up Denny to my apt.. The bus driver said his bus never smelled so good..