cars

Seniors And Walkable Neighborhoods

I occasionally read that seniors are likely to be a strong constituency for walkable, public-transit oriented neighborhoods.  This argument runs as follows: seniors gradually lose the ability to drive as they get older.  Thus, they are eventually going to need more transit and more walkabl... read more »

Americans are more multimodal than some might think

Because most Americans drive to work on any given day, one might think that they don't use any other mode of transportation, ever.  But a recent review of federal transportation surveys shows otherwise.   In fact, 65 percent of American commuters take at least one non-car trip per wee... read more »

Cities, Suburbs and Commute Length

I recently discovered a fun tool: the Census Bureau's Census Explorer, which is full of maps about all kinds of things.  In particular, I spent some time exploring commute length. ... read more »

Suburbia Not Always Cheaper

A story from a coworker of mine: Mr. X (the coworker) and his family move from Queens to Long Island to take advantage of the allegedly better public schools.  As a  result, they are able to save money by pulling their children out of Catholic school.  Were they better off?  Appa... read more »

Another Way To Measure Car Dependence

I got into an argument on Twitter about how widespread car ownership was in NYC's outer boroughs, which in turn caused me to go to city-data.com to answer the question: how do you measure how many people own cars, anyhow? The City Data website has data not just for cities and counties, but for indiv... read more »

Using terminology to frame the debate

I recently saw a listserv post with the headline "the costs of automobilism."  The phrase "automobilism" makes automobile dependence seem like an alien ism, a sinister ideology like communism or fascism.   By contrast, sprawl lobby types prefer the term "auto-mobility."  By associatin... read more »

The News From Sprawl Is Not Good

Given the widespread public transit closings in the 48 hours before Hurricane Sandy, it could be argued that one advantage of a car-centric society is that cars enable quick evacuation (assuming that people aren't stuck in traffic). ... read more »

War on Cars? Or War on the Carless?

Seattle's Publicola, in anticipation of an upcoming panel discussion on the War on Cars, invited two of their panelists to guest editorials. David Roberts, from Grist, wrote The War on the Carless. ... read more »

Michael Moore says farewell to GM ... and cars?

In the wreckage of General Motors, Michael Moore senses salvation: The demise of GM as we’ve known it offers a tremendous opportunity to catch up to the rest of the world where high-speed passeng ... read more »