In Defense of a Car-Centered Society

 Wanting personal space requires cars.

I live in Texas. Now wait – lest you say to yourself, “Ah great, a good ol’ boy from Texas defending his right to own a dually Dodge Ram with a 10” lift that runs on coal”, I do not own a Dodge Ram, I drive a small electric vehicle. Also, in the last 15 years, I’ve spent 8 of those years outside of Texas (two years in a large city outside the United States, four years in a college town and two years in classic suburbs). I like Texas; this little ditty is informed by life outside of Texas.

There are a lot of popular fantasies about living in a carless society. Frequently they use Houston as a punching bag. There is a particularly popular video on YouTube that attacks Houston for being dangerous and not walkable. It bothers me that the takeaway from the video is that because Houston made some mistakes in the 1800s and recently underinvested in sidewalks, all cars are bad and we should all walk to work and bike everywhere. Houston literally does NOT have zoning laws. That’s not common and even Houstonians waver on whether they like that about Houston (side note: Houstonians love everything about Houston). The argument “cars are bad because Houston” fails because of several confounding variables.

But here’s the real kicker: some people like having space.

I also like having space. I like being able to listen to loud music, hang stuff on walls, drop my shoes on the ground and kick a ball to my daughter without pissing off the people that live above me, beside me or below me. Maybe it’s my farmer heritage, but I feel claustrophobic living surrounded by other people. I want privacy, separation and quiet. I want to control my own climate and environment (no smells from the hoarder neighbors). This generally necessitates living on enough land to buffer me from my neighbors.

Biking and walking everywhere are generally incompatible with the desire to have personal space. Cars bridge that gap well and are getting even better at it.

Is wanting personal space inherently bad? I like to cast questions like this against the benchmark of ubiquity: “What if everyone wanted personal space?” A quick thought experiment:

Texas has ~170 million acres of land. If we trim that down only to farmland (rough proxy for desirability/livability), that’s ~120 million acres. Splitting that amongst the ~30 million residents (and taking out a generous 25% for roads, commercial and industrial buildings and public utilities and institutions) leaves 3 acres per person. If my wife and I have two children, that means my family gets 12 acres! Wow! If I lived near my parents, in-laws and siblings, we could probably split upwards of ~100 acres between all of us. That is way more land than we would even begin to know what to do with. My house sits on less than one-third of an acre and I am perfectly content with that. At least for me, this thought experiment satisfies me that wanting a little personal space is not inherently evil. There is more than enough to share for a while, even if we somehow started seeing explosive population growth rates.

So, operating under the assumption that wanting personal space is not evil, I head north from the city, purchase my little house in a little subdivision and make the daily drive to work on the interstate (that would exist independent of my need for it, salute to you Pres. Eisenhower).

If those opposed to car ownership concede that I am allowed to live in personal space, what remains of their argument?

ihatehouston72: “but ur forcing the cities to create and spend precious taxpayer dollars maintaining roads to get to ur workspace”
CarLover96: “isn’t that taxpayer money also paid by the businesses that operate there, of which i am a part?”
ihatehouston72: “sure, but it’s not just about who pays for it. what about all of the danger and pollution and noise that all that traffic brings?”
CarLover96: “im sure im not alone in wanting space… if I prefer having space and u grant me that, and there are thousands of others that prefer space, maybe the net benefit to society is higher in allowing and maintaining these roads”
CarLover96: “plus bruh its hot as hell why would u want to walk to work every day…”

A few additional thoughts:

• My electric vehicle is, in many respects, the antithesis of what most anti-car people hate about cars:
• Doesn't require gas stations
• Drives completely silently
• Detects pedestrians, animals and roadblocks faster than any human can
• Is much more convenient to drive than basically any other car I've ever owned driven or ridden in
• Once EVs truly catch on, I think the minority of miles driven on the road will be by ICEs
• When traffic is silent and much safer, pedestrians need not worry as much
• Zoning laws can successfully allow for healthy, quiet, safe and fun urban living that ALSO allow for cars; it’s been done before
• Parking lots are cheap to build and can be useful outside of just temporarily storing cars
• Along those lines, parking lots are now much more vertical than they used to be, taking up much less space in downtown areas of cities
• I believe zoning laws and parking minimums can definitely be taken too far

This would be a big claim for me to make as someone that has no formal education in the topic, but I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?

(By the way, there's nothing wrong with driving a Dodge Ram)