3 Tips For Getting People Out Of Their Cars For The Short Trips

Yes, short urban auto trips are sometimes desirable. But with a little effort, cities can help people who live in urban neighborhoods find alternatives for running that short errand.

The other day I wrote a piece extolling the virtues of the short urban auto trip. My bottom line was that it’s better to drive eight blocks to get somewhere, as people often do in cities, than drive eight miles to get somewhere, as people often do in the suburbs or exurbs.

While I was in Houston last weekend, my friend Raj Mankad, the opinion editor of the Houston Chronicle (and just about the only person I ever randomly ran into in Houston as a pedestrian), wrote an interesting piece about riding the new circulator in his close-in neighborhood there.

The Circuit urban shuttle service in Houston.

The service is provided by Circuit, which runs small electric vehicles in urban neighborhoods around the country (the same company runs a similar service in my neighborhood) and is deliberately designed to give people an alaternative to driving when trips are short and parking is not easy.

Raj’s piece got me thinking about the Substack newsletter I sent out last Monday, praising the idea of short auto trips in urban areas. I wrote the piece after experiencing a lot of such trips over the weekend in Houston, which is pretty much a 15-minute driving city.

In that piece I argued that it’s better to drive eight blocks to get somewhere in a city than eight miles to get somewhere in the suburbs. But Raj’s piece got me wondering why do we make short trips by car, even in cities, where we ought to have alternatives?

After all, most of the time when we go somewhere it’s not very far away – usually two miles or less. Even so, the use of cars for these trips is pretty persistent, and often for good reasons.

One of the most interesting academic papers on this topic (summarized here but otherwise behind a paywall) came to some pretty simple conclusions:

— People drive when they are shopping for items they must lug back home or when they are going to multiple destinations.

— They take short trips on foot – a surprising amount of the time, given that the study was in Los Angeles – when they’re going to one destination near where they live.

— And they’re much more likely to walk than bike or take transit to those destinations.

To me, it’s this last point that’s the most interesting. If you want to “get people out of their cars,” at least for short trips, the most promising alternate mode is walking.

So what does it take to actually get people out of their cars on short trips? And what can cities do to encourage alternatives to driving short distances? Here are a three tips that cities might follow: