Can We All Live With One Less Car?
It's not something that most people are doing yet. But all of our demographic and economic trends suggest it's way more possible than it used to be.
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A few years ago there was a hot idea in urban planning called the “location-efficient mortgage,” championed originally by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which argued that mortgage lenders should take both the cost of housing and transportation into account.
The idea turned the traditional “drive till you qualify” approach on its head. Most of the time, people increase their transportation cost (and time) to reach a community where they can afford to buy a house with a mortgage they can qualify for. CNT’s idea was the opposite: The less you have to spend on transportation, the more you can spend on a mortgage, so people who live in, say, transit-rich areas might be able to qualify for a higher mortgage.
CNT created a very useful index called the H+T index, that combined the cost of housing and transportation in different locations to provide a more accurate understanding of how much life really costs. By this measure, Houston’s actually more expensive than San Francisco because you have to drive so much in Houston.
But as my longtime friend and former writing partner (The Regional City) Peter Calthorpe has pointed out, this whole argument only matters if you can actually get by with one less car.
The reason is simple, and it’s related to a fundamental challenge here: A car is a fixed cost. You pay for it whether you use it or not.
So it doesn’t really matter if you live near a big transit stop – even if you commute using transit – if you’ve still got a car sitting in the driveway or garage that you hardly ever use. You’re essentially paying for a travel option you don’t use. Which is part of the reason people drive cars once then own them.
All this came to mind the other day when I was writing my riff on “the trip as commodity” – the idea being that we are moving, slowly, toward thinking of the trip as the thing you buy in order to travel rather than the vehicle. We’re accustomed to paying by the trip for intercity travel – airplanes, trains, buses – but until recently we didn’t think that was about local travel. Especially in the suburbs, everyday travel required owning and operating your own vehicle – a commodity that’s very expensive and sits unused perhaps 95% of the time.
Ride-hailing has begun to change that. Business travelers were perhaps the first to understand this. Why go through the hassle and cost of renting a car you have to drive yourself when you can just Uber around instead?
Owning fewer cars, if you can get away with it, seems like a win-win: Fewer cars on the road, thus helping society at large, and more money in your pocket, thus helping you personally. But what does it really take to dump a car and rely on alternatives such as walking, biking, transit, and ride-hailing?
To answer that question, you have to think about what people most frequently use cars for. And the answer is pretty simple. On a day-to-day basis, people use cars primarily for three things:
1. Commuting to work.
2. Schlepping kids around.
3. Shopping for groceries and other everyday supplies
A typical elementary school pickup line.
Most people in the suburbs – and even in city neighborhoods – probably think of these three things as immutable. You have to commute to work, which is often someplace accessible only by car. You’ve got to schlep the kids around because, especially in the suburbs, how else are they going to get anywhere? And groceries and other supplies are too heavy to carry.
As Axios likes to say, “Yes, but … “
1. Commuting to work
Yes, most employed people have to commute to a workplace or job site, and although I don’t have any numbers I’m willing to guess these are mostly located in carbound suburbs.
But:
— 35% of the American workforce now works from home at least part of the time (at least according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I still choose to believe.
— 15% of the American workforce works from home all the time. Despite all the hoopla about Zoomtowns,i n my day job I’ve found this to be pretty constant from city to city. And it’s three times the pre-pandemic figure.
So more and more people don’t have to drive to work, at least not every day.
2. Schlepping the Kids Around
Yes, most people who have kids at home want access to a car at all times so they can schlep their kids around and be able to respond to an emergency.
But:
— Only 25% of American households have children at home, according to the Census Bureau.
In other words, this is a problem that three out of four households don’t have.
3. Getting Groceries And Other Everyday Items
Yes, most people still go to the grocery store, to the drug store, to Costco, etc.
Almost 15 percent of American households have their groceries delivered.
But:
— More than 20% of all American retail purchases are conducted online including 13-14% of all grocery shopping, which is double the pre-COVID figure.
People are getting more and more comfortable getting their everyday goods, including groceries, online.
The Opportunity Is There
This is not to say that everybody’s suddenly going to get rid of one of their cars. There’s considerable anecdotal evidence, for example, that if people don’t have to go to the office every day, they’re more likely to drive, even if they work in a transit-rich location where they have the option of taking a train or a bus.
Similarly, many people in the real estate market still act as if most people have kids. Think about how often a childless household buys a house in a good suburban school district (often without transportation options) because they think it they’ll get more for it when they sell it to another childless household.
And, of course, there are a lot of people who live in small towns and exurban and rural areas who are pretty much stuck driving everywhere forever – even Uber and Lyft don’t work very well in places like that.
But all these trends do mean that more American households – maybe not most of them, but a significant percentage of them – have the opportunity to dump one of their cars and save a bunch of money if they want to.