How (and Why!) to Think About Driving a Little Less

I love driving. Love it. And I am not alone.

“Automobility is our national way of life,” the historian and journalist Dan Albert has written. Getting your driver’s license is as close to a coming-of-age ritual as we have; cars inspire everything from our music to our movies to the design of where we live. At the same time, the automobile has boxed out other options for getting around, poisoned the air we breathe, and is the country’s most significant single cause of climate change.

Driving is so integral to American life that only 8% of U.S. households currently get by without owning a car (and 20% of those carless households, including mine, are located in the relative mass transit paragon New York City). For most people, “giving up driving” is more of a radical thought experiment than a realistic possibility.

Here’s the thing, though: You can almost certainly drive less than you do right now. Yes, that takes thinking and planning and doing some things differently than the way you’ve always done. (You can also check out our e-bike guide for more advice on that.) But the majority of car trips made by U.S. drivers are for distances of less than three miles. “If I just need to pick up a carton of milk, does it make sense to do that in a 6,000-pound metal box on wheels that is powered by dinosaur juice? Not so much,” Doug Gordon, the cohost of “The War on Cars,” a podcast about the fight against car culture, told me recently for our guide about how to drive less.

As urban theorists have argued for decades, America’s overreliance on cars has reduced our overall freedom. In addition to diminishing our options for getting around — it’s car or bust in places without safe bike lanes, public transportation options, or dense residential and commercial development — there is also the “inescapable dependence on a vast support structure comprising oil refineries, tanker fleets, service stations, repair shops, road crews, traffic police, emergency services, investment in road projects, manufacturing, licensing, registration, insurance, and all who work in these areas,” notes the Public Transport Users Association. “Seen this way, even a bicycle permits greater freedom.”

Cycling is, on balance, usually more convenient than driving (no need to look for parking!), not to mention far cheaper and healthier. Driving costs about $5,522 per year, according to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics; cycling only 10 miles a week can knock off about $299. Other studies have found that the health benefits of cycling add an additional three to 14 months to your life, even when the possibilities of collisions and air pollution are factored in.

We can’t just Tesla our way out of the global emissions problem, either. To reduce transportation emissions by 45% by 2030, we would need 70 million electric vehicles on the road — in addition to reducing miles driven 20% per capita, RMI has found. Public transportation or cycling are the next best options for most people in most places.

E-bikes, especially, are incredible car replacement tools, helping to make otherwise daunting commutes manageable for a bigger pool of people (you don’t even have to be athletic!). While there can be sticker shock shopping around, there are also also all kinds of e-bike incentive programs and lending libraries available, and even higher-end models cost cost a fraction of a car at the end of the day. (“Well, but what if it rains?” As the old Scandi saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad weather; just bad clothing..)

Americans admittedly have one very good reason to resist letting go of their cars: Our infrastructure is so overwhelmingly car-centric that it is actively hostile to people who are thinking about alternative ways of getting around. “So often in the United States, we think about things like, ‘What is the most convenient way for every single person in a car to get from Point A to Point B with as few obstacles as possible?’” Alexa Sledge, the director of communications at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit organization that promotes non-polluting and safe travel in New York City, told me. “But that leaves so many people behind.”

This might actually be one of the biggest social benefits of using your car less: It will, in turn, open your eyes to how little room has been left for anything else. “Reimagining how we’re going to truly allocate our public resources — our public dollars, our public services — to serve everyone is so important,” Sledge stressed. Looking around, you’ll realize there is almost never a justifiable reason for your suburb or city to lack protected bike lanes or sidewalks or crosswalks — other than because they weren’t expected or demanded in the first place. What a failure of imagination that is.

And the best part? Even as you think about driving a little less, you can still love cars. A car can be an incredible freedom machine. But it isn’t the only one.