I’ve lived car-free for five years. My entire 20s I’ve lived without a car. The first three years, I lived in New York. Yet, over the last two, as I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve survived in some of the most car-dependent places in the world.

I’ve seen the much of the best of public transit (shout out Spain and Switzerland) and absolute nightmares of car dependency (Talking to you, Southern California.)

These experiences have completely shifted my perspective on how we move.

The more I saw, the more I realized the role car-dependency plays into destroying our cities, separating us from our communities, damaging our health, and slowly killing the planet.

It led me to learning more about how the world got here, in particular how the United States got here.

It’s shown me that we didn’t have to pollute our air, steamroll our nature, and reduce our opportunities for everyday movement with car dependency.

Seeing the alternatives has also given me hope that we can build something better moving forward.

Car dependency has become a metastasized cancer.

We must be cut out before it kills us.

In this article, I aim to illuminate the hidden ways cars cost us.

While there are some obvious costs of driving (like the gas price or the car price tag), there are dozens of hidden costs. These cost go well beyond what comes out of your pocket when you fill up your car’s gas tank.

In this article, I will uncover these hidden costs.

Look out, this will get long, because deconstructing the hidden costs of cars is not a small task. This is not just about gas-guzzling cars either. Electric vehicles have share many of these hidden costs too.

Here are 27 hidden costs of cars.

There are probably more, but here’s what I came up with.

Financial costs from your pocket

According to AAA, the average ownership costs $1000/month. This is money coming right out of your pocket each month. To put this another way, the average American spends eight weeks working each year just to pay for their cars.

It’s essentially a second rent or mortgage. And it’s just to be able to live your life!

Often one of the best personal financial decisions you can make is to live without a car. Of course, part of the problem is how few cities in the United States make this practical.

Let’s break down these financial costs to you, starting with the obvious.

1) The Cost of The Car: It Depreciates Rapidly

I don’t need to break out numbers of how much cars costs. Or how quickly the effort you just poured into it drops the second you drive it off the lot.

2) Loans on Your Car

On that big price tag, unless you’re paying in full, you’re often paying it in installments with regular car payments. That means you pay an additional percentage each month on top of the cost.

Plus, like so much else in our financial system, those who’ve struggled financially in the past often have to pay higher loans.

While currently super high due to interest rates, over the last 10 years you’re looking between four and five percent on average. So add that to the price of the car. For a $20,000 car, that’s an extra $1000.

3) Taxes on Your Car

From the sales tax at purchase to the registration fees, there are taxes on your car too.

4) Insurance

Usually another few hundred bucks per month.

5) Repairs

I grew up in rural Vermont (car-dependent). My first car cost $1500. It was a 1996 Audi. This was in 2016.

Unsurprisingly, it needed about that much in repairs before it died two years later. If you try to economize and get a used car, you may end up paying for it with repairs.

6) Time Opportunity Cost Due to Traffic

In 2021, Americans lost 3.4 billion hours due to traffic, according to this stat. This is in the post-COVID world too. INRIX even broke this down by driver.

If you commute by car to Boston, they estimate you’d lose over $1000 a year due to opportunity cost.

In contrast, if you live somewhere you can walk, that cost drastically decreases. If you take transit, you can get the time back. I love to read when I’m on buses and trains.

7) Healthcare Costs From Accidents

Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the United States.

Knowing the stats on this alone make me try to limit the time I spend in automobiles because it’s statistically the event that’s most likely to kill me.

I’ll talk more about this later, but let’s focus on the financials of crashes.

A 2014 CDC study reported that in a single year nonfatal car crashes had an estimated lifetime medical cost of $18.4 billion. Yikes.

Much of that of course gets paid by health insurance (note, this is separate from car insurnance) but some comes out of your pocket.

Still, some of that burden gets placed onto taxpayers, which brings me to the next section.

Financial costs to taxpayers and society (also from your pocket)

There’s a huge irony that even though car culture is typically associated with free-market economic values, it’s actually a way bigger tax burden than robust, effective public transit.

In this study from Quebec, which City Nerd referenced in his video on the societal costs of driving, which pairs well with this article, they determined that…

“$1 paid by a citizen for car transportation costs society nearly five times more than $1 spent on public transportation.”

Let that sink in.

The authors of the study went on to give this zinger: “Motorists always think that they’re paying for other people’s public transport and it’s the opposite.”

How could this be the case? Well, it becomes obvious once you begin to think about everything that goes into driving, and how much of that is paid for by our taxes, directly or indirectly.

Nearly every aspect of driving is paid for at least partially by taxpayers.

Remember this next time a politician (probably a Republican) shoots down a proposal for better transit, but gives the green light on expanding a highway.

Sometimes I wonder if they just can’t do math, then I remember that it’s because they receive tons of donations from the automotive and fossil fuel industries.

Here’s another example from a different study that puts the numbers in different terms.

Car dependency is not just a disaster for your wallet, it’s even worse for society. And who’s paying for these society costs? Well, you are. And I am. We all are together.

These subsidies benefit car users disproportionately.

And these taxpayer investment exacerbates economy inequality, because only those who can afford very high car ownership costs are able to reap any benefits from this investment.

Everybody can use sidewalks and mass transit, whereas only those who can bear the brunt of still high vehicle ownership costs benefit from the ridiculous amount of tax revenue we pour into driving.

Now let’s breakdown what these costs are.

8) Costs of Roads

In 2022 the federal government alone spent $52 billion. That’s an absolutely staggering number, and it doesn’t include local and state governments. We spend a metric shit ton on roads and highways.

The Urban Institute put this nice graph together showing that according to US Census data, local and state governments used 5.8% of their total spend on highways and roads. Yikes.

Imagine if we put even a fraction of this into other transit options like the rest of the developed world.

9) Subsidizing Gas Prices

The United States had made its entire economy dependent on cheap gas prices. This has created a situation where we seem to have no financial or moral boundaries for what we’ll do to get gas, and therefore keep it cheap. This is arguably its own article.

John Kerry, who under Biden served as the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, a man who I think genuinely wants us to help solve the problem, had this to say in a 2024 interview. “You’re going to have a complete and total rebellion economically,” he said. “People will be out in the streets demanding that the gas prices go down.”

We’ve built a society that depends on gas being cheap, so our tax money does nearly everything in its power to make it cheap.

As one example, The federal government provides direct subsidies to the oil and gas industry, which include various incentives and tax breaks.

Estimates suggest these subsidies range from $10 to $50 billion annually. Yes, this is to the already ultra-rich oil barons who are undermining our efforts to combat climate change.

Another example is how public grants fund studies on fracking, or the extraction fossil fuels from the ground.

While more indirectly, but probably more expensive if you could map it all out, is the lengths our foreign policy decisions go to get more gas. Here’s one example that leaves a knot in my stomach.

10) Foreign War Costs

Scholars debate the role that oil played in the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.

We probably never will know th, because the reasons belong in the minds of Bush and Cheney. Instead of hearing from an amateur like me, I will quote John S. Duffield’s academic abstract on the topic.

“Certainly, no compelling evidence, either in the form of declassified documents or participants’ memoirs, has yet emerged indicating that oil was a prominent factor or constant consideration in the thinking of decision makers within the Bush administration. But oil is nevertheless critical to understanding the decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. Oil did not make a U.S. war against Iraq inevitable. But it did much to set the stage for war, greatly increasing the incentives to topple Saddam, by any means possible. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the invasion of Iraq ever having occurred but for oil.”

Even if it was part of the equation, the cost of this was so overwhelming big I get angry thinking about it.

Over 4,400 Americans died in the War in Iraq. Some estimates put the cost of this war at $3 trillion dollars.

Iraq is certainly not the only foreign conflict that oil has played a role in.

We can even look at the current conflict in Ukraine. We’ve known Putin was a bad dude for decades, yet, we gave him the pass, over and over, in large part because we wanted Russia’s oil.

Again, I’m not expert on Russia and Ukraine, but Garry Kasparov is, and he condemns how the U.S and Europe allowed their economic interests driven by oil to precede human rights. He writes in his book 2014 book Winter is Coming, “Human rights in Russia were the least of Western corporations’ concerns.”

It’s impossible to look at the War in Ukraine without talking about our bottomless addiction to the oil we put in our cars, power our grid, and manufacture everything from plastic bags to concrete.

11) Cost to Prepare and Recovery From Extreme Environmental Events

Again, this is hard to put a number on, but climate catastrophes are a classic Black Swan event.

If you’re unfamiliar with Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan, it refers to highly improbable events that have massive, world-changing impacts.

These events are unpredictable, yet at the same time inevitable. The concept is named after the historical belief that all swans were white, a notion that was proven false when black swans were discovered in Australia.

Climate catastrophe is a great example of a black swan.

For example, Katrina cost $100 billion in damages and Hurricane Sandy cost New York $35 billion. And these are just a few storms!

That’s the easy part to calculate. What’s harder is how we will adapt to millions of people becoming climate refugees as sea levels rise and places become unlivable.

Given that the US Treasury estimated the cost of climate change from 2018-2022 to cost over $600 billion, then we’re talking trillions of dollars.

Are cars alone responsible for this? No, they’re not. But every day they continue to exacerbate the problem and there’s no hope of reversing this without ceasing to dump fossil fuels into the vast majority of personal vehicles.

12) Everything Is Less Efficient Due to Car-Driven Sprawl

My last two points have been about fossil fuels more broadly, so I’ll bring it back to cars.

Car dependency encourages the spread of low-density, car-centric development in cities.

This means everything will be more spread out, which reduces the efficiency of public and private services. It’s harder on a postal service, for example, when every house is further apart.

Every truck delivering goods to sprawled-out areas needs to then get dispersed more.

13) Land Use Opportunity Costs

My imagination of car-free cities began when I lived in New York. When this 2020 opinion article on a car-free New York came out, I began to see the ways car dependency financially harms us as a society.

As the article says, cars “are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.”

The land value (2020 numbers) of Manhattan is $1.7 trillion. Yet, there are enough roads and parking spots wasted to fill the size of 4 central parks.

So we’re talking hundreds of billions of Manhattan real estate currently used by roads.

It could be used for parks, larger sidewalks, more bike lanes, more housing (hello, we’re in a housing crisis), urban regenerative agriculture, and literally just about anything else.

As I’ll talk about later, there’s also a huge unseen environmental cost to these Manhattan roads.

14) Delays Movement of Goods

In traffic, private vehicles have the same right of way as freight trucks.

That means a person in their car going somewhere is slowing down trucks carrying important goods.

This is asinine, and it’s because we of our dependence on personal vehicles to get places.

7) (Again) Healthcare Costs from Accidents

I’m putting this here again because it’s also a strain on society’s funds.

What’s perhaps harder to quantify is the long-term healthcare costs from more stress, less physical activity, and more social isolations. All of these are consequences of car dependency.

Health and Wellbeing Costs of cars: Driving Kills, Quickly and Slowly

15) The Stress of Driving

We know the saying, “stress kills.” In the cultural imagination, driving in traffic is the stereotypical example of excess, chronic stress.

Navigating through traffic congestion, dealing with aggressive drivers, and the constant vigilance required on the road can skyrocket your cortisol levels on a regular basis.

Over time, elevated stress levels can contribute to a range of health issues, including high blood pressure, heart disease, weakened immune system, and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.

I don’t need to get into this, but I highly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s classic book on stress, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.

16) The Danger of Driving

In 2021, over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents. It’s the leading cause of death of American adolescents.

Because of this it’s statistically safer to grow up in cities, where people drive less, than suburbs.

The American imagination often paints cities as dangerous and suburbs as safe. This is simply incorrect.

17) The Danger for Bikers and Pedestrians in a Car-Centric World

In a world dominated by automobiles, bikers and pedestrians face serious danger.

Roads and cities designed primarily for vehicle traffic often lack the necessary safety measures for those on foot or bicycle, such as adequate crosswalks, bike lanes, and pedestrian barriers.

In 2022, 7,500 pedestrians died in the US, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association data.

The disparity in protection and priority given to drivers over bikers and pedestrians not only endangers lives but also discourages active, healthier modes of transportation.

Those in smaller vehicles are also more likely to get injured or die in accidents, pushing people to buy bigger vehicles, which are more dangerous for pedestrians, bikers, and smaller vehicles, pushing people to buy bigger vehicles and on and on.

These bigger vehicles use more gas, require more raw materials to make, and are a bigger danger to everyone else.

18) Less Walking, Worse Health Outcomes

We pour an absurd dollar amount into pharmaceuticals and other interventions to fight the obesity epidemic. The fitness industry tells to head to commercial gyms and buy their training programs and nutrition plans.

Yet, we’re not recognizing that our car-dependency means we’re sitting more and walking less than any other group of humans before us, which is one of the core causes of our sedentary life, and subsequently our poor health outcomes.

If You’re Passionate About Health and Fitness, Notice How Our Car-Dependent Nation Sets Us Up For Failure

Regular walking helps to maintain a healthy weight, improves cardiovascular health, reduces the risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, and enhances mental health by lowering stress and depression levels.

If people had the easy opportunity to walk more in everyday life, it would improve all of this. I write more about this in my article on How The Health & Fitness Industry Can Combat Climate Change.

We need to redesign urban environments and transportation policies to encourage walking and other forms of active transport.

(I argue we need to do this in rural areas too, as I discuss in my article on the Vermont housing crisis.)

19) More Air Pollution and Higher Asthma Rates

I don’t think a single person would say, “I actually like breathing in gas and exhaust fumes.”

Yet we do, thanks in large part to car-dependency. It has come with terrible health consequences that disproportionately affects the poor (because the rich don’t want to live near the highways they drive on. Also, poor neighborhoods were the ones the bulldozers went through when building the interstate system.)

I talk about this every month, but a study on the Bronx Cross Expressway showed higher asthma rates for kids near the highway, in primarily poor and minority neighborhoods.

We’ve taken strides in this. An examination of the 1990 Clean Air Act prevents thousands of deaths and millions of cases of asthma exacerbation per year.

I don’t think EVs are a solution at all, but I’ll admit that they help in this respect.

20) Less Social Interaction

Car dependency plays a significant role in the infrastructure cycle that contributes to increasing isolation and loneliness, fueling what many refer to as the loneliness epidemic.

The design of car-centric cities and suburbs often prioritizes wide roads and highways over community spaces, such as parks, squares, and pedestrian zones, where people can naturally meet and interact.

Cars lead to sprawling neighborhoods that require a vehicle to navigate, reducing opportunities for casual social encounters that are vital for community cohesion and individual well-being.

I mean, does every single person in the suburbs really need their on lawn? Do they even use them?

Addressing the loneliness epidemic requires rethinking urban and transportation planning to foster environments that create more connected, accessible, and community-focused spaces.

Environmental Costs to Everyone

In this section, there is overlap from the last one, because what’s bad for the planet will also be bad for our health. Despite society’s best efforts, we cannot “dominate” the planet or allow it to submit to our will. This type of thinking is what’s on track to kill us all.

We need sweeping changes to reverse a dangerous track we’re on. It’s not just about warming the planet, either. Already, millions of people per year die around the world from things like air pollution and lack of clean drinking water due to contamination. The climate crisis is already here and it has been here for decades. It’s not a far-out point in the future. If you don’t see these impacts, it’s because most of the bad parts are stashed in poor communities. From the power plants, to the highways, to the drinking water issues (like Flint, Michigan), climate change is not an abstract out-in-the-future problem for anybody but the relative rich.

Here are the ways cars are contributing to the problem.

21) CO2 Emissions From Your Gas Tank

This one you know. You fill up gas, you burn it off in your car, it goes up into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Booo.

This much we all know, and electric vehicles can help this. However, they may also not. That’s because much of our power grid is run by fossil fuels. Some estimates put it at 66%, even by 2050. So if you have an EV, and you plug it into to somewhere that gets its power from fossil fuels, they may not be better at all. It might be better. It might be worse. It’s often just changing where the emissions spew out.

Regardless, this is not the only way a car, of any kind, aids in the destruction of our planet and all life on it.

22) Emissions & Deforestation From The Lifecycle of Cars

The entire lifecycle of cars, including the mining of the materials and manufacturing process, contributes significantly to environmental degradation.

This encompasses the extraction of raw materials, production of components, assembly of the vehicles, and their eventual disposal. Each stage consumes vast amounts of energy and resources, leading to habitat destruction, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The global supply chain for car manufacturing is particularly problematic. Parts and materials are sourced from around the world, requiring energy-intensive transportation even before the vehicle is assembled. The production process itself, from steel for the chassis to plastics and electronics, is resource-intensive and generates considerable emissions.

The Problem With Electric Vehicles As a Climate Solution

This is why EVs are far from carbon neutral, even if you charge them with renewable energy. The lifecycle of any new car is massive, so from an environmental perspective, that has not been addressed at all. In fact, in many cases it’s worse.

For example, EV batteries use many rare earth minerals like cobalt and lithium. The mining of these materials requires deforestation. To the people who live there, it means the destruction of their homes, the pollution of their air, and long-term damages to their ecosystem. And, these minerals are often mined by child slaves in places like the Congo, (Elon Musk hates when we talk about this.)

Yet driving an EV gives a consumer the illusion that they’re really helping the planet. It makes us feel good, and gives big companies that are principally responsible for climate change to say they’re doing something good for the planet.

If EVs and Tesla’s could solve this massive 100-pronged problem, don’t you think we’d have seen more progress by now? They’re up to 16% of sales in 2023, according to US Energy stats.

For a critique of electric vehicles, I love what Jenny Price said in her short, snappy book, Stop Saving The Planet: An Environmentalist Manifesto.

She takes the point of this even further and asks us to consider what we did to earn the money to buy the electric vehicle, and what those who have our money fund with it.

Car dependency and the big industries that profit off of it (the automobile, mining, and fossil fuel industries) are fundamentally the problem, not just that the car consumes gas.

23) Fewer Plants = Worse Air Quality and Hotter Climate

In my article on urbanism and city design lessons from Medellín, I wrote about how the city’s initiative to add over 2 million plants has led to measurable benefits air quality while cooling the city by an average of 2 degrees Celsius.

We talked about the financially opportunity costs of excessive roads. It also has environmental costs. What’s stopping us from having more plants? Well, partially all the land used to cater to cars and the land use patterns it inspires, from the roads themselves to the parking lots to the suburban lawns.

Replacing roads and lawns with a wide variety of plants means a cooler and cleaner urban environment.

24) Poor Drainage, Worse Water Quality

In college, I learned about how NYC’s sewer system works when it rains.

Normally, when you flush the toilet in New York it goes to get treated. However, when it rains, the systems often reaches its capacity as rainwater heads down the sewers.

When it hits capacity, the city has no choice but to empty untreated water (your poop) into the surrounding harbor. Well, the other choice is to allow poop water to flood the streets.

That’s why when it rains, the water quality in New York is so bad. It’s filled with our poop! Of course, this is terrible.

In vain of going underground to fix up the sewer system, costing a ton a city funds and closing streets for years, the less expensive and better solution is to swap some of the concrete for plants and soil. That’s because the soil can absorb rainwater.

This will also be key for preparing New York for the next superstorm, potentially saving people’s homes and lives.

Social Costs For Everyone

You can’t separate the construction of highways and car dependency in the United States from systemic racism. All of these issues are interconnected.

However, the social costs go beyond that and harms everyone.

25) Reinforcing and Worsening Segregation

When we built the interstate system they were almost always built through the path of lease political resistance.

Almost invariably, this meant low-income black and brown communities.

I already talked about higher asthma rates along the Cross Bronx Expressway (majority black and brown communities.) More broadly, it’s important to understand how this reinforced segregation and kept poor people poor.

First, the highways ruined the neighborhood. It literally cut right through it, destroying their ability to walk around and attract business all while polluting their air.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs discusses this effect. If you’ve walked in “unwalkable” places like me, you’ve seen how nothing good even happens under highways.

Second, the highways created a physical divider, separating these communities from the rest of the cities.

The focus on highway construction and car dependency also diverted resources away from public transportation systems, which are more likely to be used by minority and low-income populations.

This has limited mobility options for those without access to a car, further entrenching economic and racial divides.

You can call in an extension of Jim Crow, you can call it segregation, you can say it’s just politics if you want to. But the facts are that constructing highways has reinforced racial inequality in the United States.

26) Exacerbation of Income Inequality

Regardless of race, our car-dependent culture supports a cycle where the economically disadvantaged can’t move up.

In the fall of 2022, I spent two months traveling around the US, without a car. I took Greyhounds and Amtraks and public buses everywhere I went.

I experienced firsthand how hard it is to exist in the US without a car.

It often took me three times as long to get places. 20 minute drives took 90 minutes on transit. This wasn’t in the suburbs, either. This was in major cities from Los Angeles to Austin to Phoenix where lots of people live without cars.

I couldn’t imagine how tough it would be to have to commute this way to a 9-5 job. If the job ended earlier or started later, it would have been even harder because I know that many buses come, if you’re lucky, every 30 minutes, but just as often every hour, and sometimes don’t have service during off hours.

Those without a car simply have fewer job prospects and opportunity.

There’s not doubt in my mind that the high costs of car ownership combined with our lack of public transit traps countless hard-working people form building their lives in the United States.

If you have a car, it’s easiest to get to and from a job. But to have a car, you need a to afford it. This creates a vicious cycle of exacerbating income inequality.

20) (Again) Less Community, More Loneliness

I already mentioned this, so I won’t count it twice. The prioritization of roads and car infrastructure over community spaces such as parks, housing, and public gathering areas means we all have less opportunity to spend time together.

Parks, community centers, and public squares serve as vital gathering spots where people can come together for recreation, social events, and informal interactions.

These spaces are essential for building a sense of community and belonging, promoting social bonds, and supporting mental health.

Without them, places risk becoming collections of disconnected individuals rather than cohesive communities.

While not the full story, our infrastructure plays a role in our loneliness epidemic.

What Can We Do To Eliminate These Hidden Costs of Cars?

The good news is there’s lots we can work on and everybody can help.

1) Lobby for Better Policy

Our individual actions frankly won’t get us out of this. As long as the oil companies continue to have their way and shift the blame to consumers, they’ll keep using fossil fuels.

And they’ll keep trying to shift the blame to us.

As one example of this, Heather Rogers in her book Gone Tomorrow discusses the Keep America Beautiful campaign. The oil companies and plastic manufacturers sponsored the campaign! She writes that the “KAB wanted to turn any stirrings of environmental awareness away from industry’s massive and supertoxic destruction of the natural world… singling out the real villain: the notorious ‘litterburg.’”

While this is about littering and not cars, it demonstrates the point about how these massive companies and lobbying groups have tried to shift the blame.

That’s why we need to collectively work together to elect politicians who are committed to moving away from car dependency and fossil fuels altogether. No more politicians whose campaigns are funded by the automobile industry or the fossil fuel industry.

The marriage between Americans and cars is a forced marriage, as Colin Beaver says in his entertaining read, The No Impact Man.

To take back our agency, we need politicians who don’t take massive donations from the automobile industry and fossil fuel industry. This is mostly Republicans, but many Democrats too.

Watch Out for Urban Planners and Developers With Outdated Mindsets

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, released in 1960, Jane Jacobs compared the mindsets of urban planners as equivalent to medicine before the discovery of germs. She writes of urban planners of the time, “They are all in the same elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting.”

Urban planners who think more roads relieve traffic should stop being urban planners. (It doesn’t, it just leads more people to getting cars and more sprawled development, which means more traffic. See LA or Houston as prime examples, or really any major US city.)

Urban planners who think parking minimums in city downtowns are a good idea also should stop being urban planners. Cities should be built for people, not cars.

Urban planners who think that taking away space for cars in cities is “infringing on freedom” should, first, stop. Second they should go spend some time in lower-income areas in our car-dependent cities and ask how “free” people are who depend on our terrible transit to get anywhere.

Car-dependency and all of the hidden costs of cars we have to pay is not freedom. It’s actually the opposite of freedom. If you want to live somewhere without a car and have reasonable commutes, I believe people of all income levels should be able to make that choice. In the United States, you can’t.

2) Engage in Your Community

A lot of urban planning happens on a local level. So get involved with your town or city and help it become more accessible to non-car transit options. You can also advocate for more green spaces, fewer roads, and other no-brainer wins.

Could you help add more plants? See where people want a new bus route? Advocate for a bike share program? If you want it in your community, others probably do too.

3) Move Somewhere You Don’t Need a Car and Rethink Your Transit

Don’t participate. Opt out. Show that there’s a demand for car-free living. Which, there absolutely is, if rent prices in all our scarce walkable cities and zip codes is any indication. If this scares you, check out my article with tips to live without a car in the U.S.

In the last year, I’ve also worked to fly less and take more trains.

I’ve come to love the Amtrak, as flawed as it is.

I’ll take a 20-hour Amtrak before I take a plane or rent a car at this point. I’ll do it if it costs more or if it’s longer.

(If you want to see what this is like, I wrote a whole article about my experience in an Amtrak roomette, their bunk-bed option.)

There are actually walkable zip codes in lots of cities where you could at least live “car-light.”

4) Talk to Your Friends About It. Annoy Them.

At the start of 2024, I wrote about how I wanted to be more annoying. So here I am, writing about topics like climate change and urbanism. This is what I’m like in real life and I’m sure my girlfriend and friends are annoyed by it.

Please annoy your friends by talking about these issues too.

Individual action might not “make a difference” but getting you and all your friends, who in turn will get their friends to make different decisions, can. That’s because it can help us all push for collective, systemic shifts.

Together we can move towards creating transit options that are more affordable for us and society, better for our health, and give us more options and personal freedom.