When you like cars, idea of a society built around cars sounds pretty great. There are some downsides to that plan, though, and we’re not just talking about the risk of someone crashing their car into your house. A new study found that while not having a car in the U.S. is bad for your overall life satisfaction, so is being forced to drive more than half the time you leave the house, the Guardian reports. Basically, having to drive all the time is making you less happy.
“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” Rababe Saadaoui, Arizona State University urban planning researcher and the study’s lead author, told the Guardian. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”
The list of possible contributing factors is long and includes the stress from having to safely navigate in traffic, social isolation of being alone in a car so frequently, lack of physical activity on a daily basis and cost of buying, operating and maintaining a vehicle. This study is, of course, backed up by dozens of similar investigations on the effects of car dependency on the humans. Living in a car the way we do is bad for our happiness, our sense of community and our health.
Unfortunately for all of us, outside of a few select neighborhoods in a couple of cities, there’s only so much you can do to get around without a car in the U.S. because decades of policy decisions have effectively made it impossible to leave your house unless you own a car.
It isn’t like we even go that far when we do drive, either. Half of all trips are reportedly three miles or less. There are definitely people who have to drive 30 miles just to get to the closest grocery store, but that’s not the case for the vast majority of people. And things are even harder for people who have disabilities that prevent them from driving. As Anna Zivarts, the author of “When Driving Is Not an Option,” told the Guardian:
Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car. I’m often the only parent going to any sort of event without a car. Everything is built around cars.
We are just locked into a system of driving that is meant to be more enjoyable but isn’t. I walk five minutes with my kid to the school bus stop and yet other parents make that journey to the stop by car. Is this really how you want to spend your life?
We need to get the voices of those who can’t drive – disabled people, seniors, immigrants, poor folks – into the room because the people making decisions drive everywhere. They don’t know what it’s like to have to spend two hours riding the bus.
Then again, it’s not like we didn’t already know there were downsides to America’s extreme car dependency. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world that hasn’t seen significant improvements in road safety in recent decades. In fact, while other developed countries are getting safer, the U.S. stands out as the only one that’s getting more dangerous. Plenty of people have deluded themselves into thinking the U.S. is some special, magical place where the things that work in other places can’t possibly work, but that doesn’t make them right or give them a leg to stand on.
Of course, turning around the disaster that is modern American infrastructure is going to take time and money, two things that voters don’t have much patience for. So the odds of things getting significantly better anytime soon are low, at least outside of a few cities with leadership that actually wants to improve people’s lives. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
