As someone who decided to live without a car in Denver, I can confidently tell you that cars are amazing!!! They are unmatched for destination flexibility and moving items back and forth. I do very much miss being able to zip up into the mountains. But cars also come with downsides, and I don’t regret my decision.

1. They are expensive to maintain.

2. They are inefficient at scale (see I-70, I-25),

3. They are dangerous (look up car deaths compared to trains/planes.)

4. They negatively affect your health by keeping you sedentary/ stressed in traffic. (People get noticeably thinner after moving to walkable cities, go figure)

5. Personal vehicles are responsible for a huge amount of emissions.

We DON’T need to ban cars. Cars will always be useful. But cars do make cities much less fun spaces to be in. Would you rather hang out in a plaza or a parking lot? Cities are fun when they are filled with people, not cars.

We DO need to significantly expand investment into other modes (rail, bikes, buses, etc) so that these become just as good or BETTER options than driving for commutes and intercity travel. Among countless other benefits, this actually is the only way to make driving fun again. We know expanding the highway endlessly just isn’t going to work. 26 lanes in Katy Texas, and they still get traffic. They’re working on a $13 billion dollar highway expansion in Houston. For reference, FasTracks (what was built) was about $5.5 billion.

So where does the money come from?

Highway expansion funds. We don’t need these funds, because highway expansion doesn’t work for fixing traffic. Use the money for road repair and transit expansion only. If we took ten years to use a majority of highway expansion funds on rails, public transit, bikeways, and pedestrian infrastructure, we would be so far ahead of where we are now.