Opinion: Car-Dependence Robs Cities of Their Soul

Public transportation is important for practical reasons, but it affects us on a deeper, emotional level as well

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My life has taken an interesting turn these last few years. My relationship with my girlfriend of seven years came to an end, and shortly after that, I had a falling out with one of my childhood friends that left me without the social circle I had always relied on. All of a sudden, after years of cultivating these relationships, I felt almost entirely alone.

Always one to try to look at the brightside, I focused on what I had naturally gained in exchange for these losses: freedom. I was no longer really bound to anything, so after a couple years of procrastinating, I finally mustered the courage to go and take a solo trip. I had never travelled alone and never even left the country as an adult, so my heart was beating frantically in my chest when I bought the flight ticket for Tokyo.

Within a week of being here, I had fallen in love with the city. It’d take its own article to describe everything I like about it, but it was the subtle features that really made me feel so taken with it. It’s the texture of the asphalt that looks grainier and unused compared to what I grew up seeing; the little kids walking around alone, in their school uniforms, at 10 o’clock at night; the walkways that are meticulously clean but that have overgrown plants along their edges, which shows me that the Japanese made a choice to let nature be nature; the mothers and grandmothers slowly strolling by on their bicycles, with babies fastened into a seat on the back; and that you can turn down a random alley, in any ward, and find a street buzzing with activity and a line of restaurants serving some of the most delicious food you’ll ever try.

However, behind all of these romantic scenes, the thing I believe has had one of the biggest roles of all in making this city as beautiful as it is is something rather practical and uninspiring, trains. Of course, Japanese culture is unique and plays a pivotal role as well, but the way that the fundamental necessity of daily transportation has been handled here makes all the difference.

It’s kind of an abstract point to argue, but I believe there’s an almost philosophical difference that goes into conceptualizing a city around car-dependence versus public transportation. Allow me to delineate how everything about what makes Tokyo magical wouldn’t have been possible if they had decided to invest less in their metro system and more in their roadways.

First off, cars are not the issue exactly but what a car represents, which is private transportation. I talked to a Chinese friend of mine about her experience visiting the United States, and one of the first things she mentioned was how “you get in a car and you go from one place to another, all alone.” Cars insulate you from the world around you and from the people around you. If you live in a building, drive to work at a different building, and then drive home, you’ve basically just been inside all day.

In Tokyo, there’s incredible street food to be found on every block, and these little establishments are always full of patrons. For the tiny stretches of space where there are no restaurants, there are vending machines and convenience stores. As a result,any outing you take becomes interactiveall along the way, and you’re furnished with anything you could need or want.

You actually get to touch and see the world around you when you’re getting around like this. I took a picture of the same flowers every day on my way to the train station. I can feel the sun on my face, stretch my legs, and move at my own pace. I can people watch all along the way, and if I have some extra time, stop in for a snack or go down a random street for a few minutes.

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Secondly, cars don’t just change how we experience the city, they change the city itself. There are certainly some beautiful and impressive cars out there, but en masse they’re nothing but ugly. The incessant growling of engines, the grinding sound of tires speeding over the concrete, the ear-battering honks from impatient drivers, and the smell of exhaust — it’s all unappealing to the senses.

Yet, all of this follows you around everywhere you go in most cities in the U.S. You don’t realize what a plague on the soul it is until you’re walking down a street in Tokyo in the evening time, and you notice there’s a tranquility to the air you’ve never experienced in a major city before.

When you need a personal vehicle to get around, the layout of the city becomes designed for cars. In the place of alleys bustling with families and groups of friends talking over warm meals, you have five-lane highways; where there could be a park, replete with fish and turtles and pigeons, you now need to install a parking lot; and what could’ve been a walkway lined with sweet-scented flowers, is now just another bulldozed path, blanketed with dull and lifeless asphalt.

The population density of Tokyo is rarely found elsewhere around the globe. Car-dependence would make this all but impossible to recreate. To accommodate cars, everything needs to be farther apart. You need extra room to store them, to let them pass between buildings, and to give them the option to park outside of most every structure. It’s impossible to describe the constant sense of exhilaration that comes with traversing a city that, being so tightly packed with people, hides around every corner a new jazzy scene to take in.

Everything I love about this place, whether big or small, can be traced back to the transportation infrastructure. The mothers and grandmothers on their bikes are renting those bikes; you can find them publically available for rent all around, and the rareness of cars actually lets you feel safe riding them through the city. The children walking home at night alone is partly a reflection of a society that is safe enough for such a thing and that encourages independence in its youth, but it simply wouldn’t be possible if kids couldn’t get around on their own because they needed a car to do so.

The liveliness around every bend is directly attributable to this as well. The sheer number of tiny restaurants all along every street wouldn’t be possible if each of them didn’t have endless opportunities to spontaneously draw in hungry passerby. The quiet, plant-skirted walkways, and the sweet aromas they foster, are the result of a simple logistical decision, made by unknown city planners at some point in the distant past, but these things are also the soul of the city, and it’s a tragedy that so many American city-dwellers have been robbed of that soul.

I wrote an article earlier this year, “Why Cars Are Evil,” giving an in-depth, data-based analysis of why car-centric cities are worse by nearly every metric, but I felt compelled to revisit the topic and discuss what I wasn’t able to put into words the first time. Forget that it’s less safe, less healthy, and less affordable— it’s the way it detracts from the lived experience, by barring you from the world around you, and the way it stamps out so much that could be beautiful and vivacious and turns it into flat, gray stretches of concrete. This is what really makes it so unfortunate that personal vehicles ever became as prevalent as they have in the United States.