The Car Is Not the Future: On the Myth of Motorized Freedom

I’ve always felt uneasy about the idea that owning a car is somehow a default requirement for adult life. It’s not just the cost or the maintenance, it’s the deeper realization that cities, economies, and even social expectations are built around the assumption that you’ll drive.

Growing up, we were sold the idea that cars meant freedom. Freedom to move, to explore, to escape. But in practice, the promise feels more like a trap, paved with traffic lights, gas bills, and endless parking lots.

But it wasn’t always like this. What if the car's dominance was a choice, not a necessity?

In the early 20th century, streets were shared spaces: places where people walked, gathered, played. Automakers reshaped public perception with propaganda, blaming pedestrians for getting hit. It worked. Streets became something to fear, not share. As explored in The Forgotten History of How Automakers Invented the Crime of Jaywalking, the word jaywalking itself was a propaganda tool and streets eventually, surrendered to cars entirely. Automakers, faced with public backlash from pedestrian deaths, needed a scapegoat. So they blamed the walkers, not the drivers. The sidewalk became your lane; the street belonged to the car.

This redefinition of public space went hand in hand with policy and infrastructure changes. Highways sliced through neighborhoods, parking lots consumed city centers, and transit funding was gutted. What’s more, this car-centric worldview made its way into our laws, our habits, and even our sense of freedom. Today, to live without a car in many places is to opt out of participation in basic civic life.

Cities that have experimented with removing traffic signals, as shown in What Happens If You Turn Off the Traffic Lights?, found that people actually behave more cautiously and accidents often decline.

You see something similar in one of the boldest infrastructure experiments of the 20th century: Sweden’s switch from driving on the left to the right, known as Dagen H. On September 3rd, 1967, at precisely 5:00 AM, the entire country changed the side of the road people drove on. The preparation was immense: over 360,000 road signs were replaced overnight, and a nationwide traffic ban was enforced during the switch.

And yet it worked. According to The Guardian, not only was the transition smooth, but traffic accidents actually dropped immediately afterward. People drove slower, more carefully. For a brief period, the streets were safer. Not because of more control, but because of collective attention and uncertainty.

Both cases suggest the same underlying truth: when we stop overengineering our environment for efficiency and control, people tend to act more responsibly. The absence of strict systems forces drivers to be more aware and respectful. It shows that a different kind of city is possible: one that isn’t built around cars, but around people.

But how did we get to a place where reclaiming the street feels radical? We tell ourselves it’s about convenience, but is it really?

If the price of gasoline truly reflected its environmental, health, and geopolitical costs, some economists argue it would exceed $10 per gallon (the article below is from 2016 so nowadays the cost will be even higher). That’s one of the main arguments in The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life, which lays out just how deeply society subsidizes car culture, socializing the harms while privatizing the benefits.Subsidies, tax breaks, and unaccounted externalities keep this illusion affordable. But it’s like getting a loan with hidden interest rates: eventually, someone pays.

Perhaps the most profound critique comes not from an economist or engineer, but from philosopher André Gorz in his 1973 essay The Social Ideology of the Motorcar Gorz argued that the car, sold as a symbol of personal freedom, ends up enslaving its owner through debt, isolation, and dependence. Fifty years later, it still rings uncomfortably true. He wrote: "never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community".

But, there's a glimmer of hope. Recent data from a study titled Are Generation Z Less Car‑Centric Than Millennials? shows a clear generational shift. In the early 2000s, sitting for a driver’s license was seen as a near-universal rite of passage. By 2020, Generation Z teens were significantly less likely to get their licenses and later, when they do, it's driven by necessity rather than aspiration. While the study focuses on the U.S., the trend appears to be global. The peak car theory reinforces this perspective: in many developed regions, young people are driving less, acquiring licenses later, and treating cars more as tools than status symbols.

Policy is beginning to catch up with this shift. Cities like New York and states like California have recently moved to decriminalize jaywalking, recognizing that the law was never about safety alone but about enforcing car dominance on streets. Lawmakers cited how enforcement disproportionately targeted Black and Latino pedestrians and wasted police resources while doing little to prevent accidents (AP News, CBS News).

All of this leads to a simple question: why do we keep designing our world around machines that isolate us, pollute the air, and bankrupt our cities? We think this is normal. But it’s not. It’s the result of decades of policy, ideology, and inertia. Maybe it’s time to take our foot off the gas.