Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Car Dependence

Where Car Commuting Is Shrinking — And Where It’s Not

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 16, 2016 | 14 Comments

Where are Americans making the shift away from driving to work? Crunching newly-released Census data, Yonah Freemark looked at how commute travel is changing in different cities and regions. In general, car commuting in major metro areas declined between 2005 and 2015, but the shift was greater than a couple of percentage points in only a few […]

John Oliver on the Cruel Poverty Trap That Is Subprime Auto Lending

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 16, 2016 | 98 Comments

Never forget this: Those who pay the highest price for the American system of transportation — one that makes owning a personal car practically a mandate — are the poor. We’ve reported before about how the largely unregulated subprime auto lending market has been expanding in recent years, leading some people to wonder if a breakdown in the […]

Seattleites Own More Cars Than Atlantans, and Other Surprising Comparisons

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 29, 2016 | 5 Comments

Here’s an interesting glimpse at car ownership in a cross-section of American and Canadian cities, courtesy of a recent report from the Shared Use Mobility Center. This table comes from SUMC’s analysis of car-share and bike-share [PDF]. We trimmed it to highlight the cars per household across the 27 cities — 25 in America and two in Canada — in […]

“Opportunity Score” Shows Best Places to Find a Job Without Owning a Car

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 28, 2016 | 7 Comments

Which places put economic opportunity within reach for residents who don’t own cars? There’s a new tool to evaluate housing locations according to the accessibility of jobs via transit and walking. Redfin, the company that runs Walk Score, today released “Opportunity Score,” which ranks millions of addresses across 350 cities based on the number of jobs within a 30-minute walk […]

Car Dependence and the Troubling Rise of Subprime Auto Loans

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 10, 2016 | 19 Comments

There have been warning signs about the growth in subprime auto loans for years now. But the issue got some very high-profile attention last week when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon raised concerns that there may be a bubble in the auto lending market. Since the economic recovery began, lending institutions have actually loosened standards for car loans. The auto […]

Remixing Great Masterpieces for the Highway Age

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 14, 2016 | 3 Comments

Last week we highlighted the Photoshop work of Memphis resident David Lindsey, who updated Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” to comment on the way cars have come to intrude on almost every public space. Lindsey was motivated by the decision to allow overflow parking from the Memphis Zoo in the city’s historic Overton Park, but his concept quickly […]

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