On the surface, “freedom” on the road can seem like having a car and driving it everywhere. But when you look at how transportation and land use have changed over the last century, a different story emerges.
A hundred years ago, many more people lived close to what they needed and could reach daily life by walking, biking, or riding transit. Today, we travel farther, spend more of our income on transportation, are exposed to more peril, and are leaving a large and growing share of people who cannot easily drive stranded and stressing public services.
The unfortunate reality is that after a century of cars, we have fewer mobility options and our ability to thrive and even survive is more dependent on a profit-making industry that has nearly complete control over our freedom of movement.
The good news is that the same kinds of policies that have led us to where we are today can liberate us.
Transportation options a century ago
In the mid‑1920s, a large share of Americans in cities and towns lived within a short distance of daily life. In 1920, roughly half of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. Those cities were much denser and more compact than today’s metropolitan regions.
Streetcars and interurban rail shaped growth. In the 1910s and early 1920s, street railways carried on the order of 13 to 14 billion trips a year, well over 100 trips per resident. In many cities, most workers reached jobs by walking or riding transit. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago all depended heavily on streetcars and early subways for commuting.
Urban neighborhoods were mixed and close‑knit. Apartments and boarding houses stood near factories and warehouses. Many people lived in walking distance of small grocers, corner shops, schools, and churches. Developers built “streetcar suburbs” whose very business model depended on buyers being able to walk to a transit stop and ride into town.
People had real options. Walking was normal for short trips. Transit was normal for work and school. Bicycles expanded personal range for many who could not or did not want to buy a car. Streets carried slow traffic and a mix of users, which made cycling and walking more plausible for daily needs even without modern protected lanes.
Most important, you could live a full life without a car. Proximity and transit made that possible. That mix of short distances and multiple modes provided a kind of everyday freedom that many people do not have now.
Transportation options today
By the 2020s, the picture has flipped. About four out of five Americans now live in metropolitan areas, but those areas cover far more land than in 1920. Homes, jobs, and services are spread over large distances.
A typical pattern in newer development is clear. Single‑family houses fill large subdivisions. Shops cluster in centers along wide arterial roads. Offices sit in business parks and edge cities near freeway exits. Schools and hospitals stand on big sites fronted by parking lots and fast traffic. Sidewalks are missing on key links. Networks for safe bicycling are nearly nonexistent. Transit lines, where they exist at all, can be rare and hard to reach on foot.
Most people now use a car for almost every trip. Around 85 percent of U.S. workers commute by driving. Transit handles only a small share of trips, often around five percent of work commutes and less of total travel. The average one‑way commute has climbed to roughly 27 or 28 minutes, up from about 20 minutes in 1980, and often covers many more miles.
The money and safety costs are high. Household transportation spending often falls between 13 and 17 percent of the budget, with higher shares for lower‑income families. For many people, transportation is the second‑largest expense after housing. Owning and operating one car can easily cost several thousand dollars per year and two‑car households are common.
At the same time, the U.S. suffers tens of thousands of traffic deaths every year and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries. That adds up to roughly a dozen or more deaths per 100,000 people in many years. People walking or biking face particular danger on multi‑lane, high‑speed roads. Pedestrian deaths have risen sharply over the past decade.
This system also limits the freedom of many groups. Young people who cannot yet drive often cannot reach jobs, activities, or friends without rides. Older adults who stop driving for health or safety reasons can become isolated if they live far from stores or transit. People with disabilities who cannot drive or can drive only in limited circumstances face long waits and logistical hurdles. Lower‑income workers may spend a large part of limited earnings on cars or endure long, unreliable commutes on underfunded transit.
Cars can feel like they offer freedom on an individual trip. At the system level, we have built a world where long distances and missing alternatives turn cars into a requirement rather than a choice. That is a narrower kind of freedom than the one many people had a century ago.
What caused the “drive” towards less freedom
The shift from a closer, multimodal world to a distant, car‑based is a consequence of policy choices, backed and promoted by industries profiting from it.
One major force was highway building. Federal and state governments invested heavily in roads, especially after the 1950s. The Interstate Highway System alone created more than forty thousand miles of high‑speed routes. Urban freeways cut through city neighborhoods and made it possible to live and work much farther apart. For decades, most national and state transportation dollars went into highways, while transit received much less.
A second major force was zoning and land‑use control. After the 1920s and especially after World War II, many cities and suburbs adopted zoning maps that reserved most residential land for detached single‑family houses. In many communities, as much as two‑thirds or more of residential land allows only that one housing type. Local codes also imposed large minimum lot sizes, deep setbacks from the street, and generous parking requirements for homes and businesses. Commercial and residential uses were often separated. This legal structure made compact and mixed neighborhoods much harder to build.
As populations grew, new residents could not easily move into central or transit‑rich areas because those areas were limited to low‑density housing by law and were often already full. Instead, they were funneled into outer subdivisions and farther‑flung towns. Everyday distances grew. Driving became a necessity rather than a preference.
A third force was the decline and partial reinvention of transit. Private streetcar and bus companies lost riders as cars grew more common. They were tightly regulated on fares and often required to maintain streets along their tracks. Without public support, many systems cut service or shut down. Public agencies later took over and federal funding began in the 1960s and 1970s. New rail lines opened in some cities. But transit was often treated as a service for those without cars, not as the backbone of regional mobility, and funding levels reflected that.
A fourth force was road design and safety thinking. Mid‑century traffic engineering focused on vehicle speed and carrying capacity. Designers widened lanes and intersections and made turning radii large. Many older city streets that once worked at human scale turned into fast conduits for through traffic. Safety programs improved cars and driver behavior in some respects but left the basic structure of dangerous roads largely intact.
Finally, housing and civil rights policies shaped who had access to what. Redlining, discriminatory lending, and exclusionary zoning kept many Black families, immigrants, and lower‑income households out of new suburbs and often concentrated them in neighborhoods cut by new highways. These communities sometimes lost both housing and access when freeways arrived, with lasting effects.
Together, these choices stretched distances, removed compact options from the menu in many places, and made driving the default way to participate in normal life. They also divided access and burden along lines of income, race, age, and ability.
How to take our freedom back
Just as creating a car-centric system has made us less free, and we can restore freedom by rebuilding proximity, restoring variety in how neighborhoods are built, and supporting many ways to travel. This does not require banning cars. It means no longer building everything as if the car is the only option that matters.
One step is to change the rules about what can be built and where. Cities and suburbs can allow more housing types in more places, especially near jobs, schools, and transit. That includes legalizing duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment buildings in areas that now allow only detached houses. It also includes allowing mixed use buildings in more locations so people can live near shops and services. Reducing or removing minimum parking requirements lets builders use land for homes and businesses rather than long‑term car storage. Over time, these changes allow more people to live closer to what they need.
Another step is to treat transit as essential infrastructure. Regions can fund frequent, all‑day service on key routes and protect those routes from congestion with bus lanes or rail priority where it makes sense. Land use and transit planning can be linked so that new housing and jobs cluster along strong transit lines rather than scattering randomly. Good transit gives people who drive another choice and gives those who do not drive a real right to the city and the region.
Street design needs attention as well. Many high‑speed arterials can be rebuilt so that they are safer for everyone. Narrower lanes, shorter crossings, better crosswalks, and protected space for cycling lower the chance and severity of crashes. Filling sidewalk gaps and improving lighting make walking more attractive and safer. Campaigns that aim to eliminate deaths and serious injuries can focus on the places and designs that create the most harm and track results.
We also need to focus on people with the fewest options today. That means strong paratransit and accessible fixed‑route service for people with disabilities. It means safe routes so children and teenagers can walk or bike to school or activities without relying on adults to drive them. It means better and more frequent transit in lower‑income neighborhoods, along with fares and passes people can afford. Supporting e‑bikes and other small electric vehicles with safe places to ride can also extend the reach of non‑car travel for many people.
Finally, transportation policy can line up more clearly with goals for health, climate, equity, and economic opportunity. Leaders can favor projects that shorten trip distances, improve access by walking, biking, and transit, and repair past harms from highways. Measures of success can shift from how fast cars move on a segment of road to how many people can reach jobs, schools, grocery stores, and doctors within a reasonable time without a car.
A hundred years ago, many urban Americans enjoyed a quieter form of freedom built on short distances and many ways to travel. Today, in spite of higher incomes and more advanced vehicles, many of us have less real choice and more dependency. By changing how we build and connect our communities, we can move back toward a world where people are free to use cars when they want, but do not have to use them for every part of life.
References
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https://data.census.gov
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