Motonormativity: the water we're swimming in
It's difficult to recognize the harms created by car-dependency when we only ever see our city through the windshield of a car. More sustainable and affordable transportation is possible.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
As I’ve been thinking about ways to articulate just how deep the roots of car dependency run in our collective consciousness, I keep coming back to this parable from David Foster Wallace. When it comes to transportation, motonormativity is the water we’re all swimming in. What the hell is motonormativity?
It’s hard for us to imagine traveling by any mode other than a car because for the past 100 years, we haven’t built American cities and towns to accommodate anything other than cars. We drive by an empty bus stop in front of a mostly empty parking lot and think to ourselves, “The city should improve transit.” We might pass someone on an e-scooter zipping along the sidewalk (assuming there is one) and mutter something about how scooters are dangerous and should be banned. Then we continue along in traffic in an otherwise empty car and park in a veritable sea of “free” parking. If we’re even momentarily inconvenienced by not immediately finding a parking spot that we deem to be sufficiently close to our destination, we declare “There’s nowhere to park.”
That’s motonormativity. It’s the assumption that of course we’re driving. Of course we wouldn’t walk or bike or take public transit. Of course there will be plenty of “free” parking when we get there. The Sierra Club’s Decarbonation Plan for Virginia calls for reforming Virginia’s transportation system “to maximize clean, sustainable mobility,” and states that “Virginia must redirect its focus from moving cars to moving people.” Cars are one way to move people, but motonormativity makes it difficult for us to imagine how on earth we would move people from point A to point B without one.
I’ve written about the harm reduction role EVs play in reducing carbon emissions. But greenhouse gas isn’t the only problem cars create. Even if there was some way we could immediately swap all privately-owned gas vehicles (GVs) for privately-owned EVs, we would still face several major issues created by car dependency that electrification does not address.
“There’s nowhere to park.”
There are an estimated 2 billion car parking spaces in the U.S. for 278 million cars; more than seven parking spaces for every automobile. The average parking spot (including the space needed to maneuver in and out of the space) requires about 330 square feet. Considering that the typical car is parked 95% of the time, this is a reckless waste of land and materials. The overbuilt car storage lots ubiquitous across North America are a blight that makes our cities homogeneous, barren, spread out, less productive, hot, un-walkable, and exacerbates stormwater runoff issues.
Harrisonburg’s zoning ordinance currently requires a minimum number of car storage spaces to be built, yet limits the number of housing units for people that can be built per acre. And we wonder why we have a housing shortage. Perhaps we have our minimum and maximum priorities backward. Expanding our glut of heavily subsidized “free” car parking in the midst of a housing famine would be a negligent misallocation of limited and valuable land.
More car infrastructure increases demand for more car infrastructure.
All that parking does not include the land, asphalt, and infrastructure needed to build and maintain all the streets, roads, and highways that cars (GV or EV) travel on. Car dependency is a vicious cycle: we need wider roads and more parking because we already have so many wide roads and so much “free” parking. This further induces demand for driving.
When a new housing development is proposed, the required traffic impact analysis (TIA) process has a built-in bias that assumes everyone will drive a car every time they leave the house. In combination with parking requirements, TIAs become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as roads are expanded to accommodate more cars and parking is overbuilt. As a result of all that sprawling car infrastructure, the surrounding area becomes such a hostile place to walk or bike that few residents end up using any mode of transportation other than a car (assuming they can afford one).
Think bigger, build smaller.
Gas-powered vehicles are a comically inefficient way to move a driver and a few bags of groceries short distances, wasting 80% of the energy on heat and parasitic auxiliary components. EVs are far more efficient than GVs, which sounds great until we consider the payload-to-vehicle ratio. 75% of American workers commute by driving alone, meaning the driver is the only person in the car. A 200-pound driver makes up 5% of the weight of the 4,000-pound vehicle they’re driving. For the 9,000-pound electric Hummer, that same driver would account for only 2.2% of the total weight. From an energy perspective, using massive vehicles (gas or electric) to get ourselves to and from work every day is like using a hydraulic forklift to return clean plates to the cupboard, one by one. It’s overkill.
I’m pro-EV, but size matters: When it comes to energy conservation, efficiency, and public safety, smaller is better. EVs with fewer than four wheels are ten times more energy-efficient than electric passenger cars. We need smaller EVs with smaller batteries, not tank-sized killdozers.
Large utility vehicles are deadlier than sedans, yet they’re outselling sedans more than 3-to-1.
More than 40,000 people are killed and 3 million are injured in traffic crashes each year in the US. Pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have reached a 41-year high. Traffic engineers, beholden to the MUTCD, have prioritized moving vehicles quickly at the expense of safety, sustainability, and accessibility.
Meanwhile, cars are getting bigger, heavier, and more dangerous. The overwhelming majority of new personal vehicle sales are now oversized pickup trucks and SUVs which are more deadly for other drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists than sedans. And there are other detrimental impacts cars have on human health and longevity, such as exhaust that degrades our air quality and toxins from car tires that end up in our local waterways. When it comes to health and safety for people outside of the cars, federal regulators appear to be asleep at the wheel.
A once and future city
Harrisonburg wasn’t originally built to accommodate cars, and we don’t have to accept that life here will always revolve around the automobile. Prior to the age of motonormativity, the social ills from cars taking over streets that belonged to pedestrians, horses, and cyclists were obvious. UVa professor Peter Norton has written a book about this period of U.S. history before motonormativity took root, and I’m finding all sorts of gems like this in the archives of the Daily News-Record:
Harrisonburg’s own climate community goals (adopted by council just a few months ago) include making sure that “the transition to a low carbon future is effective, affordable, equitable and inclusive.” There is nothing more affordable than not having to spend $500 to $1,000 per month own a private vehicle, and there are no cars (including EVs) that are less carbon-intensive than walking, biking, and taking public transit.
If we are serious about creating sustainable and affordable transportation, driving privately-owned automobiles in the city must necessarily become less convenient, while walking, biking, and taking public transit must become more convenient. We should stop subsidizing cars and catering to motorists at the expense of everyone and everything else. Driving and parking should be right-priced to reflect the full social and environmental costs of cars, and that revenue should be reinvested to improve infrastructure for walking, biking, and public transit.
If prioritizing pedestrians, restricting the movement of cars, and charging for parking sounds far-fetched for a small city like Harrisonburg, keep in mind it’s already happened on the campus of our largest local employer. It’s happening in different ways (and for different reasons) in cities like Paris, Minneapolis, Tempe, Bentonville, and many small towns across the US.
We have an opportunity to re-prioritize people over automobiles in our municipal policies, budgets, and planning documents. For the sake of our planet, our health, and the wellbeing of future residents, we should take it.
Thanks for this well written article. I appreciate you taking the time to articulate this very important perspective.