It is too soon, and the data too noisy, to make any sweeping projections. Traffic volumes, while again rising, are off of typical levels, and the driving that’s currently happening is not necessarily normal behavior (some people may be driving only because others are not, temporarily making traffic less of a concern).
With many Americans unemployed or in financial hardship, and many dealerships closed or limited to online transactions, car sales have cratered; a Honda dealer in Queens, for example, reports sales are down 60%. Zero-percent financing deals abound, which hardly suggests a seller’s market.
But it’s not hard to discern anecdotal signs of an impending urban tilt towards cars. Millennials, whose propensity to drive has been declining, are expressing greater interest in owning a car. Even dyed-in-the-wool urbanists are talking about pulling the automotive trigger. The former transit reporter of The New York Times was accused of a sort of apostasy when she mentioned on Twitter that she was buying a car. Companies like Zipcar are offering longer usage periods, anticipating that “people may want exclusive access to a vehicle for a short-term use.”
Or take, for example, my friend Kelly, a television producer and New York native. Like many New Yorkers, she learned to drive late and only ever owned a car the year she lived in Los Angeles. She typically takes herself to work, and her daughter to school, a few neighborhoods away, via the subway. And yet her habits have been disrupted by the pandemic. She didn’t think, like many people about “fleeing town,” she says, but “I did start to think about when I’d be comfortable with either of us getting on the subway again.” On Brooklyn’s often chaotic streets, a bike, for her, was a nonstarter. Cooped up for months in her apartment, she started dreaming of longer trips to places not served by mass transit. Faced with the prospect of hundreds of dollars in Uber and Lyft fares — for a ride with a possibly contagious stranger — she bought a Subaru Forester.
To rephrase the old saying, a driver is a subway commuter who was mugged by the coronavirus. Even before it became “personal protective equipment,” the car has long been theorized as a place of security (even if, as one analysis put it, “traffic fatalities are by far the most important contributor to the danger of leaving home”). As the sociologist John Urry has noted, “The car is a sanctuary, a zone of protection, however slender, between oneself and that dangerous world of other cars, and between the places of departure and arrival.” In fact, being in a car can make the outside world appear more dangerous.
My car is less an essential tool for daily transportation than a kind of weekend-utility vehicle, part of my psychic “go-bag.”
The coronavirus has put a new spin on this idea, reinforced by images — seemingly out of some J.G. Ballard novel — of drive-up testing clinics in which the people outside the car are wearing hazmat suits. And it wasn’t just the curbside restaurant pickup; people queued outside of food pantries in their cars. The newly homeless slept in their vehicles on the edges of parking lots. Even political protests were taking place via the social distancing machines known as cars, a brilliant way to subvert the dominant paradigm. As one writer put it, “How, exactly, does law enforcement break up a car caravan?”
I do not begrudge the choice my friend made. For one, I work at my kitchen table and my daughter’s school is a two-minute walk away. For another, I have owned a car for the past decade or so. As a proud urbanist, this fact is not achieved without intricate reasoning and a certain amount of self-loathing — I’m someone who believes that if you’ve never felt the slightest pang of guilt at driving a car, in 2020, you haven’t thought it sufficiently through. Like many New Yorkers who own cars (or, to paraphrase Tyler Durden paraphrasing Thoreau, whose cars own them), for me it’s less an essential tool for daily transportation than a kind of weekend-utility vehicle, part of my psychic “go-bag.”
But the idea of more drivers in New York fills me with dread on two levels. The first is just narrow, entitled self-interest. The urban driver — or any driver, really — views the addition of a new driver with all the glee a surfer at a coveted “secret” break regards the arrival of a new surfer. Traffic is the classic tragedy of the commons: Every new driver gains a marginal improvement in their own situation, while everyone else’s slightly declines. And, as analyst Bruce Schaller found, since 2012, car ownership has actually been on the rise in U.S. cities (which he attributes to everything from changing demographics — more families, higher income — to troubled transit systems).
Secondly, and more profoundly, the specter of masses of new drivers coming online should dim the hearts of anyone who believes in the larger idea of urbanism. Every new car on the street, while a minor annoyance for other drivers, reduces the quality of life of everyone outside the car: In air quality, in noise, in the risk of crossing the street (the longer it takes a driver to get through an intersection, the riskier their behavior becomes). And the security that a car seems to offer comes with a footnote. The economist and writer Tim Harford points out that from March 28 to May 29, two children between five and fourteen years of age in England and Wales died from COVID-19. “To put those two tragedies into context,” he writes, “over that same period we would typically expect eight children to be killed in road accidents.”
And the truth is, even if we wanted a New York, or equivalent city, in which everyone could drive, we wouldn’t want to live there. As one back-of-the-napkin analysis found, if you wanted to replace what the subway carried with drivers, you’d need to multiply the Queens Midtown Tunnel 84 times. Fifth Avenue would need to be 200 times bigger. None of this, of course, is remotely possible.
Of course, many New Yorkers won’t be taking the subway for some time — despite it being cleaner and less crowded than ever. “People are going to have to improvise,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “And I believe they will.”
This “let them drive cars” mentality is short-sighted at best; deeply injurious at worst. A wholesale tilt towards motorization in cities imposes health costs on everyone, which will be felt long after COVID-19 has left.