The finding that using a car occasionally but not being required to certainly resonates with me. I grew up in a fully car dependent rural place, have always bee

The finding that using a car occasionally but not being required to certainly resonates with me. I grew up in a fully car dependent rural place, have always been “into”cars, and love a spirited drive on country roads. Now, I’ve lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years now and still own a fun-to-drive car that I use once a week or less. The combination of being able to do 95% of regular errands on foot and the rest via transit, plus having access to a car to go places outside of the city on a whim is really quite a privilege and a nice way to live. Whenever we spend significant time in places where you must use a car to do anything outside of the house (e.g. visiting family in both my wife’s and my own rural hometowns), I really appreciate not having to do that every day. It seems to me that car dependency has some kind of effect of making people angrier—even some of the kindest people display surprising hostility behind the wheel, and moving around in isolation cuts out a lot of micro/transient social interactions that can actually brighten a day. At this point I think there are so few places in America where you can live like this, it means people have a limited frame of reference for what’s possible—lifestyles that don’t involve a car for almost every activity are so different, you get stuck on questions like “how will I get all of the groceries home when I shop once a week.” I wish we could build more variety into our cityscapes and provide viable alternatives rather than effectively mandating car dependency by law. The price of homes in what car-optional places do exist certainly suggests a lot of market demand.