They made it a necessity.   Matthew Yglesias links me to this…

Ask Umbra: Can I have a kid and be car-free?

My husband doesn’t like me to take our baby on the bus, even to visit friends who live near the bus line. He thinks buses are dirty, that my time is too valuable, and that it makes us look poor.

I stare at the screen and a much younger inner me looks at that entire conversation in wonder at how thoroughly the creation of the suburbs made the automobile so dominant.   Now it’s if you have to take the bus you must be poor.   But we always took the bus and we weren’t poor.   Not very well off exactly, but never poor.

I was raised by a single working mother and we didn’t have much, but there wasn’t that automatic assumption back in the 50s and 60s that if you took the bus you were poor, and actually back then having more than one car in the household meant you were pretty well to do.   Dad went to work in his car and mom stayed home to take care of the kids and do her housework and if she went shopping it was usually via the bus.   So seeing me and my mom sitting on the bus going somewhere was no stigma…mother and child on the bus in the afternoon going shopping was the usual thing.

Cars were expensive things, and especially so for single working moms.   We didn’t have one in our household until I was fifteen.   Suddenly our world opened wide. We could drive the the store and pack back lots of groceries and I didn’t have to pilot a full grocery cart all the way home.   We could drive to the beach.   It was instant liberation.   I still remember how that felt, to have all those distant places suddenly within reach.   Probably my itch to get in the car and just go somewhere for the shear joy of driving has its roots here…not in the fact of our carlessness, but in how the car opened up the world to us.   90 percent of the miles I have put on every car I have ever owned have been pleasure driving.   I love the automobile, and perhaps it may seem a bit paradoxical that this is why I would not want to live somewhere I had to use the car for everything.   I hate traffic and I hate using the car for mere commuting.   The same boring route and traffic jams over and over and over and over and over…   It seems disrespectful somehow.   The car is for exploring.

This is why the suburbs have always felt suffocating to me.   You can’t walk to anything.   There is no good public transportation for the common chores of life.   You’re trapped inside a spaghetti tangle of twisty roads and cul de sacs that are specifically designed to thwart drive through traffic, that also make it impossible to walk to anything.   City life is good precisely because you don’t need a car for every little thing.   That used to be the norm.   I remember it.   I still think that way.