A Peek Inside Car-Brain: 10 US Cities Where the Cycle of Car Dependency Has Spiraled Out of Control

we all have ideas about what car Centric America looks like strodes freeways big box stores and we might think we know which cities are the biggest offenders but today I'm going to use data to figure it all out and shave the worst of the worst it's the 10 most car-centric U.S cities and it's coming out of next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always more than welcome and I do stash these away and Ponder them for months I actually got this one from viewer David who over nine months ago on one of my q a videos can we do a video of Highway length per capita of major metropolitan areas if we can combine those data with public transport ridership there might be some interesting outcomes by the way I am still doing the occasional q a video I'm just making them Patron only for now so I did like this idea for a video and what it kind of morphed into was bringing together different data sources to figure out what the most car Centric cities in America are I'll get to what those data sources are and how I use them but first kind of a who cares peace the thesis of this video is that car dependency is a vicious cycle in particular for the cities on this list but this is a problem everywhere in the U.S it's hard to say which of these elements comes first but they all feed into each other your city or probably the state DOT builds and widens highways people are dues to buy more cars or your city attracts the kind of people who like to drive a lot either way there's more driving so now you've created a constituency for more roadway capacity projects and the elected officials respond to that constituency by building more Lanes the thing that breaks this cycle is really not just one thing it's good research good activism good political leadership those things can create a virtuous cycle but the cities we're talking about today unfortunately have not really managed to change direction the data we're going to look at today includes both the producer side and the consumer side of this equation so we can sort of view this cycle from different angles a couple data sources for the supply side when amusing the national Transit database and I'm using the same Transit Supply metric that I created for the undervalued cities video the other source is fhwa Highway statistics table hm 72 and I'm using its estimates of roadway miles per capita and freeway lane miles per capita for each urbanized area the idea here is that not only do more roadway miles probably induce more people to drive but it means the city is using more land area that could have been devoted to something more useful and then on the consumption side I'm using vehicle miles traveled per capita from the same table and then I'm getting into Census Data today which I think I have not done before on this channel for whatever reason I'll be using table s0801 commuting characteristics by sex from the American Community survey five-year data set ending in 2020. if you aren't familiar with the ACs it's more detailed than the Des sandal census you might be more familiar with anyway so801 looks at workers 16 years old and up how they typically get to work how many vehicles are available to them and a few other things so for this I'm using the percent commuting by car for each metro area and I also looked at car availability the census categorizes this by whether a worker has access to zero one two or three plus cars I use this to create a car light index where I gave full credit for or the proportion of people with zero cars and half credit for the proportion with one car okay that's the data and just to be clear I'm doing this by Metropolitan statistical area for the usual reasons I find city boundaries to be a bit arbitrary for the reasons I talked about in my crime video for discussion there if you need it and I did calculate all this for every metro area over 250 000 but the resulting list was kind of boring so I'm just going with a million and up fair warning we're going to be looking at a lot of very bad things today but when we get to the honorable mentions I'm going to look at the 10 cities that fared the best by this criteria so that's what we're doing and let's just get into it number 10 is Charlotte North Carolina this is a city of contradictions it topped my list of unexpectedly walkable neighborhoods it's got one of the better situated NFL stadiums with decent Light Rail access but despite having the beginnings of a useful Transit Network and some walkable Central neighborhoods the census numbers are pretty bad 87 percent of people in the region use a car as their primary means of getting to work and it's only one percent each for Transit and walking just to give you a baseline here's how the Charlotte Metro area's ACS members stack up against the national numbers which include everything small towns rural areas so it's not great and be warned it just gets worse from here number nine is the Inland Empire which the US government and its infinite wisdom has determined to be a separate metro area from La so let's take that at face value on its own it's the 12th largest metro area in the U.S bigger than San Francisco Oakland Seattle Tacoma or Minneapolis St Paul well the Inland number tire has two Central cities as well San Bernardino and Riverside and this is what the downtowns of those two cities look like which probably explains why the Inland Empire is on this list well besides the fact that it featured in both my ginormous interchanges and my terrible Transit videos the Inland Empire has absolutely the craziest car ownership numbers just two percent of ACS respondents had no cars and only 13 percent had access to just one car that is by far the lowest of any of the Cities I've looked at would love to hear your theories about this down in the comments number eight is Grand Rapids Michigan possibly America's sneakiest one million person metro area you know I get asked from time to time when I do these lists well have you been to all of these cities and the answer is no I haven't literally been to to every city in the U.S and Grand Rapids does fall into that category I could be talked into checking it out though one of my chief downtown gentrification indicators is Brewpub access and Grand Rapids seems to be doing all right on this front number seven is Richmond Virginia this is the only one on the list that really surprised me but it just rates poorly across all the criteria you're going to see a lot of the cities on this list have downtown freeway Loops or at least something close to it and interchanges that take up a lot of prime Urban real estate I am a fan of extending the Acela Corridor to Richmond next but there's some work to do here number six is Oklahoma City I'm probably preaching to the choir if I say downtown freeways are bad New York essentially gets this rate well at least Manhattan and Vancouver definitely has it figured out I'm happy to entertain the argument that some free freeway access and your city is good for Freight or the economy or whatever but I'll probably be skeptical but I am going to get super controversial right now and stay unequivocally that you should not have Loop ramps downtown just an amazing use of prime Urban Land it says something about a city's values when you see this and what it says is not good number five is Raleigh North Carolina so yes I'm looking at Metro areas here not cities proper but you have to say Raleigh's City Limits are pretty wild there are huge swaths of urbanized land that have this very Suburban development pattern where they apparently just didn't bother with sidewalks how are you supposed to walk or take transit if you can't even walk anywhere from your own front door well the ACs data say people just don't do it also you may have gathered from watch watching this channel I do always feel like you can tell a lot about a city from what a sports venues look like this is PNC Arena where the Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL play 10 out of 10 no notes number four is Tulsa Oklahoma this one isn't surprising since it was such an egregious offender in my freeway heavy downtowns list I mean I guess they thought the remedy to burning down Black Wall Street was to drive a downtown freeway ring through the ruins it's pretty sick stuff and why on Earth does a city the size of Tulsa need this level of car infrastructure anyway get over yourselves also just a truly staggering amount of service parking downtown I don't even know if this is redeemable maybe just start all over number three is Kansas City Casey is like a greatest hits of things I always roast cities for huge interchanges within the city limits a downtown Ring Road that eats up a ton of acreage and isolates neighborhoods from downtown and is kind of an environmental calamity bad NFL stadium and ballpark sighting awful MLS Stadium sighting enormous race track with thousands of parking stalls that go unused 99 of the time it's all there the transit situation is not good I mean it's free but this is a case of you get what you pay for okay I've still got the bottom two to come as well as the 10 Metro areas that are the least car Centric a bit of housekeeping first if you're in the Vegas area on October 22nd I'm gonna be speaking at the tedx event in the East downtown district the theme is climate Solutions and I'm not going to spoil my topic but it's going to be about as ridiculous as everything else I do on this channel this is going to be a good event though Ferguson's is a very fun venue for this kind of thing so RSVP at the link in the description if you're planning to come also as usual drop a like on the video so hit the Subscribe as those things do help the channel and certainly direct support via patreon is always appreciated sub count check the channel now has enough subscribers to fill Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville home of the Florida Gators we might be stuck on SEC venues for a while and we'll see let's hit the 10 best really quick it is kind of an interesting list starting at 10 I've got San Juan Portland New Orleans Honolulu Philadelphia Boston Chicago DC the Bay Area and this one's a surprise New York quick peek under the hood just to point out what a huge outlier New York is I imagine you already know it has way more Transit service per capita but look at what that enables here are the 10 cities I've looked at including cities over 250k that have the highest percentage of zero car ACS respondents it's just a complete Wipeout huge honorable mention to Lancaster PA the mid-sized Northeastern city is really do over perform on this index one dishonorable mention if I had used the 250k population threshold it would have knocked our numbers one in two cities down to two and three and it's kind of a surprising one it's Asheville North Carolina and it's just bad across every metric I looked at number two is Birmingham Alabama Birmingham showed up in my freeway heavy downtowns video so again not much of a surprise it was the worst of all the cities I looked at in terms of mode share 92 percent of ACS respondents use a personal motor vehicle as their primary way to get to work it's about one percent Transit and one percent walk you have to say the American South is really coming up big on this list and on that note number one is Nashville Tennessee Nashville has according to the fhwa data by far the highest VMT per capita of any City I looked at for this list I gotta say I'm skeptical about the number they're showing 52.7 miles a day per capita somebody please tell me there's a calculation error here Nashville is bad by every metric though and it's another city that just loves its downtown freeway Loop and let's look at Nissan Stadium because I always feel like what a city does with a stadium is a microcosm of its overall attitude towards urbanism this is the kind of Stadium setup you'd expect to see deep in the suburbs but this is right on the Cumberland River directly across from downtown you'd think this would be prime developable land especially in a city where housing is getting expensive I mean close to half a million dollars is a lot for this part of the country someone down in the comments please explain Nashville to me and that's all I got thanks for joining today and thanks to the patrons for keeping this Channel's finances solvent it's certainly not a given from week to week so it's very much appreciated keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 267,803

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, top 10, car oriented city, car dependency, car dependent suburbs, car dependent infrastructure

Id: U7VBfkNU41c

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022