The 10 Surprising (?) US Cities Where People Drive the Least

you know me I'm always looking for ways to highlight the best and the worst in American cities so today I've got the 10 U.S cities with the least amount of driving per capita and it's coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and here's one that has I don't know a bunch of stuff about Pittsburgh and then I used U.S census VMT data to make a list of urbanized areas with the lowest VMT and it gave me some really interesting results Pittsburgh did very well smiley face I think it would make a fun top 10 video for you you know I almost feel like I've created a monster by ranking Pittsburgh so highly in so many videos but I did like the idea except I'm not going to use census VMT data because I've been using the census a lot lately and I wanted to use a data source that I think can give us a different perspective and maybe some surprising answers and I think that's a pretty accurate description of what I ended up with here so what I landed on is actually very simple table hm 72 from federal highways which I have used in the past to analyze things like freeway lane miles in cities Aggregates travel statistics for every urbanized area in the US well one of the fields is daily vehicle miles traveled per capita which they get by extrapolating from count data and totaling up an estimate of all vehicle miles traveled within an urbanized area and then dividing it by the population of that urbanized area pretty simple but important to note that this isn't just personal vehicles it includes all the other motor vehicle travel in the region too including Freight and commercial vehicles gig workers and buses now I'm not an expert on the methodology they use for calculating all these measures but it is the fhwa so I'm basically going to take it as gospel I mean it's the federal government if they don't know what's going on on their system who does anyway let's go to the Top Line number here which is completely outrageous the average daily VMT per capita for all urbanized areas in the US is 25.5 miles that's not per household that's not even for people of driving age that's 25.5 miles of driving for every human period and look recognize that if you live car free like I do you don't really live car free in the sense that if you do things like buy random household items from Amazon or eat food or require the services of people who actually do Drive there's a sense in which you're just offloading the driving so look regardless of all this what extra expected this list to look like was just the usual suspects that have high mode share for things like Transit biking and walking and there is some of that but it's more complicated because all driving is rolled into it it's really what cities are most car dependent in a larger sense including all the freight movement and Transit and ride hails that allow the city to function and remember this is VMT not mood share so it's not just whether people drive but how far do they go when they do so one way of looking at Daily VMT per capita is it's kind of a sprawl index when cities grow out instead of up you have to go longer distances this will all be a lot clearer when we get to the dishonorable mentions so let's just get into it number 10 is Sacramento California so one thing I'm going to do as we go through this is it is very difficult to pin point exactly why each of these cities has relatively low VMT per capita but I'm going to give you my theory for each one for Sacramento you know I did very little professional planning work in California so I'm not super familiar with it but it is one of the few states that has land use laws and Regulatory Powers related to Urban growth boundaries does Sacramento have suburban sprawl sure but it has a lot of these areas where Suburban development comes right up against agricultural land so it keeps the metro area a bit more compact than it otherwise might be let's stay with this theme and go to number nine San Jose which you might think is essentially Suburban in character I mean Downtown San Jose does kind of look like in downtown Bellevue Washington but again California does just about as much to demarcate urban areas from forest and farmland as any other state does so people might drive more than they should I'm not going to tell you Santa Clara county is a transit-oriented Wonderland but those driving trips get contained in a smaller area number eight is Chicago still one of the great industrial and Freight hubs in the U.S a lot of goods move in and out of the metro area so there's a sense in which it's a little surprising it shows up on this list in a way just being at number eight is a bit of a testament to the city's High Transit mode share its density and the sheer number of great walkable neighborhoods it has you really shouldn't need to drive much in a city like this number seven is Providence Rhode Island I have to admit I'm kind of stumped on this one but I've spent very little time talking about Providence on this channel so let's just point out it's got some sneaky good urbanism if you ignore the hatch and jod they did with the freeway system you have these cool historic districts around Brown University East of downtown and even the suburbs tend to be older cities that don't really sprawl that much so it's pretty walkable and you're never gonna have to go that far within the metro area to get what you need okay that's my Providence argument give me yours down in the comments number six it gives me no pleasure to report to you that Pittsburgh Pennsylvania does in fact make this list I don't really know what I'm gonna tell you about Pittsburgh I haven't already but pretty much any measure you'll look at is gonna tell you that for an urbanized area its size Pittsburgh punches way above its weight in Transit service and use and walkability and the amount of walking that actually occurs honestly at this point the less said the better number five is San Francisco Oakland shouldn't be a surprise given what the mood split data is for this region and what I already told you about California land use a lot one thing I want to emphasize here though this is all about VMT that occurs within the urbanized area itself so it doesn't really account for say super commuting like people who live in Stockton or other completely different urbanized areas coming into the Bay Area still though there is less driving per capita within this urbanized area than all but for others in the U.S number four is Portland Oregon look this one makes all kinds of sense another medium-sized Metro that over performs on Transit walking and biking but also even stronger legal framework around Urban growth boundaries than California has Statewide goal 14 on urbanization aims to provide for an orderly and efficient transition from rural to Urban land use to accommodate Urban population and urban employment inside Urban growth boundaries to ensure efficient use of land and to provide for livable communities a lot of that means promoting walkability and travel options but a lot of it is just promoting shorter trips by keeping Urban forms more compact anyway let me know if you want a deeper dive on ugps because it is an aspect of planning I dealt with for a long time number three is Philadelphia a joke that Philly is like East Coast Chicago or maybe Chicago is Midwest Philly I don't know similar deal the strong on transit for the US walkable neighborhoods all over and the suburban area is just don't sprawl the way some of our other medium and large Metro areas do which I am going to talk about in a minute but it just comes back to the point that when everything is closer together it just takes less infrastructure and less free movement to distant locations to make everything work which I think is a big part of what urbanism is all about okay in a minute I'm going to get to honorables and dishonorables and the top two one of which is eminently guessable and the other one you're gonna have to really think about but first quick reminder to drop a like on the video and subscribe if you're a fan of cities that just have less driving connect in all the usual ways if you care to and consider supporting the channel directly by becoming a patron honorable mentions I'm just going to give you the next three which in reverse order are Seattle and DC which I think are not surprising but number 11 is the Los Angeles urbanized area which is a bit of a surprise given the city's reputation for car culture and the fact that it's home to the busiest port on the continent but again La doesn't really sprawl the way some other cities do especially given Riverside San Bernardino is considered a separate urbanized area speaking of sprawl let's go to the worst city on this list which it gives me no pleasure to tell you is the one I already told you is the sprawl capital of planet Earth a couple weeks ago almost 40 daily VMT per capita just absolutely wild stuff and second worst just behind Charlotte is the city I'm just gonna call extra large Charlotte okay let's get back into it number two is New York so let the suspense begin I don't even know if I have to theorize why New York is high on this list best transit in the US by probably an order of magnitude more dense walkable neighborhoods than any other city on the continent in my opinion the lowest rates of car ownership easily there's still a lot of traffic but on a per capita basis not so much but still not the leading us metro area over million when it comes to daily vehicle models traveled per capita because the number one slot goes to San Juan Puerto Rico which shouldn't be a surprise if you really think about it it's on an island that has a mountain range in the middle of it so the urbanized area is compact by necessity like if I'd lowered the population threshold Honolulu would have been high on this list too but also Puerto Rico has its struggles there's relatively high unemployment lots of educated folks moving to the mainland and so the economy is just kind of tough overall car ownership is on the low side and if you aren't working you don't have a lot of places to drive every day that said if you haven't been to San Juan it is largely pretty walkable the weather is spectacular well except for every few years when it's spectacularly awful but it is a city I've really enjoyed visiting in the past and hope to get back to at some point okay so if you watch this channel it should be no surprise that travel is really important to me it's done more to change the way I think about cities and transportation in the US than just anything else and that's where today's sponsor nordvpn comes in back in late 2021 I only had a couple videos under my belt when I went to Mexico for three months I had like 95 subscribers when I walked across the border to Tijuana then I did a video a week as I traveled around Mexico and by the time I came back to the 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Channel: CityNerd

Views: 228,139

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines

Id: wBy0BbrECRY

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023