No place is "Car Dependent" and we should stop saying so

When we call a place, whether an area, neighborhood, county, or city, “car-dependent,” we all have a good idea of what that means: wide roadways, narrow sidewalks (if they exist at all), stroads, a lack of reliable transit, and the assumption of universal car usage. But I take issue with the term “car-dependent.”

To say that a place is “dependent” on something implies that it cannot exist without it. Every city, town, and neighborhood is dependent on essentials like water, food, healthcare, and clean air. Ultimately, this means the people in those places are dependent on those things. When we say a place is “car-dependent,” we usually mean that a car is necessary to access those true dependencies: a trip to the supermarket or the doctor. We usually add “commuting to work” to that list, since work is often a dependency for access to food and water in the capitalist system we live in.

But can you truly say a place is “dependent” on cars if many people living there do not use one to access those necessities?

If you look for them, you will see them. I often drive in Long Island and Eastern Queens, places we all consider “car-dependent”, and I see it all:

• People riding bikes or stand-up scooters, both young and old.
• People waiting for an unreliable bus in the pouring rain or on a blistering summer day.
• People taking their lives into their hands by riding or walking on the shoulder of a road.
• People running across a six-lane stroad because the nearest crosswalk is a quarter-mile away.

These people are all around us, yet they are invisible to most drivers who pay attention to nothing but the bumper in front of them. Calling a place “car-dependent” erases these people from the conversation. It centers the driver as the only relevant actor.

Instead, the term we should be using is “Car Prioritized.”

Whitestone, Nassau, Canarsie, or even the “car-dependent” segments of transit-heavy neighborhoods like Metropolitan Avenue in Forest Hills: these are NOT car-dependent places. They are places where the built environment prioritizes private cars.

The term “car-dependent” creates a false binary and pretends that car use is an inherent, unchangeable quality of a location. In the process, it ignores the lives of the most vulnerable, centers the most privileged, and hides the fact that this environment is, and always has been, a choice.