I grew up in Los Angeles, one of the most sprawling, car-dependent cities in the world. It’s easy to find highway-sized lanes in residential areas and signposts right in the middle of tiny sidewalks in my hometown. Although I regularly cycled and took public transit right up until I was 18 and moved away, the state of my city and the way people moved through it was normal to me, a mundane fact of life—I didn’t see that it could be another way. I also didn’t understand just how systemically marginalized pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users were until I watched a video about “stroads” by the YouTuber Not Just Bikes. This was the beginning of my informal education in urban design as an equity and social justice issue.

Now I live in Winnipeg, which is deeply car-centric as virtually all Canadian municipalities are. Similar to Americans, Canadians spend an average of 16 days per year driving—about seven hours and 20 minutes per week. That’s a lot of inactive transportation, not to mention stress, traffic violence, and money. Despite this huge amount of driving, their cars sit parked, collectively taking up an immense amount of space, for the other 349 days—96 percent of the time. There is nothing inevitable about any of this.

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that road transportation, which consists mainly of private vehicles by far, is a leading cause of climate change. Car-centrism is oppressing all of us—not equally, of course—in terms of our finances, health, and fundamental quality of life. Centring cars is largely what makes our cities loud, polluted, dangerous, and covered in so much sprawling asphalt that we can’t afford to maintain it.

The great irony of car-centric urban design is that it makes driving hellish, too. When everyone is coerced to drive and there are no viable alternatives, we get the soul-crushing traffic Canada and the US are so famous for. Our cities are utterly choked with cars, having been bulldozed for vehicle infrastructure in the 1960s and 70s.

None of this is to say we should despair. The Netherlands bulldozed its cities to center cars too, and now they’ve reversed course and are leading the world in the progressive, equitable urban planning at the heart of the modern urbanism movement. In much of the Netherlands, the streets are for people again, and cars are treated as guests. Reshaping our cities doesn’t need to take decades, either.

Car dependence isn’t a personal failing. It is a capitalistic system of oppression designed to extract value from people by coercing them to drive. The auto industry achieved this partly through decades of insidious propaganda (“How will you transport your kids without a car?”) and partly by lobbying for more roads, fewer sidewalks, and the criminalization of pedestrians (“jaywalking”). Like all systems of oppression, this one harms and degrades everyone, including those it is intended to privilege.

Achieving universal accessibility and ending ableism, gender inequality, and worker exploitation are impossible without kicking our car addiction. The fight for walkability is connected to the fight against all forms of oppression.

I always try to keep a nuanced perspective, but I’ve yet to hear a single good argument for centring cars in our built environments. On the other hand, there are a lot of arguments for designing our built environments to centre active transportation.

Let’s start with the money argument. The lifetime cost of a small car is $689,000 USD, or about $925,000 CAD—and small cars are increasingly rare in a world of auto industry-induced demand for SUVs, which are twice as likely to kill pedestrians when drivers hit them.

Say you live in Ontario and own a small, modest car: a 2017 Honda Civic that cost you about $18,000. Owning and maintaining that car in 2022 will cost you around $11,856 per year, or $988 per month. I live almost entirely car-free in a relatively walkable neighbourhood, and my monthly transportation expenses rarely breach $100. Even a $5,000 bike looks absurdly cheap next to the cost of car ownership. You could buy two of them per year and still come out ahead.

What about accessibility? Inevitably, someone will trot out the argument that taking away space from cars will harm people with disabilities. This short-sighted perspective reflects a myopic view of disability: not all disabled folks can drive, but all disabled folks are pedestrians—as we all are. Those few who truly do need to drive would benefit from less traffic.

Moreover, car-centric urban design creates huge accessibility issues: think small, crumbling sidewalks pocked with signposts and electrical boxes. In Winnipeg, it’s common to see people who use wheelchairs rolling in the street, because car infrastructure is almost always better maintained than pedestrian or cycling infrastructure.

Walkability also bears on gender equality, as women are more likely to walk and take public transit, globally. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to drive and cause collisions, while toxic masculinity is deeply intertwined with car culture. Women are underrepresented in cycling all over the world, but not in the bike-friendly Netherlands. In ways both subtle and obvious, car-centrism contributes to male privilege and the oppression of women.

Protesting and demanding change are essential, but the low-hanging solution is simply to begin altering how we move. I believe one person taking one cycling trip matters, not just because of that bit of carbon savings, but also because their potential to influence others is huge. Individual actions matter. Taking a small first step is a big deal, and the stakes of our choices could hardly be higher.

Anthony Leong is the creator of Car Dependency Index, a project that advocates for transportation equity and progressive, sustainable urban design. He is proudly queer and lives in Winnipeg with his partner of 13 years. You can find Car Dependency Index on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube.