SAN DIEGO SHOULD END OVERRELIANCE ON CARS
The car is king in San Diego. After decades of car-centric infrastructure, subsidized gas and sprawling development, today’s San Diegan may find it difficult to envision a city that looks and moves any other way.
It does not have to be this way. This cultural bias obscures the negative externalities that an overdependence on cars perpetuates, including climate change, financial insolvency and traffic violence. Worse yet, it divides us at a time when we should be united in tackling the pressing challenges our community is facing.
The climate crisis, long known to be driven by our society’s reliance on fossil fuels, is a major challenge for our generation. Over 50 percent of San Diego’s total emissions come from personal transportation. These ramifications reach beyond the San Diego region. In December 2021, the International Energy Agency reported that, “if SUVs were an individual country, they would rank sixth in the world for absolute emissions.” It is clear that we cannot continue down this path.
Yet this crisis cannot be mitigated by a transition to electric vehicles alone — we need to change the ways we move around our communities. The bike, pedestrian and transit infrastructure that keeps people safe is the same that serves as a step towards mitigating climate change at a regional level. Comprehensive bike and pedestrian infrastructure is the floor of climate action, the bare minimum we can do to make San Diego more livable and resilient.
Car dependence also carries a financial burden. Miles of roads and highways are expensive for a city to build and maintain. Automobile-oriented development requires property developers and business owners to cover all the costs associated with parking minimums, lot sizes and setbacks, increasing the barrier of entry for small businesses. Now, because we have no option but to drive, individuals need to own and maintain vehicles that cost them thousands of dollars a year.
As more and more single occupancy vehicles fill our roads, they become worn and congested. We widen them, costing the city millions of dollars and attracting more drivers. This congestion not only robs us of our precious time, it costs San Diego county’s economy $1.2 billion annually. We rinse and repeat, generation after generation. Reducing our auto-dependence could improve the financial sustainability of our city, our local businesses and our citizens.
Finally, we come to the crisis of traffic violence. The San Diego region saw a dramatic increase in car-related injury and death, which we as a society currently accept as a fact of life. Just during the summer of 2022, motorists killed five bicyclists in San Diego County within a span of two weeks. Data from the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition shows that 16 bicyclists were killed in 2021. While the city’s Vision Zero goal aims to eliminate traffic violence by 2025, there were 331 traffic deaths between 2015 and 2020 alone.
Ongoing traffic violence happens as we debate whether infrastructure improvements that keep vulnerable road users safe are worth the investment. Such discourse places people in greater danger and threatens the safety and well-being of all those who walk, bike and move around with and without a car in San Diego.
We should not accept these deaths as the cost of getting around our city or the loss of loved ones as a part of our lives. No one should wait until this crisis affects them personally to care about it.
These are all preventable problems. Yet each moment we spend debating their legitimacy is another moment we are not moving forward with solutions.
To be sure, change can be intimidating. We have been told for decades that transportation is a convenient, individualistic experience; however, this necessary mode shift will require us to understand that transportation is in fact a collective experience.
Let us be clear — there is a time and place for cars: emergencies, deliveries and even recreation. We do not want to ban cars. We want to allow for greater freedom of mobility. Within this transition, we may lose parking spaces, but we gain a system that provides options for all.
We ask San Diegans to consider these problems. Consider our changing world, our economic prosperity and our community’s safety. At the end of the day, we all just want to get home safely.
We do not want to ban cars. We want to allow for greater freedom of mobility. We all just want to get home safely.