Saturday, June 13, 2009

NYTimes Magazine Piece

Check out The Roads Warrior if you haven't yet-- a quick interview with Ray Lahood, the Secretary of Transportation, where he "talks about whether the one-car family is in the American future."

Highlights for me:

President Obama has talked about his desire to wean Americans off automobiles.
What we’ve talked about is getting to a concept that we call livable communities, where people don’t have to get in a car every day. You can use light rail, you can use buses, you can use walking paths, you can use your bike.

and

But if Americans increasingly get around by rail, bus and bicycle, as you’ve planned, who will be buying cars in the future?
I think everybody will have an automobile. I think it’s amazing in America when you drive around and look at new homes that are being built, there are three-car garages. I don’t think you’re going to see families with three cars. I think you’re going to see families with one car, possibly two.

We're not carfree in our home. We're the one-car family model and I would like to believe that we can call ourselves a 'car-light' family now. However, looking around the web, we know he is wrong on the "everybody will have an automobile" line.

3 comments:

Jen said...

We are a one car/six bike family and we plan to stay that way. We have to have a car because there is so much sprawl here and rough winter weather but we are trying to minimize it's use. We drive a Toyota Rav4 which comes in handy for hauling things but is good on gas. We also purchased a terrapass to offset the emissions from it. This is something that we are comfortable with. Sort of the best of both worlds. It's tough to get people to give up cars here because GM is our major industry but hopefully, we'll start a trend.

Carrie said...

Just discovered your site -- love the pink boy shirts! My little guy (4yo) looooves pink! We're a one car family as well. In the city we currently live in (Seattle) it's definitely possible to live car free, although better to have access to a car if you want to go skiing or something. Where I lived before in Kentucky, car-free would be very difficult -- it was really hard with just the one car. Hopefully things will change in the future.

Andrea said...

More and more I want to be in a livable community (of course I'd need to take my birds and bobcats and river and peace and quiet with me--then again, without cars it would be peaceuful and there'd be room for the wildlife!)