The car dependency con: Moving beyond auto industry gaslighting to rebuild walkable communities

By Peter Norton

—————

This part you know already:

Exercise is essential to health. In the United States, sedentary living is a leading contributor to cardiovascular disease, the most common cause of early death. Physical activity can boost your quality of life – and extend your healthy lifespan by years. But if you’re like most Americans, you get a lot less exercise than you need.

But here’s the part you don’t hear about so often:

If you don’t get as much exercise as you need, it’s not because you lack willpower, or don’t have the grit it takes to maintain an exercise routine. Sure, willpower and grit matter. But no, they don’t explain why most Americans don’t get enough exercise. The real explanation is not only interesting – it’s also useful. It can point the way toward more physical activity – a way that can help even if you don’t have a consistent exercise routine.

People who work in public health seek ways to make the status quo better for all of us. History can help by revealing the origins of the status quo. For example, thanks to history, I can predict that when your great grandparents were the age you are now, they walked much more than you or I do today. They didn’t walk a lot because they had amazing willpower, or extraordinary grit. They probably weren’t fitness zealots. They probably did not have any regular exercise routine.

They walked because walking was literally normal – it was the single most common mode of everyday mobility. No one had to tell your great grandparents to get more exercise. Exercise was built into the world they lived in.

For most Americans, that world is long gone. Today most of us in this country depend on driving for nearly all everyday trips. The nearest grocery store may be miles away – and even if it’s close, you may have to cross six busy lanes of traffic to get to it. To walk to everyday destinations is likely to be long, dangerous and unpleasant.

How did it get this way?

How did car dependency happen? The answer matters. We’ve been fed versions of history that tell us that the status quo is the consequence of mass preferences. People preferred driving to walking – the story goes – and that’s why so many people stopped walking any further than the distance to and from their parked car.

If this version of history were correct, we would have to settle for telling people to get willpower. Develop an exercise routine and stick to it. This is just what we usually do – with disappointing results.

The truth is a lot more interesting – and empowering. The people who sold us car dependency were the same people who came up with the histories that teach us that we drive everywhere because that’s what everybody wanted.

They were smart. They knew that if they could make the status quo seem like the product of democracy, or free enterprise, or mass preferences, or American culture, they could make us conclude that we have to accept it. So they came up with versions of history that trace car dependency to these causes. The lesson was simple: If you can’t walk anywhere, it’s because we Americans preferred it that way. It’s bad history – but it’s good business.

If you dig deep into the historical record you’ll find that this story doesn’t stand up. Yes, Americans welcomed cars. But they resisted car dependency – patiently, persistently, and inventively. They were not against driving, but they were against losing all of their other choices. The people who fought for mobility choices were urban, suburban and rural, of all ages and from all walks of life. Most were women. They organized street blockades to demand safer conditions for walking, they planned community bike rides to publicize cyclists’ needs. This resistance was out of our histories because it didn’t suit the interests of the people who want to sell cars and roads.

History proves that Americans have always wanted walkable communities.

Americans fought for good mobility choices. Walking did not decline because people always preferred to drive. Walking declined because it was deterred, devalued and denormalized.

This hidden history is not only surprising and inspiring. It’s also useful. When an authority cites status-quo traffic data to tell us, “sorry but everybody prefers to drive,” it helps us know how to answer: “When people have no good choices, we can’t tell what they prefer.” When appeals to slow drivers down to making walking safer are stigmatized as the demand of a radical fringe, history can help is show that people of all kinds fought for walkable streets. If we want a future of more walkable and bike-friendly streets, we need the honest histories that prove car dependency is a historical aberration.

The structural change we need:

The structural change we need is not easy to get, but it’s cheaper than maintaining the status quo. If we relaxed strict zoning ordinances, small grocery stores could open up within walking distance of residences, and small, apartment houses with affordable rents could open in places that permit only single-family houses on large lots. With such reforms, more people could walk or ride a bike, and transit systems could serve populations more cost effectively. If we ended minimum parking requirements, space now wasted on underoccupied parking lots could find new life as lots for homes, businesses or parks. If we recommitted a small fraction of road toll revenues to public transportation, we could not only improve bus service, we could also ease pressures to build expensive new road capacity.

While federal and state policymakers have been ignoring these needs, many cities have been pursuing them. Several US cities – including my home city of Charlottesville, Virginia – have relaxed zoning requirements so that affordable housing can be built closer to everyday destinations, easing the pressure to drive. On the Parking Reform Network’s website, you can see a map showing the location of over 100 US municipalities that have lifted minimum parking requirements. Throughout the United States, community advocacies have been getting results. Look for the groups in your area. They need your help.

The individual action we can take:

The reforms we need take time, but we don’t have to wait for them. In small ways, we can renormalize everyday walking, without turning it into a grit-testing regimen. If you drive to work, try parking a mile from your workplace. It can be a way to get better acquainted with your community. Your walk will become a normal part of your daily routine. At the supermarket, experiment with parking further from the store entrance. You’ll find it easier to get into and out of the parking lot that way. If you’re going out to dinner with friends from work, consider restaurants that are in walking range of your workplace. These habits, and others like them, can renormalize walking without turning it into a trial of willpower.

History shows us that walking in the United States did not decline because people preferred to drive. It declined because it was deterred, devalued and denormalized. Walking will recover when we welcome it, value it, and renormalize it. While we work together for the structural change we need, we can begin in our personal lives be integrating walking into our everyday transportation needs.

For those interested in examples of community power rising up against industry-powered car dependency, here are some sources to check out: 

• A Bloomberg article on the hidden history of American anti-car protests,

• An episode of The Whole Podcast featuring Michael Kelley of BikeWalkKC sharing how advocacy, community outreach, and policy work come together to shape a more accessible Kansas City

• A StreetsBlog article on state and federal zoning reform for sustainable transport

3 keys to building and breaking power (and the one language you NEED to be speaking)

Building community power and breaking corporate power are the only way we get out of the raging fire we’re currently caught in: the one where corporations are destroying our health, blaming us for it, and distracting us from even realizing it. 

And as insurmountable as the challenge may seem – others have built and broken power before us. That gives us both hope and guidance for what we should do next. 

I recently attended a Free DC orientation (Free DC is a campaign to preserve the right of the people of DC to govern themselves) and was really struck by three key concepts related to power building and breaking that they shared based on lessons learned from movements around the world that have taken on autocracy and won. 

1. Do the things we know from prior movements are keys to winning

These key lessons from prior movements form Free DC’s strategy. While these are framed in the context of autocracy, I think these are also the keys to building community power in any context, and to breaking power among whoever has too much of it (whether that be autocratic governments or greedy corporations or as the case may be, both).  

Note: The points and descriptions below are directly from Free DC’s orientation materials.

• Do not obey in advance — Obeying in advance (or “anticipatory obedience”) makes oppression easy for authoritarians. Reject this loudly everywhere you notice it.

• Prioritize joy — Every successful movement against autocracy has had song, food, dance, or faith at the center. These practices help move us through fear and sustain us over time.

• Take up space — Authoritarians count on silence and compliance. Part of how we will succeed is to be physically vocal and visible in our communities in outspoken, joyful celebration of our people and culture.

• Organize — Around the world, when efforts against authoritarian regimes have the sustained participation from 3.5% of the population, engaged in strategic noncooperation, those regimes typically fail. 

• Practice solidarity — Authoritarians will label some people or groups as “dangerous” and others as “safe,” and gradually move the bar so that more and more people are seen as “dangerous” and only those who agree with them are “safe.” Reject this effort and show your solidarity with targeted groups at every opportunity.

What you can do:

What groups and spaces are you currently in where you can apply these lessons? What groups and spaces could you join where these lessons are already being applied? Consider how you can put these lessons into practice in ways that build community power and break corporate power.

2. Do the only thing that will definitely work: hit them where it hurts by speaking in the language of $$$.

While rallies and other such activities are important ways of practicing solidarity, prioritizing joy, and taking up space, ultimately, we need strategic, collective, economic noncooperation if we hope to change things. Things like boycotts, a general strike, and tax refusal are the only things that will speak loud enough to prompt political and policy change - because they speak in the language of $$$ and that is the only language powerful political and economic actors will hear. It will take a sustained, concerted effort to build enough support for these types of actions. 

What you can do:

Start talking to your family and friends about the need for this kind of resistance, and start thinking about what kind of economic non-cooperation you’d be willing to engage in. What kind of supports do we need to build up in our communities to make this kind of non-cooperation more feasible for us, our family and friends, and our communities writ large? What kind of stories do we need to share to build buy in for this kind of action? I’m looking into existing efforts to build support for things like a general strike, and hope to share more soon. 

3. Remember that the triangle of power is upside down

We often think of power as a typical triangle, with power flowing from the tip of the triangle at the top down to everyone at the bottom, who form a stable foundation of support.

But the reality is that the triangle of power is upside down. Political and corporate power is this narrow point on which the triangle balances - isolated and fragile. This triangle is unstable, shaking, and feasible to topple. It’s held up by a variety of pillars, including government institutions (like Congress, the courts, and the military), corporations, the media, and so on. Our assignment: begin to weaken and remove those supporting pillars. 

---

Building and breaking power is no small task. But if we’re both strategic and collective in the way we approach it, and begin by taking small steps in the right direction, I do think we can get there. And there tons of amazing community organizing groups - like Free DC, like Pittsburgh United - that we can join and look to for inspiration and guidance. 

Let’s get going.

Companies that are getting it right: how Patagonia, Costco, and Bob’s Red Mill are playing a different game

Here at GASLIT, we talk a lot about large corporations that are manufacturing harm, covering up the damage they do, and adding insult to injury by blaming us. 

But there ARE large, national companies that are getting it right (there are even more small, local companies that are getting it right - more on them in a future post!). 

These companies are playing a different game - one where profits don’t always get put above people and the planet (and let’s be real, those profits most corporations prioritize above all else primarily accrue only to their C-suite/top shareholders). 

So who are these companies getting it right, and what are they doing? 

Here are a few examples: 

1. Patagonia

An outdoor apparel company, Patagonia has long been an example of a responsible business: They’ve taken care of their employees (with onsite child care at their headquarters and primary distribution center, 100% of medical premiums covered, and paid activism hours). They’ve stopped doing things - and started doing new things - specifically to uphold their social and environmental values (even when it cuts into their profits). They’ve built environmental and animal welfare responsibility programs to guide how they make their materials and products. They’ve shared information about suppliers across their supply chain and gone to great lengths to ensure that their suppliers’ practices align with Patagonia’s values. They’ve supported grassroots environmental activism and advocacy. 

And in 2022, they took their commitment to a whole new level. In 2022, Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, shared in this letter that “Earth is now our only shareholder”. He went on to outline their truly unicorn approach in the world of corporate America:  

Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.

Here’s how it works: 100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. The funding will come from Patagonia: Each year, the money we make after reinvesting in the business will be distributed as a dividend to help fight the crisis.

2. Costco

Membership warehouse club retailer, Costco, is known for paying its workers well (and recently increased hourly pay to more than $30 for most workers – though notably, this increase came in response to pressure from Costco’s unionized workers, who voted to authorize a strike) and promoting from within (Costco’s current CEO started his career as a forklift driver for Price Club, which then merged with Costco). These are aspects of a broader “obsession with culture” that Costco’s founder and first CEO cultivated intentionally. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Costco’s turnover rate is only 8% – in comparison to 60% in the retail industry writ large. 

In addition to their employees, Costco aims to ensure a good experience for their members as well, “carrying a generous return policy on top-quality products, always passing on the savings of purchasing those products at wholesale on to the customers, [and] spurning the use of misleading advertisements”. Costco’s founder has shared a story about a time when the store sold Calvin Klein men’s jeans for $29.99 a pair. The jeans flew off the shelves as fast as they could stock them. The company then secured a deal with Calvin Klein to pay just $22.99 per pair. Costco could have kept the price to consumers the same, since they were clearly happy to buy the jeans at that price. But that’s not what they did. Here’s how Costco’s founder explained it:

We pass the savings on to the customer, every time. Do you know how tempting it is to make another $7 on a pair? But once you do it, it’s like taking heroin. You can’t stop.

3. Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods

Bob and Charlee Moore started Bob’s Red Mill in 1978, selling stone mill-ground whole grains. Over time, the company grew into selling over 400 whole grain products. In 2010, Bob established an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, effectively “handing over the keys to his 209 employees” (as the plan went into effect, by 2020, the company has become 100% employee owned). 

In discussing his decision in 2010, Bob told an interviewer he’d gotten “countless buy-out offers over the years, but he couldn’t envision selling the business to a stranger.” 

Here’s Bob in his own words: 

It's the only business decision that I could make. I don't think there's anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it. I have employees with me right now that have been with me for 30 years. They just were committed to staying with me now and they're going to own the company…

There's a lot of negative stuff going into business today. It's a good old basic Bible lesson -- love of money is the root of all evil. And unfortunately, our entire philosophy today is get all the money you can and whatever way you can. It's caused many corporations to bite off more than they can chew. And it causes people to do a lot of things just for money that they feel in their hearts is not the right thing to do.

---

I absolutely love the quotes from the founders of these companies - they’re “going purpose”, they’re staying away from the heroin-like temptation of chasing more and more profit, they’re refusing to do things just for money that simply aren’t the right thing to do. 

And I think it’s notable that these kinds of companies are also a lot more likely to push back when things - whether internal or external to the company - go against their values. 

Patagonia’s current CEO has been outspoken against recent EPA rollbacks of climate protections and called out the Trump administration and its “powerful fossil fuel benefactors” for the harm they’re causing.   

Earlier this year, as other retailers ended their diversity programs, Costco’s board voted unanimously to ask its shareholders to reject an anti-DEI measure (which they then did reject). The board noted “our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary”. 

All that said, let me be clear, I’m not saying these companies are perfect. No company (and none of us, either) are perfect. 

But I do think these companies are prioritizing something over profits alone - whether that be their employees’ well-being, the planet, or something else. 

And in today’s corporate world, that’s far too rare. So it’s worth celebrating. It’s worth seeking out and supporting companies that care about something more than they care about wealth and power and whose culture and actions (not just their words!) actually reflect that.

3 things you can do today to build community power

Building community power is key to strengthening community connection and agency (i.e., being able to make and influence decisions!), building buy-in for policies and system changes that support our health and planet, and reducing corporate power. 

Which all sounds great, but how in the world does one build community power? 

We’ll tackle what community coalitions and groups can do in another post but today's post is just about you. What can YOU do, especially if you aren't already part of a coalition or group advocating for change in your community?

• Text your neighbors, your local friend group, your book club, your church group, your basketball team, whoever your people in your local community are. Find a time to get together IRL and be intentional about what you’ll do in that time. Here are some options to consider: 

• check in on how they are, 

• discuss how you all can help each other, 

• share how connected you each feel to your community (and what might help strengthen that), 

• find out if there are any local policy issues folks are interested in working together on.

Whatever set of questions feels right for your particular group, explore them. Feeling a sense of community and connection are step 1 before any meaningful organizing or joint action can happen.  

If you don’t know your neighbors or have “your people” in your local community yet, take some initial steps to build that (even if for no reason other than your own sense of community!). It’ll feel hard and uncomfortable at first, but know that many others are also seeking community and will be grateful you reached out or showed up. 

• See when your next local school board, planning commission, or health coalition meeting is and put it on your calendar to attend (take a neighbor with you if you can!). Before you have a sense of what to advocate for locally, you need a lay of the land, an understanding of the key players, and more information about the pros and cons of various policies under consideration. The first step to having your voice heard is being present and informed. 

• Find your local newspaper, news website, radio station, or other media outlet - start reading/listening, subscribe to it if you can, and keep it in mind if you advertise for your company. Strong local newsrooms help us: hold local public officials, agencies, and businesses accountable; investigate community problems; highlight community solutions that work; and build community connections. 

Many of us have lost our “civic muscle” over years of living in relative comfort and safety - it’s time to pick up those weights. Start small. Start local. You got this. 

What is Systemic Change? (A Beginner’s Guide in 3 videos)

So here at GASLIT, we’re talking a lot about the need to change systems. But what does that even mean? 

My favorite illustration is the upstream/downstream parable that most of us in public health hear early in our training: 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: A couple is fishing on a riverbank and all afternoon, they see people struggling in the current and rescue them one by one. Finally, they go upstream and discover an unprotected overlook where people have been falling in. They realize that if they could post some warning signs and put up a protective barrier, they could prevent everyone from falling in, instead of trying to rescue folks one at a time after they’re already drowning. Warning signs and protective barriers are just two examples of the kind of systems changes we focus on in the public health field. For a Kindergartener-ready interactive version of illustrating this story, check out my experience at my daughter’s elementary school career fair. 

By changing the system - instead of changing or treating the individual - we are more likely to address the root cause of the problem and come up with a solution that is effective and sustainable. 

So now we know what changing the system looks like. But how do we go about really understanding a system and identifying what needs to change about it? Often, when we start to think about how to change a system, we focus on the one piece of it we interact with or know about. This is a huge mistake. For more on why, let’s visit another favorite parable of mine (this one is a familiar one for those who’ve learned about systems thinking): 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: Six blind/blindfolded individuals encounter an elephant for the first time. Each person feels only one part of the elephant and comes to a conclusion about what they are encountering based on that (the one feeling the tail says it’s like a rope, the one feeling the tusk says it’s like a spear, the one feeling the ear says it’s like a fan, the one feeling the trunk says it’s like a snake, and so on). It leads to a lot of misconceptions and no single person who has the full and accurate picture. 

Systems thinking and systems change requires us to broaden our perspective. We have to work together across individuals, organizations, and sectors to get to a better shared understanding of all the intersecting parts of a system - and thus, a better understanding of where and how to intervene to improve the system. 

We also need to deepen our perspective to take in the entirety of a system - not just the tip of the iceberg. Which brings me to my next favorite systems thinking illustration, this one more a metaphor than a parable:

For those who prefer to read it, the basic idea is this: The problems we see in our communities are like the tip of an iceberg - they give us incomplete information, because 90% of an iceberg is below the surface of the water. The iceberg model organizes an issue into four levels: at the surface is the event or presenting problem that you can obviously see, under the surface are first underlying trends or patterns, then structures or forces contributing to the patterns, and finally at the deepest level, the mental models (beliefs, values, stereotypes, biases, and -isms, many of them subconscious)  that maintain the system structures.

When we dive deeper to see the whole iceberg, we get beyond reacting to events and symptoms and can get more proactive about addressing deeper root causes as well as gaining empathy and understanding for the perspectives of others in ways that might help us work across differences to improve our communities. 

With a better sense of how to think at a systems level, we’re still left with the question of how do we actually MAKE systems change - in our own work, in building community power, in reducing corporate power? That’s what we’re hoping to unpack here at GASLIT. For some initial examples, see our recent posts about how a community coalition in Pittsburgh fought to keep their water system public and how organizations and people across the country came together to change systems in ways that drove cigarette smoking rates way down in the U.S. 

If you’re trying to figure out how to apply systems thinking in your own work, you can find some very practical tips and guidance in the places the videos above are drawn from. The upstream video is drawn from a TEDx talk I gave a few years ago, and the elephant parable and iceberg model videos are from a systems thinking training I helped develop in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center, which folks can access for free here. 

Individual-level solutions aren’t the answer to our public health and other problems, but individually, we can each begin to make the mindset shifts from individual-level thinking to systems-level thinking. That’s what we need to build community power and pursue systems-level solutions that actually work. Our health, our planet, and our future hang in the balance. Let’s do this.