A third of Americans don’t drive. So why is our transportation so car-centric? » Yale Climate Connections

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, approximately one-third of the nation’s residents don’t have driver’s licenses. In her 2024 book “When Driving is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency,” disability advocate Anna Zivarts argues that not only is America’s car-centric infrastructure harmful to the climate, it also fails to meet the everyday needs of many Americans.

Born with a neurological condition that causes low vision, Zivarts can’t drive. Frustrated with her experiences of traveling around Seattle on public transportation with her young child, she created a mobility-focused group at the organization where she works, Disability Rights Washington, to raise awareness about the needs of local non-drivers. This grew into a larger project considering how these issues play out across the nation. 

Yale Climate Connections spoke with Zivarts about her research.

Interview was condensed and edited.

Yale Climate Connections: Your book argues that there are far more people who don’t drive in the U.S. than commonly assumed and that our transportation infrastructure doesn’t serve their needs. Can you give me an overview of who these non-drivers are?

Anna Zivarts: I started this research by trying to learn more about people like me who can’t drive because of disabilities. There are tons of different disabilities that might impact someone’s ability to drive, whether it’s low vision, blindness, epilepsy, traumatic brain injuries, intellectual disabilities, mobility disabilities, chronic health conditions. I feel like every time I talk to community members, I hear about different experiences with disability. One thing that’s often overlooked is anxiety or PTSD around driving. There are so many people who don’t identify as disabled but find driving incredibly stressful. If they can drive, it’s only when they absolutely have to. 

For a lot of older folks, this is the reality. Or perhaps there are only certain conditions under which driving feels safe and comfortable. I think of my grandma, who has a heart condition. She drove anyway, but she would pass out – radically not a great situation, but she lived in a really rural area and didn’t want to have to move into a nursing home. Or my mom, who can’t drive at night anymore. 

Then there are folks who can’t afford to drive. Some people I’ve talked to would drive if they had a vehicle that accommodated their wheelchair, but that’s not something they can afford. And all sorts of folks can’t afford vehicles for other reasons: Vehicle ownership is expensive; car insurance is expensive. And because of the racialized nature of poverty in our country, Black households are much less likely to have access to vehicles than White households. 

And that doesn’t get into who within a household has access to that vehicle. There are often a lot of dynamics within a household around gender or other issues that we aren’t able to explore when we’re just looking at [household members] as a single unit. 

There are also people who don’t have a driver’s license for a lot of reasons. Documentation, in some cases: While there are many states that allow undocumented folks to get driver’s licenses, not all undocumented folks want to enter their information into the system and be tracked that way, for very valid reasons. So there are folks who drive without licenses, but there are also folks who don’t feel like they can drive because they don’t have a license. 

There are also folks coming out of the criminal justice system, or people who have had their licenses suspended. Which can happen for safety reasons – DUIs and stuff like that – but in many states, we see it happening for seat belt use or a broken taillight. There are all sorts of fines and fees that can accumulate and result in license suspensions. And that happens to poor folks, right? 

Then there are people who are too young to drive. In some places, 10 to 15% of the population is under 16. 

And finally, there are people who choose not to drive. A big part of that is young people. Gen Z is not getting driver’s licenses at the same rate that my generation did in the ’90s. When I was a teenager, about 50% of 16-year-olds in the U.S. got driver’s licenses; now it’s down to about 25%. Part of that is choice, and I think part of it is the economics of how expensive it is to own a car, maintain a car, and have insurance. 

So together, those are the non-drivers in the U.S. There’s a lot of nuance and difference within this group, but we all have similar access needs. We need to go places, but we can’t grab the keys and go the way drivers can.

YCC: On the topic of people under 16, you write in the book about how U.S. cultural norms around children being driven everywhere by their parents can seem strange from an international perspective. Can you say more about this?

Zivarts: In many other countries, children are given a lot more freedom to get around on their own because infrastructure is set up in a way that allows that. In some cultures within the U.S., though, expectations around parenting assume a lot of time and privilege to parent in really intense ways. When we create systems that assume that every child has a caregiver that can drive them everywhere they need to go, that creates a lot of exclusion, because there are families that don’t have that access, right? There are adult non-drivers with children they’re responsible for. 

There’s been some interesting research by Dr. Kelcie Ralph at Rutgers around children who grow up without a driving caregiver. As adults, they have lower earnings and lower education attainment levels, even if you control for race and income, because so many opportunities are tied to access to driving.

YCC: You write in the book about speaking with government officials and transportation professionals who are shocked to learn that a quarter or a third of the people in their communities probably don’t drive. Can you tell me about the assumptions they came into these meetings with and how those discussions typically go?

Zivarts: On webinars, usually the first question or comment is something akin to “Thirty percent can’t be real. In my suburban or rural community, everyone drives.” Or “It’s not 30% if you don’t count kids.” To which I usually try to ask, “Well, at what age and with what abilities should someone get to be counted?” Is it 16? 18? 12? Starting first grade? Because all of us, even from the time of birth, need to go places. And not all of us can travel independently, even as adults. So why draw a line at all?

I’ve actually started beginning all my presentations by asking people to think about who they know in their own social circles who can’t drive. It personalizes the issue and preempts some of this backlash I’ve received in the past – because generally, people do know people in their lives who can’t drive. 

I think the first time I did this was a huge webinar when I was asked to talk to the Federal Highway Administration. I was like, “Oh, dear, this is going to be hard – these are all highway-building people.” I had them put in the chat who they knew that doesn’t drive, and there was a stream of answers. And then I was like, “OK, there are people that you love and care for who don’t drive. Now I’m going to talk about how we can design transportation systems that work for all these people.”

YCC: Why is it a problem that the people planning and building our transportation system assume everyone drives? What is the logical outcome of that assumption?

Zivarts: Well, we leave people out, right? I think there’s an assumption that, “Fine, there are people who don’t drive, but they can get rides” – because most of our communities are so car-dependent that, for most non-drivers, that’s how we get around. We end up relying on either our social networks or social services for rides. 

But that always comes with strings attached: Someone has to sort of validate your choice every time you want to go somewhere. And even if you have a loving, caring partner who has all the time in the world to drive you where you want to go, the way you interact with the world is going to be filtered through that, right? 

But there are lots of situations where people don’t have a loving, caring partner who’s able to give them rides. Say people need to get out of their household for safety reasons, or for health care reasons, and that option isn’t available.

And beyond those two extremes, there’s all the in-between – like wanting to go hang out with a friend but feeling like it’s too much of a favor to ask someone for a ride because that’s seen as not critical. There are lost opportunities for engagement, social cohesion, and community building, which has mental health implications.

And then there are lost opportunities to get to jobs.

YCC: So how do we get to a system that works better for non-drivers?

Zivarts: The first thing is visibility. We need to help non-drivers understand, “You are not alone.” There are a lot of us, and we need to be more visible. 

It also needs to be possible to imagine communities without cars. We lived that way before cars were invented, and there are places where it’s doable today, which I wish more people could experience. I spent 15 years in New York City, and it was so normalized not to own a car – that was really nice for me. My disability was much less of a thing there. But we also need to create systems that work for non-drivers in rural areas, not just in big, expensive cities. 

Those are complicated questions, and they’re connected to land use, housing, and housing affordability as well. So we need to be very intentional about addressing these issues. 

It really is about, at a systemic level, what can we do to make it easier for people to get where they need to go and not have to drive there.