Patrick Filler

Low-car Cities

After perusing Wikipedia’s “List of U.S. cities with most households without a car,” Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant, attempts to reach some conclusions about why certain cities make the list. Surprisingly (at least to me), a city’s presence on the list is not purely a product of available public transportation (though it is an obvious factor).

If I then look across the whole list and try to identify factors that seem to explain, in different mixtures, each city’s presence on the list, it seems there are three: age, poverty, and dominant universities (i.e. universities that are large relative to the size of the city).

The top three carless cities (by percentage) are right in my neighborhood:

1. New York, NY (55.7% of households are carless)
2. Newark, NJ (44.17%)
3. Jersey City, NJ (40.67%)

Of the top 30, only San Francisco (28.56%) is west of the Mississippi.

(via Bobulate)