Roadkill: How Cars Ruin Our Lives, and How Big Auto has Occupied Your Subconscious

By Justinas Petkauskas '26

As the afternoon waned on a calm fall Saturday, I stepped on to the asphalt at the intersection of Tarrytown and Mooreland. With no cars in sight, I proceeded across the street, and continued northbound on Mooreland, walking in the left lane in order to ensure I wouldn’t get mowed down by the distracted driver of a two-ton SUV or lifted pick-up truck. As a matter of fact, it was quite a pastoral scene: birds sang their discordant harmonies, rays of light fell gently through the treetops, and children played in their lawns. That is, of course, until someone ripped through the curve and accelerated aggressively through the school zone. I stepped into the ditch to show the driver that they were driving offensively, but it was to no avail; they did not react. With this, my walk home had gotten off to a splendid start.

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How do you get to and from school? More likely than not, by car. By far the most ubiquitous mode of transportation in Henrico County, a 2022 survey revealed that the automobile was preferred by nearly 80% of commuters, with nearly 70% of respondents stating that they drove to work alone. In the Collegiate community, driving is ingrained into our culture. For many upperclassmen (myself included), the privilege of having a license, car, and spot to park at school supports a way of life which allows for unprecedented autonomy and a perceived sense of freedom. We are able to come and go as we please, define our life in terms of where we need to be and when, and get about comfortably and stylishly.

Yet cars take a toll on society, one which is seldom visible but nonetheless viciously pernicious. Believe it or not, cars make our lives worse. Weighing the costs of auto ownership, both direct and indirect, the dangers to the driver, others, and the environment, and the impact on the quality of our governance, it becomes evident that driving is a categorically flawed mode of transport. Walking, biking, or public transit make much more objective sense as a means of transport - yet they remain impractical or even impossible thanks to the very nature of our society and the way our communities are built. That being said, all hope is not lost; there remains plenty which we can do to locomote more sustainably and fight back against the system which propagates our auto dependency.

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Before the car, life was simpler. Some people lived in the ‘city,’ and others lived in the ‘country' with a clear delineation between the two. Those who lived in the city had everything at their fingertips. They could walk or bike to work, school, the grocery store, etc. Streets were filled with pedestrians and bikes, whose only competition were the slow horse-drawn carriages. When the car first appeared, their affluent owners became immediately frustrated with the slow pace of traffic and the inconvenience of striking pedestrians. As they became more aggressive, the government fought back. The public spirit was, broadly speaking, with the foot-passenger, and thus citizens often lobbied for speed limits and restrictions on where cars could drive. But affluent people, being affluent people, lobbied some here and there, eventually making car-centric streets the norm. One hundred years later, after Ford ‘democratized’ the car with the Model T, and wealthy city dwellers fled the growing poverty of dense urban areas, the concept of ‘suburbia’ proliferated, blurring the line between town and country, and thus creating quasi-urban spaces where parking is prioritized over people and a 30-minute commute is normal.

I characterize suburbia and driving in such a negative light because driving is inefficient, dangerous, and has a history of corruption, while the alternative of urbanism and individual mobility present a safer and more sustainable paradigm of human settlement and transport. Let us begin with the principle of urbanism.

Urbanist philosophy posits that cities are the best forms of human settlement for many reasons, but namely because they a) improve the efficiency and quality of the distribution of goods and services by concentrating consumers, b) minimize the environmental impact of settlement by concentrating development and human impact in as small of a surface area as possible, and c) promote the diffusion of culture and innovation by concentrating diverse groups of people and ideas. The goal of urbanism, then, is to promote density and sustainability within cities by focusing on key aspects of how humans interact with the built environment around us, be it public transit or green space. The ideal city is one where people can get to work walking, biking, or taking public transit, have all the services which they regularly require within a close distance to their dwelling, and can ultimately afford to live there. This manifests through density and upwards growth, which allows more people to occupy the same amount of land, and public transit, which allows for more people to move around in a quick, efficient, and land-effective manner, among other initiatives and practices.

For a long time, most American cities were that way, and most Americans who live in urban areas lived within urban cores. Yet today, most Americans actually live in suburbs, separated from the central core of cities by an ever-expanding radius of low-density housing developments. And while low-density housing is not inherently problematic, its broad proliferation and overutilization was in no small part aided by something more insidious: the automobile, and specifically, big auto.

Urbanism and automobility are fundamentally incompatible insofar as the personal automobile is the most inefficient mode of transportation. If an individual drives a car, they must have a space to park their vehicle at both the origin and destination, space which is dead and cannot be otherwise used productively in an urban environment which is often home to some of the highest-value land in an area. There must be a road to connect those places, a road which is expansive and hostile to anything other than cars. But again, those things are not problematic in isolation. What has occurred in the United States is that automobility has become the focus of transport, to the active detriment of cities. As car companies became more and more powerful, they gained the ability to mold the development in cities by influencing certain politicians and their wealthy constituents, shifting their priorities away from public transit to highways and parking to make their own lives more convenient and pad the bottom lines of Big Auto. Today, most American cities are uber-accessible by car, a fact that is made possible by the systematic taxpayer subsidization of an inherently antisocial and individualistic form of transport, i.e. the car, through the government and State DOTs’ feverish construction and expansion of urban highways and roads. Local authorities codify suburbanization through restrictive zoning codes which all but monopolize low-density single-family housing and restrict urban density, further proliferating auto dependency. Beyond cars themselves, urban highway construction has a long and problematic history which is well beyond the scope of this piece. But combine that with the cost and inconvenience of auto ownership, and the funding tradeoff with public transport, and we end up with an endless feedback loop of car ownership, highway expansion, city decay, and suburbanization, which makes us and our lives poorer as a result.

Taking a step back, let us reorient ourselves with the context of our own lives. The Collegiate school sits in a quintessentially suburban part of the greater Richmond Region. Statistically speaking, most students live in suburban areas, some far from school. Even then, the city of Richmond is by no means a metropolis. Talk of high-rises and urban rail is foreign to us. So why should it matter?

Beyond the realm of principle, cars are bad in myriad other ways. They pollute the environment, most guzzling unreasonable amounts of gas and releasing polluting byproducts into our waterways. Even electric vehicles have a large environmental impact during their production - nevertheless, a sizeable proportion of airborne pollutants come not from the vehicle’s tailpipe, but its tires and the road surfaces which they drive on - meaning that the very concept of rubber tires on a road is inherently polluting . Cars are dangerous, proving potentially lethal to occupants and bystanders at the slightest mistake or miscalculation (or worse, act of negligence). And, they are expensive to buy, drive, and maintain.
Not all cars are equal, however. Misguided federal policy over the past few decades has incentivized the auto industry to produce more SUVs and pick-up trucks, which, from a bureaucratic perspective, have fewer fuel efficiency, weight, and safety limits than their Sedan counterparts. Thus, big auto is able to profit more from said vehicles, which is why the industry has invested so much in their advertisement and sale. The wide adoption of trucks and SUVs has spelled disaster for pedestrian fatality rates, as their disproportionate weight makes impacts less survivable. These vehicles certainly have their place as useful tools - but their broad adoption outside of their intended use as off-road or work vehicles has made streets more dangerous for pedestrians. A first policy step for any administration

In reading this article, you may have felt a visceral anger at my critique. I have heard as much from many peers to whom I explain my perspective. But I do not blame you. Not long ago, I too used to mentally scold people who rode their bikes on the road. Big Auto is at fault for fabricating the narrative that the car and automobility are at the center of our identity, both as individuals and a nation, which explains why critiques of our auto-dependent lifestyle can feel especially painful and targeted. The American values of liberty and rugged individualism are not inherently tied to the personal automobile.

You may object to this analysis by pointing out that I, the author, drive to school. But I believe that both things can be true at once - you can drive and be an urbanist - because staunch fundamentalism promotes polarization on an issue which need not be so contentious.

For us (sub)urbanites in the Richmond metro area, the principal alternatives are walking and biking. Walking is amazing because it requires nothing beyond what you would need at your destination to take advantage of, making it incredibly convenient. Biking is faster than walking, and still requires minimal, low cost equipment. Both allow for the individual to locomote under their own energy, or in other words, exercise while commuting, thus killing two birds with one stone. Yet as keen observers may note, biking and walking remain all but impossible for most, due to the lack of sidewalks or appropriate infrastructure making the option too dangerous. Furthermore, when cyclists occupy right-of-way which is typically thought of as car-only (even though they have the right to do so as per Virginia statute), they, at no fault of their own, foment rage within drivers who see them as little more than an obstacle, and subsequently perpetuate a cycle of cyclist hate and corresponding inaction on bike infrastructure solutions. Or, perhaps, you live too far away from school and driving is the only feasible way to make the commute in a reasonable amount of time. The school, at little fault of its own, does not support many alternative modes, for its part. Beyond the immediate vicinity of the campus, sidewalks are scarce, while bike racks are few and bike lanes nonexistent - all the while making parking a priority and catering nearly exclusively to the needs of drivers, consequently embodying a paradigm of complete car-dependency.

In spite of the systemic issues which I have highlighted, there are still things we can do to address these issues. If at all possible, walk or bike to wherever you are going - I do it, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the experience. Take advantage of public transit whenever possible. Bring the ball into big auto’s court by lobbying your state and local officials for enhanced bicycle or pedestrian right-of-way legislation, for instance. When considering your living arrangements or lifestyle in the future, remember the impact of your choices and the alternatives to our car-centric paradigm. The school could explore alternatives to expanding parking infrastructure/incentivizing driving in order to promote more sustainable commuting. Finally, I implore you to simply keep this idea in mind. I promise you, just as it did for me, it will change how you see the world and make you question what you thought were otherwise unchallengeable ideas or norms.

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As the sun bore down on the unforgiving pavement, I approached the most hostile intersection of my trek: that of Patterson and Pump Road. Said intersection has no crosswalk nor pedestrian infrastructure, meaning I was left to fend for myself. After observing the patterns and flow of traffic for a few minutes, I finally mustered the courage to cross. As I hastily shuffled over the subtle crown of the pavement, I couldn’t help but feel exposed. Suddenly, every movement became conscious. I began to think about where my next step landed, where I put my hands, and how I held my head. Only the thought of being flattened kept my pace brisk. After crossing Patterson, the rest of the walk was significantly easier, as there were more pedestrian implements alongside the harsh and unfriendly roads. Eventually, after two hours, 6 miles, and thankfully no incidents, I made it home. But my perspective would never be the same again.

Justinas Petkauskas, ‘26