The most idiotic ideas come from articles written by anti-car writers. This isn’t recent, but a colleague from Washington let me know of a 2022 article from a “public interest” organization called the Frontier Group that reports that “less driving is possible.” Thanks to “compact neighborhoods” and “investments in infrastructure that supports walking, biking or riding transit,” some states have managed to reduce per-capita driving, which the Frontier Group regards as a victory.
To encourage transit while discouraging driving, Washington converted lanes on a bridge that had previously been open to all vehicles into light-rail lines. Image by Sound Transit.
As evidence, the author of the Frontier Group article, Elizabeth Redlington, compared miles of per capita driving by state in 1996 and 2021. Between those two years, some states increased but some declined and the biggest decline was in Washington state, which saw a 15.8 percent drop in per capita driving during that period. Continue reading
