“Would it be weird to live here without a car?”: Using social media to understand car ownership decisions

Transportation practitioners and scholars increasingly view car-free mobility as an essential component of a sustainable, healthy, and safe transportation future. In the United States, however, strikingly few households—only around 9%—do not own cars. Moreover, most zero-vehicle individuals—around 80%—are without vehicles due of constraint (e.g., because they cannot afford one), while a much smaller fraction—around 20%—are car-free because they can meet their mobility needs without one. This latter group is of interest to transportation researchers and practitioners, given the imperative to reduce driving and its associated negative externalities. In this paper, I examine factors that contribute to individuals’ decisions to live car-free. This research is based on 430 comments posted on the social content-sharing website Reddit, in which commenters shared their first-hand experiences related to the prospect of going car-free. These comments were obtained from 46 threads situated in seven different US cities, focusing specifically on car ownership decisions. Commenters described accessible neighborhoods as foundational to decisions to forego a vehicle. While such conditions were typically necessary, however, they sometimes were not sufficient to foster car-free choices. Costs of car ownership, especially parking costs, were often the deciding factor for commenters who opted not to have a car. Finally, inconveniences related to car ownership and travel, like traffic-related stress, were discussed as benefits of living car-free. In sum, the observed individual decisions about car ownership tend to consist of people balancing supportive conditions for non-car travel against costs of and constraints on car-travel.