No One Left Behind: Nondrivers Are Facing the Housing Crisis Too
U.S. Highway 15-501 is an old country road that, with the help of a North Carolina highway initiative, has been reborn as a four-lane highway. While the transformation is mostly complete — a median divides the northbound and southbound lanes of traffic — some remnants of its rural roots remain. Traffic that normally travels at 50 or 60 mph must sometimes come to an abrupt halt to avoid vehicles pulling onto the causeway from gravel roads. At night, not even the largest intersections are lit by street lamps.
The weak beam of my bike headlight was no match for the darkness of the unlit highway. I could usually see the white stripe delineating the shoulder from the rest of the road, but my eyes couldn’t distinguish the dark silhouettes of road kill from the dark of the asphalt. The area around Chapel Hill was rural, so it was not uncommon to see deer carcasses or the bodies of squirrels or some other putrid, rodent-like creature flattened along the edge of the highway. I kept imagining the front tire of my bike would hit some bloody thing and slip on the rotting carcass. I'd lose control and sprawl out across the pavement, road kill for the next truck barreling along the highway.
The U.S. is not an easy place to live without a car, especially suburban or rural America. But each day, nearly a third of people in the United States — disabled people like me, people who can’t afford cars, recent immigrants, young people and people aging out of driving — find ways to cope in this land of the open highway.
I was born with nystagmus, a condition that reduces my distance vision and prevents me from getting a driver’s license. I moved to Chapel Hill in March 2007 to work for a political campaign headquartered at Southern Village — a suburban enclave a few miles south of Chapel Hill on Highway 15-501. Southern Village did have bus service, but it didn’t extend to weekends or the evenings when I was off work. I was lucky that I could rent an apartment in this same exurban subdivision as the campaign office, but if I needed to go into town to go shopping, visit a pharmacy or see the doctor, I had to bike or ask for a ride.
As the U.S. faces a profound housing affordability crisis, more homes must be built. The lower cost of rural land might make building more places like Southern Village seem appealing. But if these are the only places people can afford to live, nondrivers will face huge barriers.
Even for people who can drive, greenfield developments lock households into car ownership and additional driving, costs that are too often overlooked when thinking about affordability. Greenfield developments also increase costs for transit agencies, which have to stretch routes to cover exurban developments, especially if these developments are intended to be affordable for low-income households.
In Washington, where I live now, zoning codes require developers to extend pedestrian infrastructure to new developments that are built along local roads. But there’s an exemption if those developments are built along state highways, resulting in a financial incentive for developers to build more places like Southern Village that are islands of isolation for nondriving residents.
This past summer, I participated in a walk/roll audit by a high school in the exurbs of Vancouver, Washington (the city across the river from Portland, Oregon). The school was located on a state highway, and a new development had been built on the other side of the highway. There were transit stops and sidewalks along this four-lane, high-speed arterial road, but it had been designed as a rural highway, so intersections with stoplights were more than a mile apart. So students, wanting to get from their homes to school, would wait for a gap in traffic and dash across the highway. Bus riders faced a similar dilemma: walk more than a mile out of the way to cross with a light or cross directly.
The previous year, a student was hit by a vehicle while crossing the highway, and the highway department responded by installing multiple warning signs telling students not to cross. They didn't work: Even as we stood there talking about the safety challenges of exurban development, two young people dashed across the road in front of us to catch the next bus.
Greenfield sites are not the solution for housing affordability, even if it’s an easier political sell than increasing density in existing neighborhoods. Housing needs to work for nondrivers, whether that’s people like me who can’t drive, people who can’t afford to drive, young people or older adults (on average, Americans will spend the last seven to 10 years of their lives being unable to drive). When driving isn't an option for so many people, building more car-dependent communities isn't a solution.
When I see advertisements for greenfield developments, especially ones that are built with “new urbanist” ideals, I think back to my year in North Carolina. Southern Village wasn’t just an exurban housing development: The “Village” featured a town square with an organic grocery store, a small gym, and even a restaurant or two. But it definitely wasn’t possible to get everything you needed without leaving, and leaving meant navigating the highway.
For people who can drive, being able to reduce their driving trips because there’s a cute coffee shop nearby might feel great, but for people who can’t drive like me, places like Southern Village feel more like a desert island than the intended suburban paradise. Without enough transit, and often with only a highway shoulder connecting the development with all the other places a person might need to go, these places necessarily exclude people who are physically or financially unable to drive. Because, sometimes, you need more than a coffee shop or a cute grocery store.
Anna Zivarts is a low-vision parent, nondriver and author of “When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency” (Island Press, 2024). Anna created the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge and is passionate about bringing the voices of nondrivers to the planning and policy-making tables. Anna sits on the boards of the League of American Bicyclists, the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium and the Washington State Transportation Innovation Council. She also serves as a member of TRB's Committee on Public Health and Transportation (AME70) and the National Aging and Disability Transportation Center Coordinating Committee.
