The great motor divide: How our obsession with cars has driven us apart

Colin Anderson is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.

On Damen just south of Ogden next to Cook County Hospital, a very old Latino man struggled to get on the #50 Damen bus. As he sat down, a sociable Latina woman turned to him and said, “Wow, su reloj está muy bonito” in Spanish ("Wow, your watch is very nice"), likely a friendly attempt to help him forget about the trouble he had getting on the bus. He had trouble hearing her, so she repeated the compliment, and then asked, “¿Cuántos años tiene?” ("How old are you?") in a curious tone. “Noventa y tres años” ("Ninety-three"), he answered. If I am still alive and healthy enough to ride the bus at ninety-three, I will have the bus to thank.

At the next stop, on Damen just north of Taylor, another elderly Latino man in a wheelchair and his daughter got on. A Black woman in her forties immediately stood up and folded up her seat to make room for the man in the wheelchair. A young white woman offered up her seat to the man’s daughter, and the same sociable woman translated the interaction, helping the daughter explain she wanted to stand to better assist with her father’s wheelchair. There was a palpable sense of cooperation and goodwill on the bus, and multiple people had gotten a natural shot of feel-good hormones by helping execute the intricate choreography.

When was the last time you witnessed this kind of prosocial exchange between strangers on the Dan Ryan? How about while someone was parallel parking on Ashland?

A few days later, on the #50 bus going north to Wicker Park, an adorable Black toddler who was almost certainly a Gerber Baby as an infant played peek-a-boo with the white couple behind him as his great aunt rolled her eyes and said, “He knows he’s cute, that’s the problem.” She chatted about the snow, the mayor, and the current ward remap process with two Black women, the ice sufficiently broken by the adorable antics of her grand nephew. Going over the Eisenhower, the same woman helped clear up confusion between the driver and two riders in the back about which stop they wanted.

This is why transportation by private car fails the city socially. Drivers often come in contact with strangers when one or both parties is in a state of acute stress. I do not mean to imply we’re at our best on the bus ride home from work, just that we do not have the same forces acting upon us as we do behind the wheel. By contrast, on the bus or train, an audience of onlookers who can see us plainly acts as a safeguard against most poor choices. Honking at an older person who crossed the street too slowly for our liking as we speed away results in little or no consequences, while getting into it with someone on the bus is a price few of us would be willing to pay. No wonder it feels like the end of civility, considering that the most common way of getting around makes it easy to be a jerk.

The effects of widespread public contact are powerful. Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Margaret Crawford describes them in the concept of Everyday Urbanism, explaining that the mixing of local populations “create[s] a new condition of social fluidity... as chance encounters multiply and proliferate, activities of everyday space may begin to dissolve some of the predictable boundaries of race and class, revealing previously hidden social possibilities.” For a city as profoundly segregated as ours, previously hidden social possibilities sound like a step in the right direction.

In her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs argues that informal public interfacing is the necessary “grease” for higher levels of public life. With no “casual public trust,” how can we be expected to collaborate closely with those who are very different from us? If we are out of practice with performing small talk or even simply sharing the same physical space as those not our kith, kin, or color, when friction really comes, we find that things break down with no social grease to smooth things out.

As Nathan Heller reports in his New Yorker article "In a Divided Country, Communal Living Redefines Togetherness," an M.I.T. study of cell phone data showed that in choosing our friends in the modern city, we do not “mix” with our geographical neighbors; we sort according to social strata, regularly interacting only with people who are just like us.

Instead of seriously expanding opportunities for us to mix by taking buses and trains, the elected officials of our city and state continue to over-focus on auto-centric policies and spending. Recently, the Illinois Department of Transportation announced its intentions to widen the Eisenhower expressway in a futile effort to relieve congestion, a move that has Governor JB Pritzker’s full support. Not only is this irresponsible, given the state’s own admission that transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gases, but it's also counterproductive, since widening urban expressways simply induces more driving, so any congestion reduction is short-lived.