The Weight Of Car Ownership On Immigants And The Rest Of Us

 

What better uses could these costs be applied to if we weren't forced to own on or two cars? Wikimedia Commons

I was speaking with a coworker the other day who has a J1 visa from the Philippines to work. A J1 gives her five years to work in the U.S. before having to return to the Philippines for two years before returning. She told me that they were purchasing a new "cheap" second car so that her husband could get to work. With three kids and the ongoing costs of being an immigrant, in a little town like Williston, she is still strapped by the feedback loop of having to go to work to pay for the car so that she can keep going to work. Once again, bad urban design is forcing the never ending indentured servitude of being compelled to own a car by people who struggle to afford it.

As Ellen Goodman has so comically written:

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” 

 

What if we had a society where we had more time to spend in the home we are paying for with those clothes because our communities were designed so you wouldn't need a car?

 

The added irony is that when my friend returns to the Philippines, she won't need a car because communities are designed more in a more human-centric than car centric way. While most people don't own cars, even modest communities in the Philippines have networks of little motorcycle sidecar cabs called trikes one can hail for short trips and truck sized busses called jeepneys to jump on for longer trips.

In my wife's town of 50,000 in the Philippines, I would never bother with the hassle of driving around by car since it is so easy to jump in a trike cab. Living in a town just over half the size in the United States doing anything without a car, though not impossible, is a struggle.