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I grew up in suburban California but have now lived in an East Coast big city for over three decades. And with that geographic change and the passage of time, I've done a complete U-turn when it comes to cars.

I was not a big car buff as a kid, but that's kind of the point I'm making here, which is that the prevailing culture I grew up in was car-dominated. You could actually walk to things in our neighborhood - I did walk or bike to school for most of my K-12 life - but most trips of consequence took place in a car, and no one thought anything of that. 

More than the practicality of how one got around, cars commanded a central place in our collective psyche at the time. Getting your driver's license and your first car were veritable rites of passage, markers of freedom, and symbols of a good time ahead. My friends and I, and again none of us were huge car fanatics, would fantasize about owning certain cars, for the speed or the status. To extract cars from our lives at the time would've robbed us not only of our ability to get around but of how we expressed our plans and aspirations.

I still remember my friend taking me on a drive once, as a test run for a date he was going on, as he wanted my help in game planning everything from the route he took (and the views along the way) to the condition of the vehicle in which he would be taking his crush around. The car, in this scene he was so intent on getting perfect, was not just something that would get him around but an extension of himself in an attempt to impress a girl. It was, in multiple senses, a vehicle for him, and that was how central cars were to our lives.

Fast forward to the present, and the car is only a sometimes vehicle in the sense of getting myself and others around, and almost never a vehicle in the sense of representing who I am or what I aspire to. Very few recurring trips I take require a car. My kids get to school and my wife and I get to work without a car on a daily basis; in fact, I could probably count on one hand the total number of times we have used a car for these trips. 

More so than concerning the logistics of my life, driving is something I find myself wanting to have happen as infrequently as possible, for economic and social and environmental reasons. Creating places and cities that don't require driving are inherently more accessible, since not everyone has the money or the physical ability to drive. Driving (and parking and traffic) is bad for the environment and for your nerves. And less space for roads and parking spaces means more space for people, shorter distances for people to get from point A to point B, and more opportunities for people to interact. As I like to say, I bump into people all the time when walking, biking, or riding the subway; whereas I'm actively trying not to literally bump into people when driving.

And this is a central premise to my hope for the future of cities, which is to say my aspirational future for humanity, since what I want for humanity is sustainability and equity and vibrancy, and where that best happens is in urban places that don't require cars and in fact where as little driving as possible takes place. Such places are where people have lower barriers to a happy life, and where the kind of mixing can easily happen - across walks of life and at frequent intervals - that leads to cultural expression and scientific discovery and business success. 

In a generation, I've gone from the car being squarely in the middle of my life to actively pushing it to near obsolescence, from relying on it for mobility and freedom to having a full life completely outside of using it at all. What a U-turn!