My family owns six cars among seven people. I have mine, my father has two, my mother has one, my grandparents share one, my uncle has his own, my cousins share a family car. In my hometown, statistics suggest an average of two cars per person across the city, which means my family is actually below average in our car ownership. I owned my first car before I had a driver’s license, and so did most of my friends. You’d think that this is an exceptional privilege, but within our middle class, that’s just normal. You got a car, then you learned to drive it, then you drove it everywhere because not driving isn’t really an option in Brazilian cities unless you’re very poor or very committed to making your life difficult. Public transportation is inadequate to terrible depending on the city. Walking is both unpleasant and dangerous depending on the neighborhood. Cycling is suicidal on most streets. So everyone drives, which means everyone needs parking, which means the city is covered in parking lots and parking spaces and parking structures, which should solve the parking problem except it doesn’t, because abundant parking just induces more driving which creates more traffic which means everyone spends time stuck in cars looking for parking in a city that’s supposedly built to accommodate cars despite being actually strangled by them.
This is the paradox that shapes life in most of our cities and, differently but recognizably, in cities globally: we‘ve organized urban space around storing and moving private vehicles, made car ownership essential for participating in normal life, and then discovered that serving cars makes cities worse for everyone including the people in cars. The question isn’t if this is sustainable, because it obviously isn’t. The question, truly, is how we got here, why it persists regardless of being dysfunctional, and whether the way out exists or if we’re trapped in a system that will keep expanding until it consumes everything.
Let me start with what car culture actually is, because it’s not just infrastructure or transportation policy, it’s identity, aspiration and class signaling wrapped around a durable good that sits idle 95% of the time. In Brazil, car ownership marks the transition to adulthood in ways that employment or even marriage doesn’t. Your first car, regardless of its condition or value, represents independence and the ability to move through space on your own terms rather than on the schedule and routes of a run-down public transit. The type of car you drive communicates where you sit in the social hierarchy more clearly than most other possessions because it’s visible, expensive, and culturally loaded with meaning about success and who you aspire to be.
This manifests differently across contexts but the underlying pattern is similar. In the United States, car ownership is assumed, mandatory, pretty much the baseline requirement for participating in society outside of maybe five or six cities with functional transit. American car culture is about size, power and myth of open-roads tied to personal freedom, which is why trucks and SUVs dominate despite most owners never hauling cargo or going off-road, because the vehicles themselves perform identity rather than serving practical transportation needs. In Italy, car ownership is nearly universal despite dense historic cities with medieval street layouts never designed for vehicles, resulting in chaotic creative parking everywhere, on sidewalks and in piazzas, often blocking narrow streets, a kind of improvisational relationship with rules that extends to driving itself, where traffic laws are mere suggestions and parking restrictions are guidelines you can ignore if you’re clever about it.
The Netherlands represents the deliberate exception, a country that in the 1970s decided to reduce car dependency through massive investment in cycling infrastructure and in urban design, prioritizing pedestrians and bikes, by consequence making car ownership optional rather than necessary for most daily activities. Dutch cities still have cars, but they’re not the only choice, and this is what fundamentally changes the relationship between people, their vehicles and their cities. But the Netherlands is exceptional precisely because it required sustained political will and public investment over decades to create alternatives, and most places lack either the will or the resources to accomplish the same.
Brazil sits somewhere complex in this landscape: car ownership is aspirational for the middle class but increasingly necessary for everyone because public transit is inadequate and cities are designed around cars even though the infrastructure to support them is worse than in wealthy countries. Brazilian drivers navigate narrower streets in smaller cars with more creative parking and more aggressive driving than Americans but less chaotic than Italians, a specific adaptation to conditions where you need a car to function but the city wasn’t really built to handle the number of cars everyone needs. And because buying a car in Brazil is prohibitively expensive in ways that Americans or Europeans will never fully grasp, used to their own expensive but relatively accessible vehicle markets, the entire relationship to car ownership carries different weight.
The economics of car ownership in Brazil are genuinely insane. A new car costs multiple years of average salary, which is already difficult, but financing makes it worse because interest rates on auto loans are the highest in the world, regularly exceeding 20-30% annually, sometimes reaching 40% or more depending on credit rating and market conditions. This means buying a car on installment payments, which most people must do because few can pay cash for a vehicle starting at 80,000 to 120,000 reais for more basic units, results in paying double or triple the sticker price over the loan term. You’re essentially buying a car plus another entire car’s worth of interest to the financing company.
And you can’t opt out by buying used imports, because Brazil has maintained since the nationalist dictatorship era a law prohibiting the import of used vehicles newer than 30 years old, ostensibly to protect domestic industry but in practice creating an oligopoly where traditional manufacturers control the market with little competition and can charge whatever prices they want because consumers have no alternative. Recent entry of Chinese manufacturers like BYD has started to challenge this, but even BYD’s cheapest model, the Dolphin Mini, costs over five years of minimum wage salary, putting it out of reach for most of the population. So Brazilians drive older cars, keep them longer, repair them repeatedly, because replacing a vehicle is a major financial undertaking that might involve years of debt at interest rates that would be illegal in any developed country.
And yet people buy cars anyway, take on the debt, pay the interest, because not having a car isn’t really an option. Public transportation in most cities ranges from gutted to actively terrible — buses are overcrowded, unreliable, slow, often dangerous, run by private companies with government contracts that function essentially as cartels with little accountability and no competition, widely understood to involve corruption and political lobbying that prevents improvement because the current operators profit from the inadequate system. Using buses means potentially hours of commute time, unpredictable schedules, crowded conditions, and limited routes that don’t efficiently connect most origins to most destinations. Walking isn’t viable for most trips because cities are spread out and sidewalks are poorly maintained. Street crime can also be a concern in many areas, specially those that are purely residential or commercial (Jane Jacobs’ Eye on the street theory) and the climate is often hot and humid, making long walks unpleasant. Cycling is dangerous because most streets have no bike infrastructure and drivers don’t expect cyclists, meaning accidents are common and often fatal.
So everyone who can possibly afford it drives, which means traffic is terrible, and since commute times are long anyway, you’re sitting in traffic one way or another, but instead of being on a bus at least you’re in your own space with air conditioning and the autonomy to leave when you want rather than when the bus schedule permits. The car provides a kind of dignity and control that public transit doesn’t, and this matters enough that people will pay extortionate interest rates for it.
Gasoline prices add to this. Fuel in Brazil is expensive relative to income, and the best gasoline available, the premium formulations with additives that supposedly clean engines and improve performance, costs at least 30% more than regular gasoline. Interesting given that Petrobras and the pré-sal exist, but I digress. This affects everyone, including public services that rely on vehicles, because those public services are typically operated by private companies paid partially by government contracts, which means every increase in fuel costs gets passed through to either government budgets or service quality, perhaps both, and yes, this system is widely understood to involve corruption, essentially a mafia-like structure where the companies providing services have captured the agencies meant to regulate them. Nobody is particularly surprised by this, it’s just how things work, which makes reform difficult because the problem is structural and embedded in political relationships that have existed for decades.
And the vehicle fleet keeps aging. The average car on Brazilian roads is getting older every year because replacement is so expensive and financing is so burdensome, leading to older cars with worse fuel efficiency, higher emissions and more frequent breakdowns, but people keep driving them because the alternative is not having a car, which for most people means not being able to work or participate in normal activities. You maintain the car you have and keep it running as long as possible, because buying a new one means taking on debt you might not be able to afford.
The vehicles themselves have shifted in what’s considered desirable. Sedans, particularly long sedans, precisely American-style sedans with substantial length and presence, are relics now, things from a previous era when cars were about proportions and a certain aesthetic sophistication. I love them specifically for those qualities, the long hood and trunk, plus the visual balance of a proper sedan, but they’re not what most people aspire to own anymore. Now it’s compact SUVs and pickup trucks styled after American models like the Silverado High Country, vehicles that signal success through size, height and aggressive styling. These are vehicles that take up more space and consume more fuel, while simultaneously being harder to park but that perform status more effectively than sedans do. This is partly a global trend, with SUVs and trucks having replaced sedans everywhere, but in Brazil it’s complicated by the infrastructure mismatch: people want larger vehicles but the streets and parking spaces were designed for smaller cars, creating constant friction.
I currently drive a compact hatchback that parks easily, fits tight spaces, navigates narrow streets without drama, and costs very little to fuel. It’s practical and efficient but completely uninteresting, which is fine for daily transportation but not particularly satisfying as an object or an experience. My next car will be a large sedan, something in the 4.9 to 5.3 meter range, with the proportions and presence that compact cars lack. This will, naturally, change my relationship with parking fundamentally. I’ll need more time to maneuver, more space front and back, backup cameras that are a necessity, not convenience, and I’ll have to pay attention to where I can actually fit it. The infrastructure in Brazilian cities wasn’t designed for 5+ meter vehicles. Parking spaces are often barely adequate for 4.5 meter cars, sometimes marked at 4 meters in length and maybe 2m wide, when 2.5 would be ideal. Street parking in older neighborhoods has no formal dimensions at all, just curb space between driveways or corners, and fitting a large sedan means careful positioning and accepting that you might overhang slightly or be closer to adjacent cars than anyone prefers.
In the United States, this wouldn’t be an issue, since American infrastructure was built assuming large vehicles, since forever. Parking spaces are much wider, easily accommodating full-size sedans, trucks and SUVs. Streets are wider, strangely so, the garages are also bigger, and the system as a whole scales to vehicles that would be considered oversized elsewhere. But our infrastructure doesn’t scale this way, because it was built for smaller vehicles, the compact cars that dominated the market for decades, and the aspiration toward larger vehicles is constrained by physical reality in ways that create constant frustration for drivers of anything bigger than a Volkswagen Gol.
This is visible in parking structures where the turns, ramps and space dimensions were designed for small cars, making navigation in a bigger vehicle a careful exercise in not scraping walls or columns. It’s visible in street parking where a large vehicle might technically fit but requires multiple attempts to position correctly and risking blocking sight lines for other drivers. It’s visible in residential garages built to minimum code dimensions that barely accommodate one compact car and certainly can’t fit anything approaching American dimensions. The infrastructure and the aspirations are misaligned, and this misalignment is nobody’s individual fault but everyone’s problem.
And vehicle size has cascading implications beyond just parking difficulty. Since larger vehicles block sight lines, it’s harder for drivers of smaller cars or for pedestrians to see traffic when pulling out or crossing streets. They’re more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists in collisions because of their mass and the height of their front ends. They consume more fuel, often diesel, which matters when gasoline is expensive. They take up more street space, reducing effective road capacity, they’re harder to maneuver in tight urban environments, requiring more time and attention to park or navigate narrow streets. But people want them anyway because they signal success and provide perceived safety through size, even though actual safety is more complicated and often depends more on vehicle design and driver behavior than on pure mass.
The global trend is toward larger vehicles even as cities get denser, resources get scarcer and climate concerns become more urgent, because individual incentives don’t align with collective outcomes. “I want the largest car I can afford and manage because it’s more comfortable and impressive and feels safer”, and if everyone makes the same apparent rational individual choice, the result is streets full of oversized vehicles that don’t fit the infrastructure and make transportation worse for everyone. This isn’t solvable through individual virtue or better choices, but by facing the problem, which is structural, and requires coordination, regulation and ultimately infrastructure investment that currently doesn’t exist.
Let me talk about parking specifically, because that’s where the dysfunction becomes most visible and most personally frustrating.
Florianópolis, my hometown, has parking everywhere. Surface lots, street parking, parking structures, parking in front of most commercial buildings, parking behind residential buildings, parking along every major avenue. You would think this solves the parking problem, but it doesn’t. Traffic is still terrible, people still circle around looking for spots, specially downtown, and parking is still contentious and stressful. Why? Because abundant parking induces more driving. If I know I can park easily at my destination, I’ll drive instead of considering alternatives. If everyone makes that same calculation, everyone drives, which creates traffic congestion that makes every trip longer, which means the parking you’re driving to is harder to reach despite being abundant.
This is induced demand, a well-known concept, and it works both directions. Build more roads and you get more traffic as people shift to driving because driving is now easier. Build more parking and you get more traffic as people shift to driving because parking is now easier. Remove roads or parking and, assuming alternatives exist, you get less traffic as people shift to other modes. But when cities are built only for cars, providing essentially no viable alternatives, removing parking without providing transit or cycling infrastructure just makes people angry and doesn’t reduce driving because people still need to get places and cars are still the only realistic option.
The city is trapped in an equilibrium where everyone drives because the city is built for cars, and the city keeps building for cars because everyone drives, and this cycle continues until you have a city that’s simultaneously built entirely around car storage and movement while also being completely dysfunctional for car storage and movement because there are too many cars for the infrastructure to handle even though the infrastructure is designed for nothing but cars. It’s absurd but also rational from within the system, because at any given moment the best individual choice is to drive, and the aggregate of everyone making that best individual choice produces collective dysfunction.
The arithmetic of parking reveals costs that are mostly invisible. A single parking space on the street occupies roughly 12 to 15 square meters, including the space needed to maneuver in and out. In dense urban areas where land has commercial value, this represents opportunity cost: that space could be outdoor dining for a café, or a bike lane, or wider sidewalks with trees, or simply smaller streets that cost less to maintain and are easier to cross as a pedestrian. Every parking space is a choice about urban priorities, a statement that storing one private vehicle for one person is more important than any other use that space might serve.
In dense city centers, where land costs are highest, the subsidy becomes explicit and enormous. If land is worth R\$12,000 per square meter, a single parking space occupies R\$144,000 to R\$180,000 worth of prime real estate that the city provides for free or vastly underpriced to whoever happens to park there. Over a year, considering the rental potential or the sheer market value of that footprint, the city is providing hundreds of thousands of reais in subsidy to private vehicle owners, what could instead be redirected toward expanding the BRT, if present, building social housing, if possible, or simply reducing the overall tax burden. But this subsidy remains invisible because it isn’t a another mere item in the budget; it is simply public wealth paved over and gifted to car storage because that is what we have always done.
Building parking in Brazil is expensive in ways that are hidden within housing and retail costs. According to CUB (Custo Unitário Básico), the raw physical cost to build just one square meter of commercial structure, in Florianópolis, is R\$3.222,03. When you factor in the land value at R\$12.864/m² and the complex engineering required for underground garages, a single parking space in a new development represents an investment of around R\$150,000.
Even surface lots, which appear inexpensive, require high-value land and maintenance that often exceeds the property’s tax generation. When this parking is ‘included’ with an apartment purchase or ‘provided free’ by a shopping mall, the buyer or consumer is still charged for the bill. This ‘parking tax’ is baked into apartment prices and the cost of consumer goods, forcing everyone (including those who don’t own cars) to subsidize private vehicle storage through higher living and retail costs.
This is a wealth transfer from non-car-owners to car-owners, from renters to homeowners, from young people who can’t afford cars to older people who own multiple vehicles. It’s regressive taxation, disguised, and entirely normalized. Nobody itemizes their rent or mortgage to show “parking cost: R\$400/month” even though that cost is real and substantial. Nobody sees a receipt showing “parking subsidy: R\$200” when they buy groceries even though the store’s parking lot cost money to build and maintain and that cost gets recovered through higher prices.
Parking demand varies by time: residential areas need parking at night, commercial areas during business hours, entertainment districts during evenings and weekends. Shared parking could theoretically serve multiple uses, with office parking becoming restaurant parking after 6pm, but zoning regulations and property ownership patterns often prevent this. So parking is overbuilt to handle peak demand, which might be 30% higher than average demand, meaning parking sits empty much of the time but still occupies space and costs money to maintain.
Parking minimums are how this overbuilding gets legally mandated. Most cities have regulations requiring new developments to provide a minimum number of parking spaces based on building type and size: X spaces per residential unit, Y spaces per square meter of commercial space, Z spaces per restaurant seat. These requirements were written decades ago, often in the 1960s or 70s when car ownership was rapidly expanding and cities feared gridlock from people circling for parking. The logic was straightforward: require enough parking that residents and customers don’t overflow onto streets. But these requirements are almost always excessive because they’re based on peak demand at worst-case scenarios. They assume everyone owns cars, everyone drives simultaneously to the same destinations, nobody shares rides, takes a bus or has legs to walk around. They’re also standardized, treating all locations identically regardless of whether they’re in dense city centers with good transit or in suburban areas with no alternatives to driving. The result is that we legally require buildings to provide more parking than necessary, which makes buildings more expensive, in turn making housing more expensive and spreads cities out because parking requires space, consequently making distances longer, as a result making driving more necessary, therefore justifying the parking requirements in a perfect circular logic.
Enforcement of these requirements varies. In Brazil, my observation is that new developments must meet minimums to get building permits, so they do, which adds substantially to construction costs and gets passed through to buyers or renters. But what about existing buildings and street parking? Enforcement is inconsistent at best. Wealthier neighborhoods get parking enforcement that keeps streets clear, while poorer areas get neglected, generating informal parking everywhere: on sidewalks, empty lots, blocking driveways, wherever space exists. This creates two-tier system where those who can afford formal parking have it and those who can’t make do with creative solutions that often impede pedestrian access or emergency vehicle access. It’s important to mention how chaotic it looks and feels, too.
Reforming parking minimums is politically difficult because it seems like taking something away. If the city announces “we’re eliminating minimum parking requirements for new developments,” property owners hear “my property value will decline because of parking shortages”, businesses hear “customers won’t come because they can’t park”, and residents hear “my street will be full of cars from people who don’t live here.” These concerns aren’t always irrational, but they’re based on assumption that the alternative to required parking is no parking rather than market-appropriate parking. Developers would still build parking if demand justified it, they’d just build the amount that makes economic sense rather than the amount regulations mandate. This, however, requires trust that the market will provide appropriately, and in contexts where trust in developers is low and enforcement is inconsistent, that’s hard to establish.
I hate façade parking with an intensity that’s probably disproportionate but feels entirely justified every time I encounter it. This is the practice of placing parking spaces directly in front of commercial entrances, forcing drivers to reverse blindly into active traffic lanes. Picture yourself at 60 km/h on a major avenue: suddenly, a car edges backward into your path. You brake, the person behind you brakes, maybe someone honks. Maybe there’s a near miss or actual collision. The reversing driver is moving slowly and uncertainly, checking mirrors and maybe a backup camera, trying not to hit anything while pulling into traffic moving at reasonable speeds.
This happens constantly on major avenues throughout many cities where every storefront has a few parking spaces in front, and customers pulling out create hazards multiple times per block. In reality, this is a classic case of privatized profit and socialized risk. See, for the business owner, façade parking is an easy win: it’s cheap to pave, requires zero complex engineering like excavation or structural support, and acts as a ‘visual magnet’ for impulsive customers. However, the cost of this convenience is externalized onto the public. The business captures the benefit of easy access, while the rest of society pays in the form of traffic congestion, increased accident rates, and the hard task of navigating a street that never flows as intended. If those businesses had parking behind the building or in structures, the street would flow smoothly. Traffic would move at the intended speeds. Drivers could, then, focus on forward movement rather than constantly scanning for cars reversing from the side. But they don’t. It’s senseless. Perhaps everyone accepts this as normal because businesses need parking and front parking is easier and nobody has authority or will to require better.
The geographic specificity of parking problems matters enormously because solutions that work in one context fail completely in others. For example, American suburbs were built around cars from the beginning, designed after World War II when car ownership became universal among the middle class and urban planning explicitly prioritized automobile access. These suburbs are characterized by low density, single-family homes on large lots, no mixed use (housing separated from retail separated from offices), wide roads, and massive parking lots at every destination. Walking anywhere is often impossible, not just inconvenient, because destinations are miles apart and crossing multi-lane roads is dangerous if, at all, possible. Public transit is afterthought or nonexistent because the density is too low to support it economically. These places, then, require cars because they were designed that way, optimized for automobile access at the expense of any other form of transportation.
Parking in American suburbs is abundant and free because land is relatively cheap and requirements mandate it. Every house has a driveway and garage. Every store has a parking lot bigger than the store itself. This works when you must drive everywhere, so naturally parking must be everywhere, and it is. The problems are environmental (sprawl consumes land and requires driving everywhere, generating emissions) and social (people without cars are effectively immobile), but within the narrow question of “can you park?” the answer is yes, always, easily.
European suburbs vary enormously and can’t be treated as a single category. There are modernist housing estates from the 1960s through 80s, the kind of high-rise towers in park-like settings you see in French banlieues or the periphery around most major cities. These were often car-centric in planning, with roads designed for automobile access and parking lots scattered throughout, but they also typically have public transit connections (bus lines, sometimes metro) and higher density than American suburbs, making walking and transit potentially viable. Results are mixed: some of these places function reasonably well, others are isolated and impoverished because the transit connections are inadequate and the car-centric design makes pedestrian life unpleasant.
There are traditional working-class suburbs that got absorbed by city growth, older neighborhoods that pre-date automobile dominance and therefore have walkable streets and local shops and transit connections but less density than city centers. These often function well for residents because they have options: you can drive, you can take transit, you can walk to local amenities, and parking exists but isn’t overwhelming.
There’s also contemporary sprawl, post-1990s development that unfortunately mimics American patterns in some places, with low-density car-dependent design, shopping in large format stores with parking lots because residential areas lack local retail. These are failures of planning, importing a model that doesn’t work even in its original context and works worse in countries with higher fuel costs and less land availability.
Brazilian cities don’t fit neatly into these categories. They’re not American-style suburban sprawl (too dense, too mixed use, older development patterns) but they’re not European either (worse transit, more car-dependent, less pedestrian infrastructure). They’re something specific: cities that grew rapidly without coherent planning, sometimes no planning at all, where informal development filled in gaps, car ownership expanded faster than infrastructure could adapt, and public transit provides minimal service. Walking around is often unpleasant.
Parking in Brazilian cities is everywhere and nowhere. In summary, it’s everywhere in the sense that lots and street parking and spaces exist throughout the city, but it’s nowhere in the sense that it’s never quite enough or quite right or quite accessible when you need it. There is façade parking creating traffic hazards, informal parking on sidewalks, parking structures that are expensive or far from destinations, street parking that’s difficult to find and limited in time, and finally there is residential parking, too tight and hard to navigate. The abundance is real but it doesn’t solve the problem because the underlying issue is too many cars for the infrastructure, and adding more parking just induces more driving which makes traffic worse, in turn making the parking you drove to harder to reach.
So let me address the question of whether people should accept walking five to ten minutes from car to destination, because this most often not actually about the distance but about the experience of that walk.
A five-minute walk through a pleasant neighborhood with trees, maintained sidewalks and things to see is fine, mostly enjoyable, a chance to move and observe and transition between car and destination. A five-minute walk through a parking lot or along a highway shoulder, for instance, maybe through an area that feels unsafe is unacceptable, is a burden that negates much of the convenience that driving supposedly provides. The distance matters less than the quality of the environment you’re walking through.
People will walk ten minutes to public transit without complaint, but they’ll resent walking two minutes from parking. Why? Because the transit walk is expected and understood as part of using transit, while the parking walk feels like the car failed to deliver on its promise of door-to-door convenience. There’s also a psychological dimension of ownership: the car is mine, thus parking near my destination feels like a right I’ve earned by owning a car. The train, on the other hand, is communal, so walking to it feels like expected participation in a shared system. This perception shapes what distances people tolerate and what they perceive as burden.
In Brazilian cities, the walk from parking is often unpleasant for reasons that have nothing to do with distance. Sidewalks are broken or blocked by poles, for example. Street crossings are dangerous because drivers don’t stop at stop signs, and if much, yield, and traffic lights are usually poorly timed, neglecting pedestrian crossing. Security concerns are also present, though not always relevant. These factors make even short walks from parking feel impossible, which drives demand for parking as close as possible to destinations, creating the awful façade parking problem and the endless competition for street spots nearest to where you’re going.
Improving the walk would reduce the obsession with closest-possible parking, but improving the walk requires investment in sidewalk maintenance, in street trees for shade, in pedestrian-priority signals at crossings, in lighting and security, in all the infrastructure that makes walking pleasant rather than ordeal. Specifically in Brazil, while the city provides the asphalt for cars to drive and park on, the sidewalk exists in a legal gray area — property owners are legally responsible for paving and maintaining the path in front of their homes, leading to a sidewalk that is public in use but private in cost. This creates a fragmented, often dangerous patchwork of walkways, proving that while we treat car space as a collective public right, we treat walking space as an individual problem. And this necessary investment, which should be responsibility of the city, doesn’t happen, maybe because motorists are politically powerful and organized while pedestrians are diffuse and politically weak, or maybe because the logic of the car-centric city says that more car infrastructure solves car problems when in reality it usually makes them worse.
Your taxes maintain street parking: pavement repair, line painting, signage, enforcement, cleaning. These costs aren’t enormous per capita but they’re recurring and they benefit primarily car owners. Non-car-owners are subsidizing car owners’ ability to store private vehicles on public land, and because the subsidy is diffused across the entire tax base it’s invisible and unchallenged.
The environmental costs are, too, socialized: increased driving from abundant parking means more emissions, more air pollution, more noise, more heat island effect from pavement absorbing and radiating heat, all of which affect everyone regardless of whether they drive, degrading air quality and contributing to broader climate change. The non-drivers pay these costs without receiving the benefits that drivers capture.
What must be done, rationally, is to break free from this creates political deadlock. Since it’s not possible to simply reduce parking without providing alternatives, and alternatives can’t be fund without political support, which is unobtainable while everyone is driving, as drivers vote against transit investments that might increase their taxes or reduce their parking access, the way out of this seems to exist, but requires sustained investment over years or decades to build transit and cycling infrastructure to the point where they become viable alternatives for significant numbers of people. The Netherlands did this, Denmark did this, some German and Swiss cities did this, certain neighborhoods in certain Latin American cities have done this. But it requires commitment, public spending and willingness, which politically, at least in the current system, doesn’t seem to be viable due to short-term thinking and, frankly, lobbying. For now, it’s important to prioritize non-car infrastructure even when car owners complain, and to fight the already existent car-friendly policies even if car owners are wealthier and more politically active than transit users.
This ominous car culture in Brazil is simultaneously imposed, internalized, and artificially manufactured by industrial policy and urban planning decisions now embedded so deeply in identity and aspiration that questioning it feels like attacking freedom itself. Throughout the years, the ‘national’ automotive industry has been protected and subsidized through import restrictions, tax incentives for domestic manufacturing, and policies that make car ownership expensive yet socially non-negotiable for the middle class. The ban on importing used vehicles newer than 30 years is a blunt instrument used to shield domestic manufacturers from global competition, a situation that remains remarkably stable despite the high interest rates on auto loans, which are not natural market outcomes but rather a structural byproduct of a financial system and monetary policy designed to keep borrowing costs extreme. Similarly, fuel taxes are an essential revenue generators for federal and state governments.
These policies were choices, decisions supposedly carefully made by governments and planning agencies to prioritize automobile manufacturing and ownership as economic development strategy and as political goal. The car became symbol of modernity and progress, deliberately cultivated through advertising, infrastructure investment and policies that made alternatives actively worse. Public transit was allowed to deteriorate or never developed adequately because cars were the future, buses were the past, and the automotive industry was more powerful than whoever spoke against it. This was, too, interest of the State.
Now this is the reality, plain and simple. You need a car to participate in normal life in most cities. You need a car to get to work reliably. You need a car to access shopping and services that aren’t in your immediate neighborhood. You need a car to maintain social relationships that involve travel beyond walking distance. The car quickly went from luxury to necessity, and the fact that it’s expensive and gets more expensive through interest and fuel costs doesn’t change that necessity, it just makes it tiresome.
This internalization is so deep that suggesting people might drive less or own fewer cars, or even accept parking constraints feels like attack on personal autonomy. The car became one with them, representing mobility and control over your own movement through space and time, and any policy that restricts parking or makes driving more expensive or less convenient gets interpreted as taking away that freedom even when the restriction is just removing subsidy rather than imposing new cost.
This is a manufactured culture, produced deliberately over decades to serve industrial interests and political goals, but it’s also now genuinely felt and genuinely important to people’s sense of who they are and how they live. Unmaking it would require not just policy changes but cultural transformation, convincing people that independence and status can come through means other than car ownership, and transit/walkability can provide freedom rather than limiting it. This is possible.
So who owns whom? Do we own our cars, or do they own us?
We own the cars legally, hold the titles, make the payments, control where they go and when. But the cars own our cities, determining how we design streets and allocate land and prioritize infrastructure spending. They own our time, consuming hours in traffic and maintenance and parking that could be spent otherwise. They own our air quality, our climate future, our urban experience of noise and danger and spatial organization. They own our budgets, through purchase costs and financing and fuel and insurance and parking and tolls and repairs that add up to significant fractions of household income. They own our politics, making it nearly impossible to imagine or implement alternatives because car owners are organized and vocal and any challenge to car convenience gets interpreted as attack on freedom.
The cars own us collectively even as we own them individually, and this ownership is so complete that we can’t see it clearly. We built cities for cars and now the cars require us to keep building for them, expanding roads and parking infrastructure endlessly because any constraint on cars is experienced as intolerable.
This is the system we inhabit, built over decades through decisions made by people who aren’t us but that we perpetuate through our daily choices within constraints we didn’t choose. The system is dysfunctional, producing outcomes nobody wants (traffic, pollution, expense, spatial waste, danger) while preventing outcomes many people would prefer (efficient transit, walkable neighborhoods, affordable housing, pleasant public spaces). And yet changing it seems impossible. The final and most important question I pose is whether we’ll choose to change it through deliberate policy and investment in alternatives, or whether we’ll be forced to change it when the costs become so high that the system collapses under its own dysfunction. Right now we’re choosing the latter, continuing to build and complain until something breaks. If that breaking point produces better alternatives or just different forms of dysfunction remains to be seen, but the trajectory is clear: we cannot keep organizing cities around storing and moving private vehicles that sit idle most of the time while complaining that we don’t have enough space to store them or move them. Something has to change. The cars own us until we decide we’d rather own ourselves, and that decision keeps not happening.
Leave a Reply