Driving culture is the worst

15 Jan, 2026

Although I don't miss NYC, the one thing I do miss is not having a car. I prefer walking. I like trains and buses. I like reading and napping during my commutes. What I don't like is being stuck in a car, sitting in traffic. Or wondering why people don't use their turn signals. Or wondering why they step on their gas when they see I'm switching lanes. Or witnessing almost-collisions from idiot drivers and realizing how close that could've been me. I hate driving.

I hate paying for car insurance. I hate paying for gas. I hate not being able to spontaneously have a drink or two without worrying about how I'm going to drive myself home. I hate driving my car and then the "check inspection" light comes on and now my whole day is ruined. I hate standing at a car repair shop and pretending like I know what I'm talking about so that I don't get scammed. And worst of all, I hate how essential this all is and how I have no say in the matter.

A few months ago, I was in Dallas to see family. If you've ever been to Texas, you know it's basically urban sprawl on crack. Highways look more like rollercoaster tracks as they zip this way and that way; one exit would be on your right, another one six lanes over to your left. One family member lives in this suburban enclave, another lives at that suburban enclave, but you still need to hop on a complex, convoluted highway to access either even though they're only 10 minutes apart.

Texans can't drive, won't signal, tailgate you impatiently, cut you off, try to bully you off the road, all while blinding you with their high-beams while they sit four-feet in the air in some massive pickup, their headlights directly proportional to your eyeballs. You can't see shit, are often seconds from killing yourself and maybe someone else, and they know this but don't care. You risk your life every time you drive, only to reach your destination and it's just another soulless subdivision full of cookie-cutter homes planted in the middle of nowhere, where five puny trees greet you pathetically.

I once asked my cousin why Texans are such bad drivers, and she told me she thinks it's because Texans are still "country folk" at the end of the day and aren't accustomed to driving in a city. I'm not sure if I agree with that. Dallas has been a major city for a while. The issue is that it's so spread out. It just gets wider and wider, because unlike other countries where land is finite, that's not the case here. If you're an investor or developer with millions of dollars, you can swoop in and purchase any large body of land, build some cheaply constructed cookie-cutter homes surrounded by a playground and a school, declare it a "subdivision," and call it a day. It doesn't matter that this piece of land is 40 minutes outside city proper. The people can access this remote area in their cars. Who needs city planning anyway? Just make the highways wider!

My husband and I like to joke that some major cities in the US look like cities built in the game City Skylines. If you have ever played that game, you know the hardest part is maintaining the traffic. During rush hour, there would be tons of pixelated cars trying to get from the factory to their homes, so (if you were bad at the game, like me) you would build stupidly convoluted highways that stretched over buildings, curved around factories, and then back to the houses. The result would be an overly complex system of roads that still didn't fix the problem.¹

That's how Dallas feels. It's very "build it now and worry about how people will get there later." And now everyone has to white-knuckle it behind the wheel of a gas guzzler just to go out to a restaurant and eat rancid oysters. I'm over it.

There's an unusual street in my city that has six lanes and a huge divider that runs down the middle. I had recently learned, while at a local museum, that the street used to look different back in the early 1900s. Back then, the huge divider housed a streetcar that connected the uptown part of town to the downtown part. Which made me think, "Why did they take the streetcar away? They should bring it back!" But the automobile industry killed the streetcar industry, and here we are, merging across six-lane highways.

I once read somewhere that Gen Z doesn't drive. They'd rather take Ubers everywhere cause they're too scared and anxious to learn how to drive. I know everyone likes to make fun of them, but I get it. Shoot, I'm scared too.

#rants