Want to lower your carbon footprint? Consider ditching your car.
In a 2025 study, researchers at the World Resources Institute found that going car-free is the most effective step individuals can take to lower their personal emissions. In fact, it has a bigger impact than adding a home solar system and going vegan combined, they wrote, and 78 times more effective than composting.
But in much of the U.S., getting around without a car is difficult, if not impossible, due to overwhelmingly car-centric infrastructure. However, while going car-free may be hard for many Americans to imagine, this could change. As cities like Amsterdam and Paris have shown, when governments take decisive action to reduce car dependency, the results can be dramatic.
Moreover, the remedies for car dependency are well understood, at least at a high level. Decades’ worth of research from universities, government agencies, nonprofits, and design firms has created a significant body of knowledge about how to reduce reliance on cars.
Susan Handy, who leads the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California at Davis, said the main takeaways of this research are clear and compelling.
“When people live in more compact communities where they’re in closer proximity to the places they need to go, and when they have good alternatives to driving – meaning good bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and decent transit service – they will, in fact, drive less,” she said.
Must-haves for reducing reliance on cars
In 2025, Kostas Mouratidis, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, published a peer-reviewed study identifying seven strategies that have successfully reduced car dependency in Western European cities.
Two of these strategies – raising awareness about the benefits of reducing car dependency and supporting compact cities through policy – are prerequisites for the others to succeed, he wrote.
Awareness-raising is vital to creating buy-in and shaping public behavior. This can take many forms, including open streets events, which temporarily close roads to vehicles and open them to other uses. Found everywhere from Bogotá to Tucson, these events demonstrate how space currently devoted to cars could be used for things like cycling, walking, and entertainment. In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has used open streets days to build support for permanent pedestrianization.
Governments can also use information and incentives to raise awareness about alternatives to driving. In Portland, Oregon, households moving into some multifamily buildings receive a welcome packet from the municipality containing several hundred dollars’ worth of credits for bikeshare and public transportation, along with advice for navigating the area without a car.
This and similar initiatives take advantage of the fact that people are more likely to change their transportation habits when their lives are already in flux, said Stefanie Seskin, the director of policy and practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
“Because you’re already moving and you’re changing your patterns, it’s a great time to try riding a bike, to try walking places, to try taking TriMet, [Portland’s] transit system,” she said.
Policies that make communities denser by locating buildings and amenities closer together are also critical for sustainable transportation to flourish.
“Without a relatively compact urban form, you cannot expect people to be able to walk or cycle to destinations that they need to cover their daily needs,” Mouratidis said.
One vital mechanism for achieving this is zoning. In many American communities, zoning regulations make it illegal to build anything other than single-family homes on 75% of residential land. Changing this policy allows apartment buildings and small businesses to pop up in areas where they have historically been prohibited, allowing more people to walk or cycle to amenities close to their homes.
Zoning changes can also lower the number of off-street parking spots developers are required to build for different building types, freeing up space that allows structures to be built closer to one another. Since parking is expensive to build, parking reform can also make neighborhoods more affordable.
Limiting private vehicles and investing in alternatives
Once communities reach sufficient levels of public buy-in and urban density, five additional strategies can successfully help people shift away from their cars, Mouratidis said. (Governments don’t need to wait to implement them until they’ve fully attained these goals, however, he stresses.)
These strategies are:
- Investing in public transportation
- Improving pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure
- Restricting car use
- Supporting shared mobility (such as car-sharing services)
- Facilitating virtual mobility (such as teleconferencing and online shopping).
These categories encompass a wide variety of actions. To restrict car use, some cities turn to congestion pricing programs in which drivers must pay to enter designated areas. Building on successful programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, New York City became the first U.S. city to implement congestion pricing in early 2025, charging cars $9 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street during peak hours. In the program’s first year, 27 million fewer vehicles entered the affected area.
Investments in public transportation, pedestrian infrastructure, and bike lanes are also critical to reducing car dependency. Although many U.S. cities are struggling to fund existing public transit systems, some have found ways to not only maintain current services but also expand and improve them. In New York City, congestion pricing proceeds are being used to maintain and upgrade the city’s subways, buses, and commuter trains. In Virginia, the state government has dramatically increased its investment in public transportation as well as pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in the past decade.
Illinois offers another promising model for supporting financially vulnerable public transportation systems. A law signed by Governor JB Pritzker in late 2025 designated $1.5 billion dollars annually for mass transit in Chicago and elsewhere in the state, with part of the funding coming from gas sales taxes that were diverted away from road construction.
This represents a “groundbreaking, transformational investment in Illinois’s transit system,” said Kevin X. Shen, a transportation policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s not only filling the fiscal cliff gap they faced that was threatening service cuts, but also going over that hump to increase transit service in ways that are needed for communities across the state.”
Big cities aren’t the only ones investing in alternatives to the car. In Dublin, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus that’s home to approximately 50,000 people, the local government is helping extend existing bus lines, upgrading bus stops, working with regional partners to introduce bus rapid transit service, upgrading its bicycle infrastructure, working with companies that provide bike- and scooter-share programs, and partnering with developers and designers to build walkable neighborhoods.
Read: In an Ohio suburb, sprawl is being transformed into walkable neighborhoods.
Obstacles to reducing car dependency
Despite these and other success stories, reliance on cars is growing around the world, Mouratidis said.
“Car ownership is increasing, the sales of cars are increasing, and overall, little is done towards reducing car dependence,” he said. “Globally, we have some cities that are quite pioneering in reducing car dependence. But besides those, there is little that is done.”
One challenge is that although government officials may understand the high-level solutions, many aren’t sure how to implement them on the ground.
“Anybody going through a master’s of city planning program now is probably familiar with the research about how the built environment affects car dependence,” Handy said. “[But] even if the planners and the public officials know something about that research and believe that this is what they should be trying to do, they don’t necessarily know how to do it.”
Moreover, governments often lack the support and resources they need to make progress on this issue. Opposition from NIMBY (which stands for “not in my backyard”) groups and others can block progress.
“There’s definitely a solid base of knowledge of what works,” Seskin said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that what works is initially popular, though. And I think that’s where things get tricky.”
The private sector also plays a vital role in determining how this issue plays out. Many businesses and other organizations take steps that reduce car dependency. For example, employer-run programs to shift people from cars to other modes of transportation are the most common and popular initiatives of this type in the country, Seskin said.
But other private-sector actions are less beneficial. For example, developers and financiers often slow attempts to make communities more compact, since they, not governments, ultimately determine exactly what gets built where.
“There’s a lot of inertia and risk aversion in the development community, so that’s why we keep getting the same stuff that we always get – because that’s what the private sector knows how to do,” Handy said.
Read: Building walkable U.S. neighborhoods is harder than it should be
Groups with economic interests in maintaining the status quo are another major barrier to progress, said Shen, who was the lead author of a 2024 report about car dependence in the U.S.
“We found that the oil, auto, and roadbuilding industries receive more than 80% of the over $2 trillion in yearly public and private transportation spending,” he said. “And if you look through our history, they’ve lobbied for decades to prioritize cars over a more complete or affordable set of transportation options.”
“Our transportation system isn’t just a blank slate where people are vying for the best technical solution,” he said. “There are industries with real financial interests in shaping how we get around.”
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