I asked in my previous post about parenting without the benefit of a car. I should add that many poor parents, living in the outer rings of cities and in close-in suburbs, are already doing exactly this. One of the realities revealed by last year's congestion pricing debate in New York was that while suburban folks often stereotype the car-free lifestyle as an affluent one, in fact, it is poor, outer borough families who rely most completely on a struggling, under-serving mass transit system. New York City is the only American city in which as many as half of middle and upper middle class people live car-free. That means moving toward a car-free lifestyle, in the vast majority of places, entails convincing middle class folks to give up their cars, in large part through offering them better mass transit options. And once middle class people are invested in this swap, the poor families who've long been scraping by without cars will benefit greatly. --Dana Goldstein
