Over the past decade, car-free living has gotten an amazing amount of attention in urbanist circles and popular media in the United States. Can growth in car-free living actually be detected in national-level and state-level data? In which metros and cities is car-free living becoming more common? The data hold some surprises.
At the national level, car-free living is becoming more common. Between 2010 and 2015, households without a vehicle grew 0.2 percentage points from 8.9 percent to 9.1 percent of households in the United States. If this seems surprisingly low, it helps to remember that about 85 percent of American households aren’t in urban cities.