I gave up my car last year, and am seeing Philly — and its people — in a whole new light

I loved my car.

It was a silver 2004 Subaru Forester, and it was once my home for three months when I traveled across the country. Through a bug-splattered windshield, I saw some of the most beautiful sights our nation has to offer, from the Smoky Mountains to Yosemite and back.

It was great until it wasn’t. I eventually grew sick of relying so much on a heavy-duty machine that drained my wallet, especially for short city trips. So last year, I made a drastic change: I sold it.

Now, I get around Philadelphia on my trusty Trek bicycle, and I’ve started to fall in love with this city in an entirely new way.

For one, I’ve been able to observe and interact with the people of Philly in a way I never could in my car. From behind my handlebars, I’ve witnessed countless instances of Philadelphians trusting, helping, forgiving, and loving their fellow neighbors and nearby strangers. The comfy confines of a car cannot compare to the warmth of these subtle interactions, like when an old man and a fussy baby make eye contact and share a smile, or when a complete stranger compliments your mustache as you ride by. There’s a genuine human connection that occurs when a road dispute is settled with a verbal apology instead of a faceless beeeep from behind the wheel.

When we move about our city on bike or foot, we’re forced to humanize the people we’d otherwise avoid behind the protective armor of a vehicle.

Author and Pennsylvania native Jane Jacobs touched on this in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts,” she wrote, even citing the “ballet” of Rittenhouse Square as a hot spot for these little contacts. “Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level … is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

Rolling around Philly on my bike, I notice the “little public sidewalk contacts” Jacobs references are on full display. The sum of these contacts is unquantifiable, as she suggests, but it’s the purest distillation of the true love that courses through this city daily.

Unfortunately, this inherent beauty that exists in Philadelphia is invisible to most of its residents, simply because our default mode of movement is a personal car.

» READ MORE: For my low-income family, biking is not recreation. ‘It’s survival.’

In a city peppered with parking lots, auto body shops, and towing companies, it’s no surprise car culture is deeply woven into the fabric of Philadelphia’s communal identity. As a result, local drivers have long displayed a sense of entitlement to the public right-of-way, so much so that A&E’s hit show Parking Wars was launched in 2008 to document spats between drivers and the Philadelphia Parking Authority.

While these televised disputes became somewhat of a “claim to fame” for Philly, they underscored a deeper issue around car dependency and unsavory driver behaviors that have continued to worsen over the years. Philly’s biggest roadway challenges today include reckless driving, heavy congestion, and road rage, all of which are rooted in a sense of entitlement that inherently creates a divide between drivers and pedestrians or cyclists.

Simply put, our cars are preventing us from experiencing the organic interpersonal interactions that allow us to feel included, connected, and safe in our city.

To reclaim our reputation as a community of brotherhood and love, we need to break out of our isolating, gas-guzzling vehicles and invest in the people-friendly infrastructure that was originally intended for Philadelphia’s streets.

Take our famed Art Museum, for example. The popular attraction sits at the top of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which was designed in 1907 to connect Philadelphia’s denser urban neighborhoods with the nature of Fairmount Park, drawing inspiration from Paris’ famously pedestrian-friendly Champs-Élysées. However, the last century has seen the Parkway overrun with car traffic that pours into Eakins Oval and circles the foot of the museum like a moat, forcing hundreds of daily museum visitors to play Frogger with local drivers.

These stressful interactions between drivers and pedestrians illustrate the negative impact car culture has on how we connect with our communities. And while several efforts to improve city roadways have been introduced in recent years, real change won’t happen until our daily habits change — when we swap our car keys for sneakers and become active participants in our community instead of passive observers.

Maybe if we turned the volume down on cars and up on human interactions, our lived environment and lifestyles would reflect our heightened regard for humanity.

Thankfully, organizations like the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and projects like Reimagine the Benjamin Franklin Parkway are already working hard to make our city more human-centric. And while it may take some time to dismantle the deep car culture we’ve established, significant change starts with us as individuals, today.

So the next time you head out the door, strap on your bike helmet or grab a SEPTA Key card instead of your car keys. I guarantee a more lovely Philadelphia is waiting for you outside the driver’s seat.

Leo Walsh is a senior customer success manager at Jawnt and an avid cycling advocate. He lives in North Philadelphia.