When someone tries to tell me that Americans have no culture, I can’t help but laugh. “What do you mean?” I ask, deeply perplexed by their statement. I have personally found that there is tons of culture here, after all. In fact, it is at all times everywhere around me, with some 283 million cultural artifacts to my left, right and ahead. I am talking, of course, about cars – a symbol so deeply central to American life that it is near difficult to imagine without it. People eat, sleep and breathe their cars and it is impossible to envision a situation where one might have to leave their metal fortress. This is the country where most fast food chain restaurants offer drive-throughs, where you can purchase liquor and groceries from the comforts of your vehicle and, as someone recently excitedly told me, buy marijana at a weedstore drive-in. Heck, in some states you can even cast your ballot from your car. 

Like it or not, in a lot of ways American culture is centered around cars. Some people here love their car. Cruise through a suburban neighborhood in Austin on Sunday and you will be met with countless individuals, mainly men, passionately scrubbing their wheel spokes, tinkering with bits and bobs under the motor cap, wash their windows, change the wheels, or simply admire their cherished possession from afar, hands resting on their hips and elbows pointed outwards. Here, the idea of a car has grown synonymous with freedom, connection and masculinity (but that’s a whole different thing). You won’t have to search far to find some widespread examples of this.

Roadtripping is by far one of the most popular ways of discovering the United States and there are countless books (Travels with Charley, Blue Highways, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, On the Road, Deep South) and films (Into the Wild, Rain Man, Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma & Louise) recounting some of these journeys. Although the road itself is not central to most of these pieces of fiction, it is just a slat of asphalt after all, the road quite literally drives the plot forwards and it often poses challenges for people to overcome and provides crazy stories to recount to later generations.

The American road seems endlessly filled with adventures and it doesn’t take much to find real Americans who have at least in part undertaken some of these journeys. For instance, I have noticed that people will talk among each other about cross-state highways with such a familiarity that I too now know where Route 66 (Chicago to LA), Route 55 (Ocean City to Sacramento) and Interstate 35 (Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota) take you (yes, yes, I know this is common knowledge to most – I am late to the party). I met a fellow young traveler who nearly made his way through all 48 ‘mainland’ states by car, a temporary neighbor who once drove his way from New Jersey to California, a hostel receptionist who had driven from Northern Nevada down to New Orleans, and a now friend who once drove from Texas to Arizona just to get a coffee.

In essence, a car can take you wherever you want to go, from East to West and North to South – both across the United States as well as across the city you live in. Do you just need to get some groceries? Fear not, it is just a few minutes driving. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t even really matter what direction you go into, because you will find a hub with stores wherever you head. Crave a drink? Well, you have five soda-spots to your disposal so the picking is yours! There’s mobility offered by a car, condensing the large distances present in the United States. Besides, car culture has monotonized large parts of the U.S. with similar restaurants and gas stores popping up all across the country so there is no reason for you to truly venture far.

In the U.S., cities seem to be built around highways and their unquestioned presence takes centrality in urban design. Roads are broad enough to accommodate the bustling of cars even through Downtown areas (contrary to the Netherlands where the center of a city is often car-free), parking lots could take up as much space as apartment blocks, highways are continuously extended and widened to reduce increased congestion and traffic queues… despite evidence that more lanes correlate with more cars and more traffic; a viscous and seemingly unbreakable cycle.

Although the motorized vehicle may have once been a beacon of personal freedom, it is now more comparable to a pair of shackles one has to drag around once they exit their front doors. The U.S. has built a world in which car-dependency is vital. And with it, it has constructed an economy equally as centered around cars. There are 35 gas stations per 100.000 people here (25 per 100.000 in the Netherlands – still too many if you ask me), Americans generally spend 20% of their monthly income on their car and car related services (in comparison, Dutch people spend 10% of their income on transport – which includes both cars and public transport) and in states like Texas 97% of their state transportation budget goes towards roads, not public transport.

People need their cars to drive to their jobs, with some 86 percent of Americans driving or car-pooling to work every day. Research even found that access to a vehicle improves employment chances, especially among welfare recipients. Here is the catch though: without a steady income, owning a car is near impossible in the first place, making it difficult for people to attend interviews or arrive to work in time. Meanwhile, with American cities built around this mode of transformation, people without cars increasingly struggle to get around. Public transit is made less effective, and walking and cycling are generally considered unsafe and ineffecient. You might have to walk around large parts of the highway in search for an under or overpass, for instance.

As such, I have international friends who have become reliant on other, American, friends to drive them to Costco once a month so they can stock up on the essentials. There is no way to go out there by public transport, and walking back with heavy bags would be impossible. In food deserts, rural parts of the U.S. where grocery stores are more than 10 miles away, people are quite literally forced to own or borrow a car in order to access fresh foods. No car, no food.

Dutch individuals often feel pride at the fact that there are more bikes in the Netherlands than people. The same, albeit somewhat altered, fact of the United States having nearly as many cars as inhabitants is not received with as much glee, with 92% of Americans owning one or two vehicles. Highways are continiously being widened, destroying residential and green areas in its destructive path and eating up the swaths of nature that once made the U.S. what is. And worse of all, CO2 output continues to increase alongside it – at a time when we should combine forces to reduce them at all costs.

Meanwhile, the car has created a culture of isolation and alienation, with people spending more time on their own than being surrounded by members of their community in public transport options. Driving is a lonely thing, after all. In the 21st century, the route from point A to B no longer evokes the same sense of freedom as what it once did, with roadsides being littered with plastic cups thrown out of speeding vehicles, and traffic jams eating up much of your time and patience. There is very little still enjoyable about feeling the wind in your hair when you don’t hear anything but gas engines and smell anything but hot asphalt and CO2 pollution.

The United States has more culture than just cars, of course. There are countless of cuisines to explore, different natural landscape to embark into, various local dialects that ring in your ears like sweet honey, and instead of having just one combining culture, the U.S.’ strength is in its multitude. This country has proved to be a beautiful place to discover by foot. You end up connecting with individuals in front of stores or on curbsides. You can stop in your tracks to appreciate a beautiful sycamore tree whose roots push up a paved road or regard the Chihuahuan Ravens as they flutter around at dusk. You can help people you come across, people you would have sped by otherwise. Isn’t that what a real American journey should be all about, anyway?