Talking with Aviva Davis about why she won’t drive a car.
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Our culture is pretty obsessed with cars—not just as machines, but as personal necessities for getting from point A to point B. But it hasn’t always been that way. For most of history, people got around just fine by walking, biking, or using public transit. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when urban sprawl really took off, that suburbs started cutting people off from city centres and made cars feel essential. Even just a decade ago, there was barely any focus on building infrastructure for people to walk or bike to work, school, or the grocery store.
The thing is, cars are a huge burden—on the planet, on our health, and on our wallets. They pollute, they’re expensive to buy, fuel, and maintain, and they take up a lot of space. So it’s not surprising that many cities are starting to rethink things, with ideas like the “15-minute city” or “complete streets” encouraging more active and public ways of getting around.
Despite the whole rite-of-passage vibe around getting your license at 16, Aviva Davis decided not to. Living in Toronto, most of what she needed was within walking distance, and the subway could take her pretty much anywhere else. Not everyone gets her choice, though. She even wrote a zine called Why I Won’t Drive a Car, and I invited her to share it in the second issue of Novitas Magazine.
In her piece, Aviva explores how we shifted from walkable, transit-friendly cities to a culture built around cars—and how that shift has impacted our lives in ways we don’t always notice. In this episode of the Novitas podcast—the first of season 2!—we talk about how car culture affects the environment, our mental health, and how we see the world. We also share what it’s like to intentionally live without driving and how that choice reshapes everything from daily routines to big-picture perspectives.
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