I looked up Peoria, Illinois. 2016 data[1] (the most recent I could find): 15.4% of households have no car at all.

This data[2] gives it by cars per property (not the same as household). Summing across both owner- and renter- occupied, I find 10.7% with no car, 35.8% with one car.

It's a safe assumption that many of those renter-occupied properties are apartments that comprise more than one household. So it's somewhere between 10% and 15% of households that don't have any car at all, and at least 35% with only one car. 1-car households are the plurality. Yet the average car ownership rate is 2, skewed by people who own 3 or more.

So: it's not some tiny eccentric sliver of households with no cars. It's actually a substantial minority. A plurality of couples cannot rely on the second car while one spouse is using the first, because they have only one car.

And in turn, it's an even greater proportion of people (not households) who don't, can't, or shouldn't drive. Children, teenagers, elderly, disabled, and so on.

Those poors with cars, do you really suppose they can afford it? Living paycheque to paycheque with a car loan that's underwater isn't what I'd call "afford". The auto loan delinquency rate in the county is 8% (twice the national average), and 26% among nonwhites: https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=a...

As for buses and bikes: I searched for "peoria illinois bike lanes" and the top results were all about recreational trails. Never a good sign: it means the city government views bicycles as toys, not a means of practical transport. I looked on Streetview for ten minutes and I didn't see any bike lanes anywhere, protected or otherwise. The place seems to be full of 4-, 5-, and 6-lane stroads with 40+mph traffic. There seems to be no infrastructure whatsoever to make that safe to cycle on. I wouldn't dare bike down a road like this[3], to take a random example. And that's not even the worst one I found.

My intuition that the roads are unsafe is correct: in 2019 (the most recent non-corona year on the city-data page), the city of Peoria reported 7 traffic-related fatalities, out of a population of 113,150. In that same year, there were only 3 such fatalities in Cardiff (where I live), a city with a population of 480,000. Peoria's roads are 10x as dangerous by that metric. The story for non-fatal injuries is similar.

And here's blogpost[4] quoting local cyclists (what a hardy breed they must be!):

>Roads on these maps have been suggested by local cyclists as being safe to ride on – most of the time. Caution should still be taken at busier times of the day when people are driving to and from work.

Lmao. So if you actually want to like, get to work safely ... you can't do it on a bike. That's what you're expecting people to do?

No bus lanes anywhere on Streetview that I can see either, so that puts a hard ceiling on how much the city cares about public transport, and therefore how viable it is to rely on. EDIT: actually, to hell with bus lanes, where are the bus stops? I saw places with bus stop icons on Google maps, but the Streetview shows nothing at first glance. Like here for example https://goo.gl/maps/2UmQU9SumppeBmTt9 the overhead map shows two bus stops. I searched for several minutes on Streetview for the physical objects corresponding to these bus stops -- eventually I found them. They're just little metal signs attached to lamp posts that say "bus stop" on them. You call that a bus stop? Where's the shelter from sun and rain, where's the place to sit, where's the map of the routes and timetables? It's the same story even in the busier parts, like this place dares to call itself a "Main Street" https://goo.gl/maps/ovFbS37DLVCsN9t4A it's right next to a University, yet its "bus stop" is a perfunctory little disk of metal stuck on a light pole. How does anyone think this is remotely adequate?

Enormous indoor parking facility right next to it though. They didn't skimp on that ...

Actually now that I think about it, "Peoria", sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I coincidentally read about it the other day. An article about how atrocious the built environment is for non-drivers[5], and the indignities they suffer. Read that article. It's absolutely fascinating.

>On their walk, the group observed a corner of the city by East Peoria, from a downtown shopping area to a nearby neighborhood. They discovered there were no sidewalks for a significant length of the stretch, but there was a wide road, and clear, muddy pathways filled with shoe prints and bike marks showed that despite the area not being designed for people on foot, people were using it.

>“Everybody acknowledged [the neighborhood] had a pretty wide road. And very little vehicle traffic went by us during the time that we walked through there,” said Fenton.

>In one of the spaces where there was a dedicated walking area with a sidewalk, it felt uncomfortable and out of place—like people didn’t belong there.

>“We came through this area, which is bizarre, there's a sidewalk with chain link fences,” said Fenton. “People literally said ‘are we supposed to be going here?’ And the reason that that was interesting was because when we came out the backside we could see footprints and mountain bike tracks. Clearly, people from that neighborhood use this as a shortcut to cut back over to the retail area.”

It's fucking barbaric to make people live this way. You can't even get from one side of the river to the other on foot:

>After some research, Lees learned that, between 271 miles of river, there were only two bridges with a protected walking path—and they were nearly 267 miles apart, closest to the large metropolitan cities Chicago and St. Louis. It was obvious to Lees that there was an unequal opportunity for locals to travel safely about the city.

Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.

Meanwhile, staggeringly large amounts of land in Peoria is apparently wasted on empty parking spaces[6]. Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.

>In fact, Peoria is so full of parking that the amount of land devoted to surface parking in the county actually surpasses the amount of land devoted to buildings

Just amazing. No wonder people own so many vehicles, they're pretty much forced to, just to do ordinary things. The infrastructure is biased comprehensively towards motor cars, rendering anything else impractical and/or unsafe.

So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria, then you're pretty much like Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake". There are no safe, reliable viable alternatives to the car, by design, and you're trying to keep it that way on purpose, out of sheer selfishness. Maybe you should try living car-free for even a single week, so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure. Do it, if you think it's so trivial. And then maybe after that week (if you survive) you'll gain some empathy and realize why they want sidewalks.

[1] https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

[2] https://www.city-data.com/county/Peoria_County-IL.html

[3] https://goo.gl/maps/qiK3QZ4WNKgFj4Cm6

[4] https://ivwheelmn.org/wordpress/?page_id=372

[5] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/6/peoria-reformin...

[6] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/16/parking-peoria...