Sioux city is clearly designed for cars, but is there any real alternative for those who aren’t able to afford one?

“Living in Sioux City is difficult as it’s a city made for cars and everywhere you need to go is 5 to 10 minutes driving, but it takes an hour to walk” — “Calling for an Uber can be expensive so if you don’t have a car you’re screwed.” Said Maron Guimaraes, a Brazilian sophomore from Morningside University.

Today, it seems that walking is a thing of the past, everyone’s busy in their gigantuous trucks that have no business in being as big as they are, public transportation is basically no more, roads occupy 80% of public space in a street and sidewalks are decaying, so what other options does someone who doesn’t own a car have?

Not many it seems. Sioux City, as many other cities in the US, has close to zero alternatives to driving, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon. This car centered society comes as a shock to many international students around campus, who are not used to being so dependent on only one way of traversal.

Oliver Melander is a senior who originally arrived from Sweden, he spent his 4 years here at Morningside, here is what he had to say about it:

“When I first arrived in Sioux City it marked the first time in my life where I felt totally dependent on having access to a car. At no point before had I ever struggled to get around; Got to get downtown? Take the bus. Meeting up with friends in a different town? Catch a train. Get to school? Bike there. Nothing had ever felt too far away.” 

The roots of the problem are more complicated than they appear, as they can be traced back to the way the United States was built as a society, during its development into the modern day, cars always came first. We can contribute that to a variety of reasons, such as the economic growth of the post WWII years that lead to massive car ownership, the boom of superstores where you can find all of your needs without needing to go somewhere else, or the growth of fast-food chains, which made places where you sit down and eat almost obsolete, especially in rural America. All of these factors made it so walking and public transportation were left as a second thought instead of being a priority for the American lifestyle.

It surely makes it so life in a small city is way harder for someone in no condition to buy a car, sometimes to points where it can even affect your mental health and social life, as pointed out by Melander:

“During my first year living in a city designed for cars I felt isolated, not only geographically but as much socially. Having access to a car was essential in order to meet up with friends, to attend social gatherings or events. Designing a city for cars rather than public transport or non-fuel dependent transportation prompts social segregation by making social mobility a monetary, and subsequently also class, issue. It shapes social interaction and construct in ways that needs to be acknowledged and compensated for within such a community.”

The search for solutions also leads nowhere, as buses barely pass by, the city has no infrastructure for other forms of transportation.

Enzo Tagliati, a junior who’s also from Sweden said it was a big shock, mentioning that even when he searched for alternatives, he couldn’t quite find a solution:

“I remember my freshmen year I would often try to bike somewhere, just to for the side walk to suddenly end and I would find myself biking in a highway with cars going at fifty miles per hour right next to me” — “It really made me feel stuck as I couldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t knew any people that had cars and it really made me feel limited about what I could do in my free time”.

Unless an extreme change of mindset happens over the next years, it’s probable that most of these problems will continue to exist for a long time, for now the hope to see a community full of people and life will remain as a dream.

Car prices have seen a massive increase lately, meaning that is increasingly more difficult to buy one, as the cost for everything keeps going up, and with walking and public transportation being so unreliable, people end up in a really tight spot, where they either need to constantly depend on others to move around, or they find themselves needing to walk for hours in a city that looks, dead, post-apocalyptic, and straight-up nonexistent.