I wheezed in exhaustion as I meandered through Elmhurst Street’s pathetic excuse for a sidewalk. Wherever I looked, there were cars. Behind me? Yep. In front of me? Sure. Above me? Why not? At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a vengeful Prius was levitating inches over my head, preparing to squash me flat for daring to disturb the sacred roads with my feeble cyclist ways. 

Unfortunately, I wasn’t that lucky. If a floating car had put me out of my misery, I wouldn’t have had to keep pushing my bike and squinting at my GPS like a Boomer trying to rotate a PDF. Sickening questions spun through my head. Where was I? How late would I be? And — most dreadful of all — did they finish the breadsticks without me?  

This tragedy occurred when I had a KnightMedia Executive Board meeting at Panera, which Google Maps claimed was an 11 minute bike ride away. 

Needless to say … it lied. 

I got lost time and time again, feeling mystified whenever a sidewalk vanished from existence or the app directed me to cross the street without a crosswalk. And when there was a crosswalk, each walk signal — glowing faceless white guys taunting me with their carefree strolls — seemed to be competing for who could make me wait the longest.

It didn’t help that it was searingly hot and I was wearing all black from a band camp theme day. Any driver passing me probably thought, “Huh. It looks like that girl is going to a funeral for her own will to endure.” And honestly? They were right.

But this incident isn’t just a funny story. The truth is, American suburbs are all but outright hostile to anyone trying to get anywhere without a car. They’re built that way. And this doesn’t only plague a few Panera-going cyclists like me — it’s one of the foremost culprits behind America’s undeniably massive environmental destruction. 

First, let’s talk about car dependency. Planetizen, an online urban planning community, describes car dependency as when driving is not only a primary form of transportation, but a necessary one — because all other ways of transit took a backseat in the minds of the area’s urban planners. A car-dependent neighborhood is designed for cars, not people, and it’s unreasonably difficult to do anything but drive to get where you want to go.

Unfortunately, American suburbs and car dependency are like peanut butter and the clogged throat you get after eating peanut butter: intrinsically linked. According to Brown Political Review, our suburbs entered the scene around the end of World War 2, when cars were THE newest, coolest status symbols (think Stanley cups). Then rich people decided they wanted all the benefits of living in a city (jobs, kale smoothies) and none of the “drawbacks” (poor people existing in their vicinity). How did they accomplish this, you ask? Easy: by hauling their new automobiles to the city outskirts en masse and plopping obnoxiously large houses on jaw-droppingly massive plots of land. 

Because they were, of course, rich people, no one stopped them. The suburbs expanded like an untreated wart. As the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says, today’s roads are sickeningly wide, while sidewalks and crosswalks are either thin, pathetic afterthoughts or completely non-existent. All the homes are stuck in one area for miles on end, but the places the people IN the homes actually need to go are anywhere from a 15 minute to an hour’s drive away.  

Public transportation is limited and poorly-funded, bike racks and bike lanes are few and far between, and pedestrian-only footpaths? In your dreams. Mix these in a pot and microwave for a century, and voilá: you have a car-dependent country. 

“So what?” you might be asking. “Why should I care if it’s hard to go anywhere without a car? Can’t people just drive cars, then?” But car-dependency doesn’t only annoy suburbanites: it causes widespread environmental destruction. A series of facts paint a distinct picture. 

Firstly, the World Research Institute confirms that America emits the second most carbon in the world.

Secondly, the US Energy Information Administration shows that the lion’s share of those emissions are from our transportation, at a whopping 38 percent.

Finally, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions finishes with a flourish, declaring that around half of those transportation emissions are from passenger cars. That makes cars responsible for approximately 19 percent of America’s carbon emissions total.

And why do cars take up such a sizable portion of our carbon emissions? Oh, maybe ask Pew Research Center and their data that 55 percent of Americans live in the suburbs, which are built to rely on cars. 

It’s not exactly hard to connect the dots. Of course, we can’t throw personal cars completely under the bus (ba-bing) and blame them for all American carbon emissions when the CEO of Starbucks casually takes his private jet to work daily. But it would be remiss to point the finger at billionaires while ignoring our own environmental impacts — which we actually have the power to change, right here and right now.

So what can we change? Well, the path of least resistance would be to modify our own behavior. That means hanging up the car keys sometimes and biking, walking or taking the train instead. 

Think about it. When was the last time you took a walk that wasn’t to or from school or with your dog? Meanwhile, biking is fun because it makes you feel like the main character in a coming-of-age movie — something that’s every high schooler’s natural-born, American right. And if you really need to drive places, why not set up a carpool with your friends?

But I’m well aware that many people aren’t willing to make an effort to change their behavior. That’s why I recommend taking it right to the source: changing the infrastructure that causes car dependency in the first place. There are plenty of ways our community can improve, like by implementing mixed-use zoning, promoting cheap and widespread public transportation and getting some freaking sidewalks, for crying out loud. 

(Because I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m tired of biking right next to cars like a terrified freshman dashing and swerving through a high school hallway. Have you ever been almost flattened by a mailman? What a humiliating way to go.)

Imagine a version of your neighborhood where, when you open your front door and decide to go to a downtown coffee shop, you don’t hop into your Carbon-Emitter 3000 and nearly bulldoze every passing squirrel. 

Maybe you bike or walk there with a downtown girl playlist shuffling on Spotify and get the closest you’ll ever be to becoming Rory Gilmore.

Maybe you carpool, scream-singing to whatever comes on the radio and getting drive-thru Starbucks for everyone — because everyone knows carbon-emitting is more fun with friends. 

Or maybe you’ve gone to enough Town Hall meetings that you don’t even need to worry about the trip, because your efforts to change the zoning laws are the reason they just finished building a cat café only a five minute bike ride away. 

It’s easy to believe this future is impossible. That such realities could never exist. But just because you’ve never seen it before doesn’t mean it can’t ever happen. All we need is a little effort, and anyone can be the one to make it.

All I need, meanwhile, is for anyone ticked about me showing up to that fateful Panera meeting 11 minutes late to realize that I’m sorry. I tried my best. And next time, for heaven’s sake, save some breadsticks for the rest of us.

Edge Ideas: Planet icon, car icon, and gas tank icon for the World Research Institute statistic, US Energy Information Administration statistic and Center for Climate and Energy Solution statistic respectively. I can do my own art.