I live in Redwood City, a suburb roughly 30 minutes by car from San Francisco. Like many other residents of the Bay Area’s suburban sprawl, I live at a specific distance from San Francisco where the city is accessible to me almost exclusively by car. Whether I am entering, exiting, or passing through, the personal automobile is my primary mode of transport. That fact is contingent on my own location in the suburbs as well as the state of public transport both within and around San Francisco.
While the museums, shops, and parks of San Francisco are often quite walkable, the questions of where to and how far I can walk are dictated by the availability of parking and the degree of traffic. Even though the Caltrain commuter rail and BART metro both serve the city and the greater Bay Area, my house is far enough from the closest train station that, were I to take public transportation into the city, I would have to drive to the station.
My use of a car also renders redundant the use of public transportation within the city. While San Francisco has a robust network of buses, light rail, and cable cars, it makes little sense to use these to get around once one has already brought a car in. This means more traffic, more searching for parking, and more time spent in the car.
A large portion of my trips to the city involve no sightseeing at all, but rather solely for access to the SFO airport. While the presence of a major airport is common to large cities, the airport as a human transport node goes against the simplistic notion of a city as a destination. While I readily accept that most cities are mere stops on the longer journey for goods traveling out via highways and ports, I tend to conceive of San Francisco as a destination, as opposed to a stop, at least for human beings. From the perspective of a TV packed into a shipping container or a passenger on a plane, it is obvious that a city is a place to pass through. The logic of the car, however, is that it rarely makes sense to drive through San Francisco; wherever one is going, it is usually faster to skirt the edges or avoid it completely. The car being the primary mode of transportation through which I experience the city affects how I see (or do not see) the city as a point of departure for longer journeys of shipping and travel.
In its role as my primary mode of transport with San Francisco, the car shapes my own understanding of the city, as well as my interaction with it. In other words, my relationship to my city, San Francisco, is mediated through cars as well as the transport infrastructure – parking garages, bridges, and highways – built to accommodate them.