Writer Emma Riva, a self-described “passenger princess,” poses for a portrait along Carson Street in her South Side neighborhood, Tuesday, April 1, 2025. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Is car-free living in Pittsburgh a political statement? Or a vehicle to a certain kind of intimacy? The truth is somewhere in between.
“PublicSource is an independent nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region. Sign up for our free newsletters.”
I still catch myself going to the passenger side, even when I’m the one driving — which isn’t often. I’ll borrow a friend’s car occasionally, but for the most part, I’m a “passenger princess.”
I got my license when I moved to Pittsburgh, but I found quickly that affording to buy a car as a freelance reporter was a pipe dream. So, I’ve remained a passenger. People have varying opinions on it — that it’s impossible, that it’s doable but not ideal, or that it’s a political statement of some sort. The truth is somewhere in between.
Potential cuts to the Pittsburgh Regional Transit system show that the city is at risk of becoming less, not more, accommodating to non-car owners. Part of my goal with sharing my experience is to combat the assumption in Pittsburgh that everyone drives, which is an assumption that unfortunately seems to be baked into decisions about PRT’s budget.
A youth of subway rides
I grew up in New York, where not driving was the norm. Only people with a lot of money, a lot of free time or a guaranteed parking spot drove regularly. Owning a car wasn’t so strange, but using it with any frequency was rare.
What you got instead was independence at an early age. Where suburban kids had to wait to learn to be behind the wheel to explore beyond their neighborhoods, my initiation into independence at age 11 was learning to ride the subway by myself. My dad instructed me to think of somewhere I wanted to go and figure out on the map how to get there on the subway. I picked The Strand bookstore in Union Square, an hour from where I grew up in Washington Heights. It required a transfer from the A train to the L train, daunting and foreboding to me at that age. I got on the L going the wrong way at first and had to hop off and get to the other side of the platform to go back.
By the time I was in my early twenties, I was taking the train drunk at four in the morning comfortably. I’ve thrown up on the train at night, made out with former lovers in the now-extinct double seats, written short stories with my computer in my lap during rush hour, and taken one-eye-open naps on early morning commutes. I learned how to handle unsafe situations on the train and to navigate the good, the bad and the ugly of interacting with fellow human beings. Growing up using public transit gave me a tolerance and toughness that has served me well in my personal and professional life and allowed me to explore the world freely.
But this has meant a car-shaped void in my adult life that I didn’t really notice until I moved to Pittsburgh after college.
There are more non-drivers than you might think in Pittsburgh, though, for a variety of reasons. According to the 2023 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, more than 29,000 households do not have a vehicle available to them.
One friend who grew up in a rural area never got her license because a rocky relationship with her family meant they never taught her to drive. She had no access to outside resources to learn and has remained car-free since, citing fear of accidents after a family member died in one. I’ve also met people who don’t drive because of vision impairments or epilepsy, or, like me, simply can’t afford the average $1,000-plus monthly cost of car ownership. Driving lessons are also not cheap — mine ran $185 for a two-hour lesson — and are often the only option for people without access to a family’s car.
Moments of power and individualism
In February, while a friend was recovering from surgery and needed someone to drive her car occasionally to keep the battery going, I got to experience that version of life for a bit. I drove down Penn Avenue toward the Strip, watching a salmon-colored sunset over the Pittsburgh skyline while The Smiths played on the stereo. I felt like a teenager, as if I were fulfilling some American rite of passage I had missed out on.
Cars are a center of popular culture, often metaphors for sex or power, whether in Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive” or the iconic “Greased Lightning.” In the French horror film “Titane,” a woman has sex with a car and in the adaptation of Stephen King’s “Christine,” a car possesses and then kills its driver. They’re danger and independence, cruising down roads with sleek and sensual purrs or growls of machismo.
There’s an undeniable magnetism to cars, and in a vast country like ours, they traverse even the emptiest of places. At times, I do feel judged by other people for not owning a car, that it’s a mark of not having money or being less of a participant in adult life. And I won’t lie, when I do drive, I succumb to feeling cooler or more “normal.” Car ownership is not the only way to live, but the current transit infrastructure definitely doesn’t make it easy to do without.
Extreme patience
I’ve felt embarrassed coming in late to jobs because there isn’t a bus that gets you in exactly at 9. Dependence on the bus means I take the 75 bus that comes at 8:49 a.m., whether I like it or not, and if that bus doesn’t come, I have to figure something else out.
I’ve been frustrated by how long it takes to get between places that are geographically close — like South Side to Homestead. They’re on the same side of the Monongahela River, yet PRT requires a detour through Oakland on the 61C. By car, it’s a 12-minute trip; on PRT, it’s 47 minutes — more like an hour and a half in practice. Walking the Great Allegheny Passage is technically an option, but it takes two hours and few people are as nuts as I am to attempt it. And sure, traffic is rage-inducing too, but there’s a unique humiliation in waiting 15 minutes for a bus, only for it to vanish from the transit app. You often have to leave one or two hours early for what should be a 20-minute ride.
There’s also a definite hierarchy of bus lines, with some connections much easier than others. I live on the South Side, which makes Shadyside, Bloomfield, Oakland and Downtown easily accessible, but Squirrel Hill or Wilkinsburg a trek. (I usually walk over the Birmingham Bridge to take one of the 61 or 71 buses in that case.) Buses that serve university students and go through Oakland come much faster than those in places like the Mon Valley or the northern suburbs. I once spent almost an hour waiting for the Y46 bus from Elizabeth underneath an overpass in the dark, only to have the time-ticker then disappear on the transit app. I had to wait another 30 minutes.
Though I complain, it could be much worse. Massive cuts to PRT bus service may be an abstract change to car owners, but every day passengers across the county take around 100,000 bus rides. The contemplated PRT bus line cuts would eliminate service to areas where transit is already spotty. These potential reductions will likely cut already disenfranchised people off from access to basic resources — including food. One of the biggest challenges of not owning a car is getting to the grocery store. I had to pick where I live based on whether I can get to a grocery store easily, which made apparent just how many Pittsburgh neighborhoods are food deserts.
A car-free sense of community
I talk myself out of biting the bullet and buying a car every now and then, and it’s likely to get easier to argue for car-free living because cars are only going to get more expensive with foreign tariffs.
And really, being car-free is not all bad. Getting rides from people in my life often affords spending more time with them. You learn, when you have to rely on others, that people usually do want to offer what they have to give. If I do ever own a car, I’ll be first in line to give anyone in my life who needs it a ride to the airport or to work. The jitney cab services that served the Hill District for much of Pittsburgh’s history served a similar function, creating community care when public service was inadequate.
Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” is an anthem for non-drivers, embodying the meandering surrender to adventure of traveling the United States without a car: “I am the passenger / and I ride and I ride / I ride through the city’s backside … / And all of it is yours and mine /So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride.”
Freedom of movement is a basic human right — car or no car — and Iggy Pop has fulfilled one role: seeing the romance in the passenger life. Taking the bus might not feel as sexy as driving a Mustang, but this is the role of the passenger princess: to romanticize the blue glow of the late-night buses; to celebrate the serendipitous conversations with poets, former MMA fighters and sommeliers doubling as rideshare drivers; to enjoy the intimacy and trust of a loved one driving you somewhere you need to go. Let’s keep the city yours and mine.
Emma Riva is the founder of Petrichor, a web magazine about Pittsburgh’s art scene, as well as a contributor to Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Whitehot Magazine and more. She can be reached on Instagram @emmawithglasses and her website emmawithglasses.com.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
About Post Author
