Map credit: Vizual Statistix. (Click for larger image.)
What is the most car-loving location east of the Mississippi? You guessed it — this is a Virginia blog, so I wouldn’t have brought it up if the answer weren’t the Old Dominion.
The Vizual Statistix blog mapped the average number of vehicles per household for each county (and in Virginia, independent city) and, not surprisingly, counties in the sparsely populated Great Plains and northern Rockies states were the most auto-dependent. But the competition was stiff in Virginia and neighboring jurisdictions, where the auto-philia slops over the state line.
Given the low granularity of Vizual Statistix’s map, it’s hard to gauge the auto-centrism with any precision. (The map to the left is the best I could come up with.) Might there be a link between the incidence of auto ownership and the lack of walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods? It’s an interesting question but the data presented here cannot answer it. Perhaps one could correlate cars-per-household with county-wide walkability scores.
Vizual Statistix offers little in the way of analysis, only this: “There appears to be a slight preference for more vehicles per household around the Northern Rockies and Great Plains, as well as around northern Virginia.” Ah, hah! We all knew it, Northern Virginia stands at the heart of the matter!
Except… it really doesn’t. Clearly, the author of Vizual Statistix is not a Virginian, for the area he refers to as “northern Virginia” in fact extends to the counties (excepting Henrico) surrounding Richmond and down the Shenandoah Valley to the Roanoke Valley. Squint real hard and you’ll see that Arlington (barely visible) and Fairfax County have fewer cars per household than outlying counties.
How’s that for rigorous statistical analysis?
Virginia also has a lower percentage than other East Coast states of households that own no vehicles at all. Likewise, Virginia counties tend to have a larger percent of households with more vehicles than people. There is no indication in the statistics, however, how many of those vehicles might be mounted on cinder blocks in the back yard!
— JAB
