It was the drive-thru flu shot that did it for me. 

In years past, getting the seasonal jab was kind of a hassle: Head to our local medical center, risk hitting traffic on the way, find parking, walk in, find the right floor, check in, wait around on plastic chairs near coughing patients for the shot that should help keep us healthy. Time indoors: half an hour minimum. 

This year, thanks to COVID-19, our local medical center moved their flu jab stations outside. Via a nearly empty freeway, my wife and I drove up, stuck our arms out of the window and got a jab, a Band-Aid and a nifty cotton mask in return. Time: under two minutes, or less than half the wait at the Starbucks drive-thru on the way home. Before, we’d laughed at the idea: drive-thru flu shots, how very American. Afterwards, we wondered why we’d ever do it the old way ever again.  

There was a lot of this going on in 2020. Google “drive-through COVID testing” and you’ll get 1.8 billion hits; every major U.S. city now offers it. Curbside pickup was suddenly available for most forms of retail, including cannabis dispensaries. Drive-in movie theaters had a banner year; formerly summertime only, many extended their seasons so much that they had to hire snow ploughs. There were drive-in Hollywood premieres, drive-in discos, drive-thru Halloween houses, even drive-in yacht rock concerts.    

Previously associated with red America, car parades became a point of pride for blue states too. Drive-thru voting was a hit in Houston, despite the Texas GOP’s efforts to shut it down. The Biden-Harris campaign found its footing with socially distant car rallies (and arguably should have been doing so much earlier). Even the once-annoying car horn, as my colleague Nicole Gallucci wrote, became a joyful sound in these difficult times.

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All of which has left those who dislike car culture deeply conflicted. For as long as I can remember, I’ve lamented life in the claustrophobic box. Gary Numan’s “Cars”, a hymn to road rage and paranoia, was the first pop video that got stuck in my head. The award-winning satirical cartoon What on Earth!, in which Martians mistake cars as our planet’s dominant species, left a deep impression at an early age. When I moved to California, there’s a reason why I chose the relatively dense and walkable streets of San Francisco; Los Angeles’ sprawl and odd anti-pedestrian attitude leaves me cold.   

Even now, I am pro-public transit (lest we forget, around 9 percent of households in the U.S. have no access to a car) and anti-car ownership. In January, a million years ago, I wrote about why the brave new world of autonomous vehicles mean we will subscribe to cars, not own them; I also explained why city centers should ban them altogether. When Paris slashed half its parking spots, I cheered; same goes for when a host of other cities created pedestrian zones, added bike lanes and prioritized parklets. Viewed in purely territorial terms, it’s been a terrible year for the car species.

But the primary story of our year behind the wheel is emotional, not territorial. The sheer numbers of us working from home (up to 42 percent of the U.S. workforce in one Stanford estimate) has led to lower traffic levels — at least here in the Bay Area, though we’re certainly not alone. That in turn has made driving enjoyable for the first time in ages. The average trip is much less stressful. In pursuit of socially-distant hiking, I drove to more trailheads in 2020 than the last few years combined. There were no parties or dinners where the drive time almost exceeded the fun time. Grocery shopping at an hour when there are as few other shoppers as possible has meant zero trouble finding a parking spot, which  is great for my blood pressure. 

Electric vehicles also had a good year in 2020. EVs and plug-in hybrids now comprise 10 percent of all cars sold in Europe; the number is expected to spike to 15 percent next year. That’s thanks to the EU’s recent mandate that no new gas cars be sold after 2035; California followed suit this fall. The UK went even further, banning new petrol car sales after 2030. 

This shift suggests the day is not far off where we can divorce our feelings about car culture from our legitimate worries about carbon emissions. The faster we can layer EV infrastructure over our current setup — for example, by installing chargers in every gas station, as Germany has mandated — the more we can transition to guilt-free driving without missing a beat. 

Which isn’t a bad thing, even for anti-automobile grumps like me. Car culture has more to recommend it than we suspected at the start of 2020. That claustrophobic box is also a bubble of safety, one that can transport your pandemic pod to any number of socially-distanced events. If only we’d promoted in-car entertainment back in March — with mandates and subsidies that helped turn every cinema into a drive-in, say — we might have further slowed the spread of COVID-19. A nation that needs more jobs fast, and is still nostalgic for the 1950s, could have provided a lot of employment opportunities for carhops. 

But at the very least, we can consider all the ways that cars made our lives easier this year, and continue to implement them going forward. Drive-thru voting is such a no-brainer that every state should implement it. Curbside retail reduces the need for parking garages, themselves an inefficient waste of time and money; it’s a superior system for employees and customers alike. And of course, superfast drive-thru jabs should be a thing at every health provider going forward. Not just for the flu, but for the new COVID vaccines that need to get into our bloodstream with zero-to-sixty haste.