User:Melanieeeedawson/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Car dependency

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am very interested in examining how as a society we have become so reliant upon cars and I am hoping to uncover how problematic this is. I am especially interested in this because Idaho is a very car-centric state with little to absolutely no public transport options, so I want to explore what this means for society and how this materializes.

Evaluate the article
The Car dependency article has been rated to be of high importance, but quite frankly there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

Lead section

The lead section consists of one singular sentence that explains what car dependency is, but in my opinion it is not capturing the true essence of what car dependency actually is. It does do a good job of explaining the environment of a car-centric city/town, but I feel like it is also missing the way of life and mind that car dependency creates. I think there are sociological and psychological factors that are not captured with this lead section, as well as the social issues surrounding this. There needs to be more than one sentence in the opening of the article, and it needs to thoroughly explain the concept.

Content


 * 1) The origins of car dependency section is a good starting, it provides great background information and shows how the US has become so dependent on the automobile. However, I think there is much more that can be said with this section. It does not talk about the suburban sprawl that occurred after the Second World War, which is key to understanding why the US is the way it is now. I think this article does not at all bridge the equity gap either as there is so much that can be said with marginalized communities and the automobile - how it has affected certain groups and how car dependency particularly can harm them (or benefit to not be biased towards showing how problematic cars are). I think this section could go into a bit more depth of what American cities were like before the rise of the automobile as well, just to give an idea of how much they transformed and how people travelled beforehand. There definitely needs to be more citations as well.
 * 2) There is a subsection titled Street Design, and this is a fantastic section that does need to be included, but I think it needs to also talk about human infrastructure and how cars so greatly change humanistic cityscapes. It does a good job covering how streets do not include enough room for cyclists and bus lanes, however this section could dive into what makes walkable cities so beneficial and productive. It could talk about the designs of certain streets, such as the stroad, and how they do not prioritize people at all but rather cars. There is also not a single citation in this subsection.
 * 3) The negative externalities of automobiles section has so much potential - there is merely a list detailing the cons of driving cars basically - but there is no elaboration whatsoever with these points. They are just listed when some of these could be completely subsections on their own. And once again, only one citation for this part. There is so much that needs to be expanded upon here - such as how car dependent cities contribute to air pollution, noise pollution, so on and so on.

Tone and Balance

Even though I love to hate on cars and these cities as much as the authors of this article, I do have to say this article could benefit from having a section dedicated to what city planners believed the benefits of car dependency were. I think that these types of cities have been widely recognized as being problematic in terms of climate change and such, but it could be good to see what planners were thinking when allowing automobiles to take over. Could also be good just to try to balance out the negatives within this article.

Sources and References

After examining nearly every link on this page, I do think that the sources are decent. I think that there could be some updating with them, seeing as many are over a decade old and I think there are valuable recent studies concerning these topics especially as the world has seemed to wake up to the fact that climate change is real and is posing serious threats now. There are several sections and paragraphs of this article that do not have any sources, or they just cite a single one, and I think that is one of the primary weaknesses of this article. The sources that are provided are sufficient - they all seem to be as credible as they come and the links do work. However the article is lacking corresponding inline citations and could overall benefit greatly from having more sources (especially newer and ones covering marginalized communities). Talk Page

There is not much going on in the talk page at all, the first few entries being that the article was the subject of a few Wiki Education-Foundation courses. In 2011 someone discussed the usage of the word automobile and then in 2020 someone in a similar academic situation to this class added to the page. This article was last edited in January of this year, clarifying that there really is not much here.

Overall impressions

Looking at this page, I was honestly overwhelmed seeing how much I think needs to be done here. There are some excellent sections that I think do not require much editing at all, but my overall impression is that this page could be a lot better. There is so much that can be discussed with the issue of car dependency, and I feel like it is something that is becoming much more prevalent in the mainstream especially this year, and this article needs to do it some justice.