User:Steffeskevin/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I am evaluating the article titled Car dependency.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose to evaluate this article because I think it is a topic that would be interesting to work on for my course - "Democracy, Science and Climate Change". Within the course I am most interested on policy at the city level that can be changed to address climate change. There are a lot local policies like zoning, parking minimums and transportation funding that lead to car dependency which all contribute to climate change. I also chose this topic specifically because it was rated as "high importance" in the Urban Studies and Planning Articles WikiProject. It was also given a rating of "Start" which makes it a good article to build off of for this semester.

Evaluate the article
This article is fairly limited in scope and could use a more nuanced understanding of the topic. The lead is misleading because it describes car dependency specifically as a spacial design issue when it should be expanded to include policy and planning as well. The lead could be better fleshed out to summarize the main sections of the article and better prepare the reader for what the article is about.

The overview of this article is not clear and jumps around between many different topics in a confusing way. It mentions induced demand, and the traffic funding spiral without calling them out by name which is confusing. It also does not include some important historical topics which could help frame the topic more clearly like suburbanization and single family zoning of the 1950s as well as the interstate highway program that brought cars into cities in the first place. It is not clear if the article is specifically about car dependency in the U.S. or more generally, but since it is often something that comes as a result of policy it might be helpful to restrict the article geographically.

The tone of the article feels like it is relatively impartial though there are moments where some assumptions are made by the author without proper citing like when they assert how public transportation takes on a negative connotation. This article could use a number of new subsections as the topic just really needs to get fleshed out more to include specific design and policy topics which lead to car dependency.

The sources come from a variety of sources and the links do work.

This article is rated a high priority by a number of different WikiProjects, but the talk page is relatively quiet. I think it is probably high priority because there aren't any current editors taking a stab it the issue. The last talk page entry is from 2011 and takes issue with some edits that reveal an author's opinion.