What it means
Car culture in Scottsdale is less a hobby than a condition. The city stretches 31 miles from the Salt River to the Tonto National Forest, the streets run on the grid of mile-apart arterials laid down for farms and then for subdivisions, and for four months a year the afternoon sidewalk is somewhere a sensible person does not stand. So everyone drives: to work, to the trailhead, to the restaurant two parking lots over. The 2024 numbers put 61 percent of workers alone in a car, 31 percent at home and under 2 percent on foot, with an average commute of 21.6 minutes, which tells you the roads were built for it.
You hear the phrase two ways. One is the shrug: “it’s a car town,” the answer to any visitor who asks whether they can walk from the resort to dinner. The other is the pride: this is the city of the January auctions, the Penske museum and a Scottsdale Road corridor where Bentley and Lexus sell under the same roofline. The getting-around guide covers the logistics; this page covers why it is so.
Where you’ll meet it
At the rental counter at Sky Harbor. In the first week of the moving guide, which says a car per adult. On the north Scottsdale Road dealer row. In the one exception, Old Town, where the free trolley and a walkable bar grid make the car optional, and in January, when Car Week turns the whole city into a showroom.
Where the word came from
Nobody coined “car culture” for Scottsdale; the city grew into the postwar pattern harder than most. The farm-era section-line roads became the arterials, subdivisions filled the squares between them with block walls and cul-de-sacs, and shopping went to the corners with parking in front. By the time the city thought about transit it was 20 miles long.
The selling side has a clearer history, and Scottsdale Progress columnist Joan Fudala has told most of it. Dealers started downtown, then moved to McDowell Road for land once Los Arcos Mall opened in 1969. Madison Chevrolet had led the way in July 1964, and over the next decades Bud Beck Pontiac, Bill Watkins Ford, Bud Brooks Cadillac, Linda Brock Volkswagen, Korte Chevrolet and a dozen more lined the road. The strip was branded the Motor Mile; by 1996 a partnership of 20 dealers marketed it together, with some 32 brands at the peak.
Then the city moved north and the freeway did not come. Los Arcos closed in 1999, the Loop 101 opened with frontage the old strip lacked, and one by one the dealers sold, closed or left. The Tribune counted Power Pontiac Buick GMC as the sixth departure in October 2008; each store had been worth half a million to a million dollars a year in sales tax to a city that runs on it. Meanwhile Werner Schumacher’s Mercedes store (1985) and Lou Grubb Ford (1988) had planted dealerships at Hayden and Frank Lloyd Wright in the Airpark, and when that filled, the trade moved onto former Arabian horse land along north Scottsdale Road. That is where the Penske group sells 17 brands today. South Scottsdale got SkySong and apartments in exchange.
What it is not
Car culture is not the whole story of movement here. Scottsdale is also a serious cycling city, with the Greenbelt, the canal paths and more bike lanes than its reputation suggests, and the north is horse country. It is the commute, the errand and the summer that belong to the car.
The fine print
Three forces keep the car in charge, and none is going away. The first is geometry: a city 31 miles long and in places four miles wide cannot be served by a rail line without passing most of it by, which is the argument that has kept Valley Metro’s light rail at the Tempe line. The second is heat: the June-to-September rhythm the moving guide describes, errands before nine and after dark, is a driving rhythm, because the car is the only air-conditioned space that moves. The third is money: the city’s budget leans on sales tax, and car sales are among the biggest single sources of it, which is why the council treated each Motor Mile departure as a fiscal event.
The car also has its own calendar. Barrett-Jackson’s January auction at WestWorld anchors a week of sales, Bonhams, Gooding, Russo and Steele and the rest, that fills every hotel room in the city at the top of high season; the Car Week survival guide is the local manual. The Pavilions car shows and the Goodguys weekend keep it going.
What the trolley solves is small and real: the free Old Town loop lets a visitor leave the car at the hotel, and the Neighborhood and Camelback routes give a few corridors a ride home. Waymo’s driverless cars now cover the core too. Neither changes the arithmetic north of Shea, where the honest advice remains the first line of the getting-around guide: yes, you need a car.