Dozens of communities have outlined schemes to integrate carts and similarly sized vehicles (also called Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, or NEVs) into their transportation networks. In the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles, NEVs are a regular sight on the streets of Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage, and even at the McDonald’s drive-through. In Greenville, South Carolina, residents use NEVs to visit neighbors, go to the farmer’s market, or catch the Greenville Drive, the local minor-league team.

Why drive a cart? Certainly, disposable income, warm weather, and relatively dense settlements are prerequisites. But drivers also say that NEVs allow for old-fashioned urban social interaction.

“It’s impossible to deny what fun these little vehicles seem to be,” the editorial board of the Greenville News wrote last year, “and how they have served to better connect neighbors in a busy world.”

Exurban, postwar Sun Belt communities were a natural site for this transportation experiment, thanks to master planning and, of course, the centrality of golf courses. Big developers like Gary Morse, the billionaire who built The Villages, could draw golf cart paths into urban design from the start, linking homes, services, shops, and recreation.

“Why would you bother to haul a huge car around everyday, especially if you don’t feel comfortable operating it anymore, when you have this other option?” asks Hannah Twaddell, a planner at the Virginia consultancy ICF International, who has studied the trend.

The vehicles’ appeal is evident beyond retirement communities. In beach towns and other compact tourist enclaves, already accustomed to a mix of transportation modes, NEVs can do a car’s job with ease. “They’re kind of like the iPad, between the iPhone and the laptop,” Twaddell says. “It’s this medium-sized tool that’s incredibly flexible.”

South of Atlanta, suburban Peachtree City now has 11,000 golf carts for 13,000 households. “It’s almost our alternate transportation system here,” says Betsy Tyler, the city clerk. Between 1995 and 2010, dozens of surrounding subdivisions authorized golf-cart use on city streets.

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Kids accompanied by a parent can drive a golf cart at 12, and by freshman year, they can drive to school alone—avoiding state roads with high speed limits on an intricate network of bridges and tunnels. (That small electric vehicles don’t necessarily require a license represents a kind of freedom for both the old and the young.)

Much of Peachtree City was designed for low-speed electric vehicles. But increasingly, warm-weather towns with aging populations may look to retrofit their street grids much the same way that big cities are reworking the grid for bicycles.

East of Los Angeles, the Coachella Valley Association of Governments is drafting plans for a 45-mile, $100-million path for bikes, pedestrians, and low-speed electric vehicles along the banks of the region’s stormwater culvert, linking eight towns and hundreds of thousands of people.