In Southern California, traffic is the centerpiece of daily life. According to my friend in Los Angeles, her 14-mile commute takes up to three hours of her day; to get to her work by 9 AM, she leaves by 7:30. I live in Santa Barbara, a much smaller town with far fewer cars, but even our local NPR station has a commercial pitching their classical music hour that’s “here for you, no matter the traffic.”

Despite the deep connection between cars and the Southern California coast, the region has built more than 530 miles of new commuter rail along with 100 miles of light and heavy rail transit in the last 25 years. Even so, transit ridership has been falling in Southern California, according to a new report by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

The primary reason is straightforward enough: more people are getting cars. In 2016, America added more than 5 million vehicles to the roads, nearly 800,000 of which were in California, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration.

Why has car ownership been increasing so quickly? There are many reasons, but the UCLA study mentions one that has often escaped attention: the torrent of cheap and easy credit that has washed over car showrooms and used car lots in the years since the end of the Great Recession.

It can be hard to remember now, but in the immediate wake of the Great Recession, the nation took several steps to get people back into showrooms again — steps that in the clarity of hindsight wound up reinforcing our dependence on cars. The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program incentivized customers to trade in their old cars in the hope that they would buy new ones. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to bargain-basement levels and through the magic of quantitative easing flooded the economy with money.

Eventually, Wall Street and lenders began to realize something: the auto loans they had issued prior to the recession were actually holding up reasonably well. As described in a May 2017 story in the Financial Times, “Consumers tended to default on their house first, credit card second and car third.”

And so, investors looking for returns began pouring money into auto loans. Lenders and auto dealers began to find new and exotic ways to “make the math work” for the people coming into their showrooms. Lenders increased no-down-payment promises and started to issue longer-term loans that translated into smaller monthly payments, making owning a car (or buying a more expensive car) seem feasible to more Americans. Some went even further: making loans that borrowers could never repay, or even issuing loans to consumers who claim to have never signed on the dotted line.