What really killed the American love affair with the car? The hell of American driving. …
What younger adults recall as children is being strapped in the back seat as Mom lurched the vehicle through a soulless crudscape of drab chain retailing. They’ve done the six lanes of stop-and-go — bored out of their skulls and worried about Mom’s frazzled nerves.
They don’t want to do this anymore. And if it means sharing a 700-square-foot apartment downtown, so be it. …
The mission going forward is to build up the public transportation system to serve Americans’ changing needs. Conservatives of yore framed public transit as a devious plot to force Americans from their five-bedroom spreads to apartment houses along bus lines.
But a bus-and-rail boom was not the big thing accelerating multifamily home construction during the Great Recession and beyond. It was market forces, guys. And the Americans leading that market are the millennials, yearning to hang up the car keys.
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More seriously, Emily Badger in the Washington Post looks into why young people are driving less:
It’s true that the recession has probably dampened car use, not just for millennials but for everyone. But there are also some relevant, long-term socioeconomic shifts underway that will likely continue to affect car use even after the economy fully recovers. As student loan debts rise, alongside the cost of housing in many big cities, budgets for car payments will be squeezed. This is particularly true in cities like Washington, D.C., where the high cost of housing is partly subsidized by the low cost of transportation for young professionals who rely on transit and bikes instead of cars.
Americans are also forming their own households, getting married and having children later – all trends that predate the recession and that postpone life stages associated with the peak driving years. … And one more economic argument: Americans just reaching driving age today “have no living memory of consistently cheap gasoline,” the PIRG and Frontier Group authors write. And they’re not likely to see it again in the near future, regardless of what the economy does.
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I don’t know if it’s strictly generational. I can relate years of passenger seat helplessness throughout my youth, and deliberately looked for a walkable, car-free adulthood, but there are lots of millennials I grew up with who never left the suburban lifestyle. Likewise, there are retirees who dream of downsizing to a condo for the convenience and cool of urban living, but plenty of boomers who keep on driving.
I think it has as much to do with the return of young people to cities for work and the new cultural cachet of urban living — young people always want to be cool — as it does with conscious rejection of motordom by any particular demographic.
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There are many factors but driving has been a frustrating impractical thing for decades now. It’s a useful thing in the country but once you start to have some concentration of population and they’re all doing the same thing at the same time, there just isn’t the space.
Add to that how expensive it is (even after the high subsidy) of private motor car ownership and people look for alternatives.
But another way of looking at it is that we have had an artificially skewed transportation system for about 70 years. If there hadn’t been interference from the auto and oil industries that pressured our governments to design automobile-only cities then a mix of transportation options would have been still available to us. Now we have to incorporate it after the fact.
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Reblogged this on SalvoLomas and commented:
La generacion del milenio y el auto
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