The end of car culture?
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Interesting article. It might be premature to announce a long term trend, but there are clear indications that car culture is declining among the young. Apparently heavy cell phone usage is taking time away from driving. That's great, as long as they don't try to do both at once.
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one of today's headlines:
[h=2]U.S. Car Sales Pace Hits Five Year High[/h]https://stream.wsj.com/story/markets/SS-2-5/SS-2-267367/
It appears that a large portion of the sales are work/fleet vehicles.
[h=2]U.S. Car Sales Pace Hits Five Year High[/h]https://stream.wsj.com/story/markets/SS-2-5/SS-2-267367/
It appears that a large portion of the sales are work/fleet vehicles.
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That article says that sales are starting to get back to 2007-8 levels. But it also says a lot of that is overdue fleet replacement or private car replacement that was deferred during the recession, so it might not be sign of growing long term demand. Also, it doesn't take into account population growth since then, so it doesn't present any clear evidence that contradicts the notion that fewer young people are moving into car ownership than in past times. Only time will tell if that trend is permanent.
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Still it was the thrust of the thread title. Do you know what the high water mark for the bike culture was in the US? We still haven't reached the Adult sales figures from 1974-75. No one is posting the bike culture is over. I was just pointing out the headlines can and most often are just to make news, not report it.
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That article says that sales are starting to get back to 2007-8 levels. But it also says a lot of that is overdue fleet replacement or private car replacement that was deferred during the recession, so it might not be sign of growing long term demand. Also, it doesn't take into account population growth since then, so it doesn't present any clear evidence that contradicts the notion that fewer young people are moving into car ownership than in past times. Only time will tell if that trend is permanent.
I'm going to be looking at the percentage of people with DLs as a better indicator than car sales.
Transit ridership will also be an interesting figure to follow. This has increased steadily since the boom years of the late 1990s.
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But, given the pathetic state of mass transit in the United States, it seems that massive investments would be in order if a move away from the motor car were truly under way, and, from I've been able to observe, the focus is still on subsidizing the automobile.
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Still it was the thrust of the thread title. Do you know what the high water mark for the bike culture was in the US? We still haven't reached the Adult sales figures from 1974-75. No one is posting the bike culture is over. I was just pointing out the headlines can and most often are just to make news, not report it.
I did put a question mark in the title. Whether or not the car culture disappears, it is interesting to see that more young people do not feel they absolutely need a car.
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my son asked for a car and doesn't care what kind it is, but he was very specific about which phone he wanted
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Extract:
"Millennials do say they’re less interested in driving, but young people have never bought many new cars, anyhow. Polk’s data show that buyers between the ages of 18 and 34 accounted for 14.6% of all new car purchases in 2008. Today that has fallen to 11.4%. That’s a significant but unsurprising drop, since young workers have been hurt the most by the weak recovery and grueling job market. Once they get on their feet and start to build families, they may suddenly become more interested in sedans, wagons and even minivans. It’s also possible more young people are driving their parents’ cars, especially if they’ve moved into Mom and Dad’s basement to save money."
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More "end of car culture" news: https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-e...150316490.html
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While I acknowledge your point, intelligent use will ease the need for alternate infrastructure. Overall, sure, I'd like to see more spent on transit, but intelligent car use can reduce the cost of maintaining what we already have, as well as expansion.
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I think that one of the main problems with these stories is that they are too general and too broad. The US is way too diverse and much too different from these kind of broad statistics to be meaningful.
For actually meaningful statistics, you have to look at the local level. If the modal share of bike commuters in your city has doubled in the past 5 years, that's going to be significant...at least for your community. If your city has added 100 miles of bike lanes and far more people are bicycling, that's going to be significant, too. Again, for your community.
But trying to divine whether statistics taken from the entire country are meaningful or not is much more difficult - an increase in biking in NY, SF, and Boston might be enough to nudge the car ownership metric down, but it won't really be significant for people who don't live in those communities...people who don't live in those communities may see no change at all.
For actually meaningful statistics, you have to look at the local level. If the modal share of bike commuters in your city has doubled in the past 5 years, that's going to be significant...at least for your community. If your city has added 100 miles of bike lanes and far more people are bicycling, that's going to be significant, too. Again, for your community.
But trying to divine whether statistics taken from the entire country are meaningful or not is much more difficult - an increase in biking in NY, SF, and Boston might be enough to nudge the car ownership metric down, but it won't really be significant for people who don't live in those communities...people who don't live in those communities may see no change at all.
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I think the high water mark of the US bike culture was from the 1890s to WWI, or somewhere in that period. I wasn't around then. However, I was around in the seventies. True, there were a lot of bikes sold in 1973, and there was the oil embargo, and then the shortage of gasoline in 1979, but I don't think there was a real bike culture. It was a period of rediscovery of the bicycle. In the fifties and early sixties adult cyclists were rare. One remark directed at me in 1963 was "How old are you?".
I did put a question mark in the title. Whether or not the car culture disappears, it is interesting to see that more young people do not feel they absolutely need a car.
I did put a question mark in the title. Whether or not the car culture disappears, it is interesting to see that more young people do not feel they absolutely need a car.
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Headlines are junk. Somebody in editorial adds them to grab attention, and half the time they misrepresent the article, as everybody in this thread understands, starting with the OP'er who put the question mark in the thread title for that very reason. The headline on the second article you posted ('Peak Driving' is looking like a myth) was not much better than the car culture one, since nobody has actually claimed that we've reached peak driving, so the headline was knocking down a straw man.
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I hate to be cynical but while I think the appeal of driving and car-ownership as a lifestyle may be receding culturally, the build up of sprawl in many areas has made the choice to go car-free more daunting. Probably the result of this will be a grumpy culture of young people who grudgingly get pressured into driving. Hopefully there will be progress but many older and more established people (i.e. parents) seem to view car-free living as simply impractical and, even if they're wrong (which I believe they are insofar as their perspectives are simply biased by living through the peak-growth period of sprawl-expansion), their dismissal of the possibility of cultural and economic change makes for an uphill battle.
What's more, it sometimes seems as if the areas where the most progress is being made to set precedents for car-free living attract the strongest opposition as well. It's almost as if there's an active network of people trying to prevent car-free living efforts from succeeding so they can live out their lives in the belief that driving is simply the only way to realistically get around locally.
The main hope, I think, is getting staunch driving-dominance supporters to realize that driving is so much better when traffic is light so it is only in their benefit for growing bike and pedestrian infrastructure to provide an alternative to driving so those who do drive have less traffic to deal with.
Somehow, though, many people seem to have this mindset that if some people give up driving than everyone will have to so better to herd everyone away from alternative choices to protect the automobile's dominance. It sounds insane when put this way but it seriously seems like this mentality is present in many people. Maybe it's just as simple as people getting self-conscious when others are changing but they aren't so they start talking up their aversions to car-free living to surround themselves with people who feel the same.
What's more, it sometimes seems as if the areas where the most progress is being made to set precedents for car-free living attract the strongest opposition as well. It's almost as if there's an active network of people trying to prevent car-free living efforts from succeeding so they can live out their lives in the belief that driving is simply the only way to realistically get around locally.
The main hope, I think, is getting staunch driving-dominance supporters to realize that driving is so much better when traffic is light so it is only in their benefit for growing bike and pedestrian infrastructure to provide an alternative to driving so those who do drive have less traffic to deal with.
Somehow, though, many people seem to have this mindset that if some people give up driving than everyone will have to so better to herd everyone away from alternative choices to protect the automobile's dominance. It sounds insane when put this way but it seriously seems like this mentality is present in many people. Maybe it's just as simple as people getting self-conscious when others are changing but they aren't so they start talking up their aversions to car-free living to surround themselves with people who feel the same.
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I hate to be cynical but while I think the appeal of driving and car-ownership as a lifestyle may be receding culturally, the build up of sprawl in many areas has made the choice to go car-free more daunting. Probably the result of this will be a grumpy culture of young people who grudgingly get pressured into driving. [/COLOR]
I agree it isn't growing that fast, but I am personally seeing more and more people use bicycles to get around... at least when the weather is good. On top of that, there's enough of a core of all-weather cyclists nowadays that people can at least imagine doing it all year around.
A while back I was riding a local trail when a passing cyclist said, " Hey... aren't you that guy? Aren't you the guy who rides all winter in West Des Moines? That's so cool." I guess everyone has their 15 minutes of fame.
Last edited by gerv; 07-10-13 at 08:08 PM.