Why aren’t younger Americans driving anymore?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I lived in downtown Atlanta for most of my adult life, and had a daily 23 mile commute. Anywhere I needed to go, except the bar across the street, involved a car trip.
Now I live in the New York suburbs, with a wife and baby, and I drive maybe once a month between Metro North and the subway. My wife doesn't even have a license anymore. It's incredibly liberating. I went to visit my parents last month and got stuck in the never-ending D.C. traffic, and I seriously wanted to kill people. I never realized how much aggression traffic created in me until I didn't have to sit in it any more. I can get as drunk as I want without worrying about driving home (drunk driving is epidemic in car-dependent places like Atlanta). On weekends, I have a happy baby in a stroller instead of a cranky baby in a car seat. Just this weekend we rode the train in from the suburbs, had coffee with my brother on the east side, went shopping near Penn Station, and had drinks and dinner with an old high-school buddy on the west side. At no point did we ever have to take the baby out of her stroller. In D.C., merely going out to lunch is an exercise in traffic and frustration every time the car stops and the baby starts screaming. I realize now that sitting in a car going nowhere is frustrating for everyone, not just the baby--it's just that the baby lacks coping mechanisms to deal with it...
Edit: I'll add that in all my years of driving, thumbing, and general perusing I don't think I've met a single big rigger who hasn't considered Atlanta to be in or at the top of their five worst places to drive.
Serious: http://www.iscvt.org/what_we_do/climate/case_studies/connect... ...sorry, I can't find my bookmarks on this at the moment. The first two links capture the sentiment of my comment anyway.
I'm currently living in Bellevue, WA so it's not possible to live entirely without a car. My wife and I are planing to move to Seattle though. It seems very walkable and there's a lot of public transit options.
But you're right, the MS shuttles are really great for getting around.
"My wife doesn't even have a license anymore. It's incredibly liberating." Really?
"I seriously wanted to kill people." Really?
My "mentality" is really just due to a personal problem. I understand there are a lot of people who find driving easy and enjoy it. But driving for me is a HUGE mental burden. I can't understand how people don't feel overwhelmed having to monitor 1 rear view mirror and 2 side mirrors + controlling speed + keeping eyes on the road + checking blind spots + paying attention to what's happening around and to traffic signs and lights. And from my perspective, people who add a stick shift to all that are just insane (moving to America and driving automatics made driving immensely easier for me). The feeling I have is that cars should be driven by giant spiders with eyes pointed to all directions and many limbs for controlling everything.
The thing that prevents me from being a bad driver is putting a huge amount of mental effort so as to do everything right. Otherwise I'll probably start hitting every car in front of me and on my sides, and running over people and stuff. By the time I get out of the car at my destination, I'm usually exhausted and stressed.
I've recently moved to the US, and while driving here is much better than in Brazil (where cities are a massive chaos), there are some elements which add a lot to that "driving mental burden" of mine, such as right turns on red (I'd rather wait for the light to go green, but people behind me get mad if I do so).
So yeah, for me, driving sucks and I find it liberating when I don't need to do it.
Today's ride-sharing startups (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc.), while very disruptive in their own right, seem to be more of a bridge technology in the big picture, like Netflix physically mailing DVDs to your house before streaming got big, or maybe native apps vs. HTML5 (that's still TBD).
While Airbnb is disrupting the hotel/motel industry in a huge way, I question whether ridesharing will ever get as big. I use Airbnb when I'm traveling or on vacation, which is a few times a year. But rides are something people need ALL THE TIME every day, and I'd rather own a (driver-less) car than have to ask a random stranger for a ride every time I need one.
I just have trouble wrapping my mind around how a shared driver-less car economy would work, especially when it comes to the role of government vs. companies.
For example, who would maintain and repair all the cars? Who makes sure that the interior of cars are kept clean and in working order? Would car design become totally commoditized? Cars are a form of self-expression for many, what will people do if all cars are shared and driver-less?
I'm not saying this to be cynical, I'm just genuinely curious how all this might play out. When you think about how much time people would save and how many industries would be changed or created, I think it's possible that shared/public driver-less cars might be just as revolutionary as mobile devices and the internet, or at least in the same ballpark.
But besides that, it'll be a long time before we have driverless cars because governments, insurance companies, oil companies, road construction, they would all lose money, lots of resistance. If cars never crash, how do you sell auto insurance? If nobody speeds, how do you write tickets? LOL.
That's at least part of it, although the article notes that the percentage change in young people without driver licenses is only from 21 percent in 2001 to 26 percent recently. My oldest son is plenty old enough to drive, and making enough money to get driver training and make payments on a car (he has no student debt), but he lives in New York City, so he has little occasion to drive. He's probably more used to using public transportation in general than many Americans because we all used public transportation to get everywhere when we lived overseas.
Our second son is also old enough to drive, and we will spring for his driving lessons if he desires to take them. But he can get to and from high school and many of his activities on foot (we live only a couple miles from the high school) or by bicycle, and of course we offer him rides when he needs rides. So he hasn't had much occasion to drive either.
On my part, as an aging Baby Boomer, I'm looking forward eagerly to the era of self-driving cars, when I can ride but not drive, and eventually cease buying vehicles, rather simply subscribing to a self-driving on-demand car service.
Yes. Yes please. As I said in a sibling comment to yours, I take the train instead of driving because driving is boring and requires me to concentrate on it. A self-driving car makes the five-hour trip to go see my parents a lot more pleasant...
Driving occupies my attention for no real benefit. If I'm sitting on the train I can read, I can write some code, I look out the window without having to worry about drifting off the road. The train is eighteen bucks a week (or $70 a month, but I don't go into Boston every week so I do a weekly pass) and I live in a place where I can walk to the grocery store--why would I hop in the car for anything?
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-teen-dr...
But for all the suburban kids who are switching from "going out to see people" to "staying home alone on the computer", I worry for their fate.
If they are hanging out with their neighbors instead of driving around town aimlessly, I suppose it's not bad.
This essentially forces people and their work to be in different areas, which then means some form of transport between the two.
- Definitely the preference for (usually inner-city) higher density areas, which already have good, accessible transit. However, the root cause is these areas are cool, rather than (just) specifically public transport.
- Congestion means getting around the inner-city is a real drag in a car. Parking is worse. This makes public transport an easier option. More often than not, people are opting for bikes. I live in the CBD and commute to the inner city. Bike is by far the quickest, public transport next and car a distant third.
- Explosion in the availability and convenience of car sharing.
- Cost is an issue, but a lot of people I speak to just say it's a "hassle" owning a car, rather than specifically the expense. Sustainable and environmental issues crop up too.
- An ongoing and persistent crack-down on drink-driving over the last 2 decades. Young people want to drink & are happy to take public transport to do so.
• I grew up in a small town with environmentally conscious friends who chose to bike in all weather because of their beliefs.
• As I've moved between metropolitan hipster-areas (i.e. Williamsburg), I've found that same cultural attitude. Riding year round is a cool and a 'right' thing to do.
• Since I've lived in metropolitan areas, driving is expensive and the difficulty of parking makes it unattractive.
• I don't want to live anywhere that isn't walkable. Even Brooklyn was unsatisfying in that regard. I'm trying Europe next.
• Getting a license seems relatively difficult, though it's probably easier than I think it is.
• Most of my free time is spent on my computer or otherwise in my house, learning and making.
• I'm not sure how expensive cars are, but I don't want to spend any extra money.
• All of my friends who don't work in tech are just scraping by.
• Yeah, student loans.
Personally I don't drive because I can't really afford a car, and with new services like Zipcar I no longer need my own vehicle.
At least, that's my justification for never learning to drive.
I presume this fact, along with "The recession" are the two most important deciding factors when it comes to the reasoning behind OPs question.
Edit: Dead reply indicates a more recent figure is 1 in 88. (Just trying to share with the folks not wearing their "I see dead people" goggles cuz I used to not wear them either.)
cough
As other people have commented, it's also unclear to what extent this represents increased diagnosis or actually increased levels of the condition; to the extent that it is the former, it's not clear what amount of driving-reduction that translates to. Finally, it's worth noting that there's a 20+ year lag between the conception of a kid who will have an autistic spectrum disorder someday and the day when he or she will be in the twenty-somethings statistical bucket; I'm not sure how that maps onto proposed increases in the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders but we are talking about cohort-1996 and earlier so insofar as there has been an increase in the past few years it's not relevant yet.
And even if it is 5%, and even if that is a lot given that it's a single disorder, what of the rest of the statistic that's 19 times as big?
I'll just go out on a limb and guess that at least half of the change is primarily related to economic circumstance and not incidence of some disease or disorder.
Sheesh.
Younger Americans are also eating less meat. Do you want to spin some list to explain, or just admit we're getting poorer?
I have yet to find any convincing reasons why this is, but at the very least there are some obvious clues for the average Japanese, including but not limited to: much better public transportation, trains run consistently even in very rural areas, density is high enough and Japan is small enough that younger people don't find driving "worth it", and because walking/biking are easy and encouraged. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in NY– in Yokohama, it's rare to see a cyclist anywhere but the sidewalk.
As for the US, I have yet to see this trend of non-drivers. Living in the city of course it's the norm not to drive, but coming from the country, everyone I know is stilling willing to go through all the ropes to get their license and whatever they can with wheels because it's about the closest thing to independence you can get in such a rural area. Now I have noticed people being less motivated to go places thanks to more efficient communication as was mentioned above– Facebook obviously, but even before then AIM had just about everyone and their grandmother. I will not be surprised if further down the road there is a noticeable decline in the number of new drivers because of this, but I haven't seen it just yet.
On the money point though, I do think it's a very good thing to bring up when making the generational comparison. I don't really have much to say about it except that when my parents' generation were teenagers, it seemed like everyone could earn the money for a decent (read: popular, not super low-end) car with just a summer job in the country. A suburban job was good enough to enter the low-end muscle/sports car market for some uncles. The late '80s/early '90s generation middle class on the other hand seemed to have two options: take out loans or lease a nice car for your child and hope that they don't wreck it (or beef up your insurance if they do, I suppose) OR, as I'm much more accustomed to, peruse the classifieds until that prized low-mileage foreign auto from past decades finally hits that sweet spot of under $5000 / less than 1sq meter of rust.
...All that being said, there's definitely something to be said for the fact that these days freedom isn't measured in miles attainable, but rather in how much ingenuity, computing power, and free bytes (¡OSS!) you have.
Japan is like Germany in that cyclists are supposed to use the sidewalk and not the street (which I believe is actually illegal). I actually prefer using the street as cars don't get in my way as much as pedestrians do. But the city I live in now (Beijing), it doesn't matter, both cars, bikes, and pedestrians use the streets, sidewalks, bike lanes....suffice it to say I don't bike but rollerblade on the street instead.