Millennials Lead the Trend to Less Driving. Will It Last? | Hacker News Reader

Millennials Lead the Trend to Less Driving. Will It Last?

theatlanticcities.com

42 pointshispanic70 comments

>It’s not entirely clear, though, exactly why this has happened

Really? It's not clear why miles traveled has gone down since 2004? Line up these graphs for the last 10 years [1]. Or perhaps this one [2].

Gas prices are at record levels since 2004, and unemployment among the 16-24 year old population has skyrocketed. It's not any wonder why millennials are driving less. They can't afford to drive more. The rising cost of college is putting even more strain on the pocketbooks of the young work force. The article seems to want to attribute this trend to one source and no more than one source. The real world doesn't work that way.

[1] http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx

[2] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/12/22/the-global-...

The article seems to want to attribute this trend to one source and no more than one source.

? The article calls gas prices twice as well as other economic problems as reasons for the decline. For example: "Researchers have not yet been able to disaggregate how much of our current decline in driving has been attributable to gas prices, or the economy, or changing attitudes toward car ownership or urban living"

It does say that, yes. It also says that it's not known why, and it says that further up the article than any facts. They're implying that because researchers are looking at multiple factors they have yet to filter it down to one specific cause. I'm not discounting the researchers. I'm discounting the article, and their false sense of mystery behind this trend.

I don't think that implication is the author's intention. I read that as an opening to say "researchers are still investigating the causes", not "researchers have not yet found the cause."

Why? I looked at the graph and whipped out the calculator and VMT has not "stagnated" as they say so much as dropped about 3% or so from peak.

Then look at my commute. Scroll down to "employment" (If this doesn't work simply pull the employment graph for a decade or so for your MSA from the BLS website)

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUMT55333405?data_tool=XGtab...

How many people are sharing the highway with me going to and from work? Well, about 3% fewer than peak. My commute times do resemble this in that I can get home a little faster now than when I was younger.

Less jobs to drive to seems to explain 100% of the delta in VMT, very superficially. I'm sure it depends on which area you gather data from, blah blah, but it does mostly seem to be employment stats. There exists a political axe to grind WRT encouraging urban living / mass transit / changing attitudes toward car ownership, but censoring factual data and manufacturing confusion to help grind the axe is simply unethical.

I drove 45 minutes one-way to high school during my junior and senior years in '93-'95. Gas cost .99/1.09/1.19 during that time. It was fifty miles per day, in the mountains, and I got about 15MPG. So that's about $3/day or $15/week. Now it would cost nearly $12/day or $60/week.

Luckily minimum wage has gone from $4.25/hr to $7.25/hr to keep up as expenses quadrupled. Err, um...

It would be interesting to know how much the average income has increased, more than minimum wage, and the effect of inflation on other prices would also be useful.

I'm not saying that it would lead to a different conclusion, but just that it's data you can't ignore when comparing prices across a 20 years span.

If you change "increased" to "decreased", you can find this info pretty easy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_US_household_income...

If you're looking for personal income rather than household income, there's a graph for that as well.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6c/Historical_med...

I don't think it's all about money.

I live in NYC in large part to avoid driving. If I moved to Kirkland the lower rent would easily pay to lease, fuel, insure and maintain a luxury car, with cash left over. I'm staying here. So are my 8 million neighbours.

Yes, it's still not clear. Your theory is a good and interesting one, but it's not clear that it's true.

Also interesting to note that while car sales in the US declined steeply in '07 and '08, they are slated to have a consecutive record sales year in 2013, possibly surpassing the record year of 2005. [1]

In the last 5 years, many manufacturers have had substantial YoY growth - the luxury segment had 13.4% YoY growth in 2012. [2]

[1] http://editorial.autos.msn.com/blogs/autosblogpost.aspx?post... [2] http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1081451_bmw-tops-u-s-luxu...

This would explain why miles driven has declined among Millenials for whom gas is a significant expense. But as I understand it, car ownership and usage has declined even among Millenials who can easily afford to buy the gas they need.

My guess for the primary factor is demographic--Millenials are choosing to live in urban areas by the greatest proportion of any generation yet. Cars are not as necessary in cities, and can be liabilities due to parking difficulty.

The key question is what will happen over time. If it's a financial issue, then Millenial car ownership and usage should go up over time as they achieve greater financial security later in life. If it's a shift to cities, that might a cultural change that is more durable.

Motoring is incredibly cheap in the US.

Here in the UK, petrol (gas) is over $8/US gallon. Insurance is mandatory and phenomenally expensive for young drivers - a new driver would expect to pay at least $2000 for their first year of insurance, even for a tiny and underpowered subcompact. Our driving test is quite rigorous, so most people will spend at least $1500 on learning to drive.

Only two-thirds of young Britons have a driving license and far fewer actually drive. The barriers to entry are prohibitively high and there's a growing cultural divide, between young people who see driving as an unaffordable luxury and their parents who see it as a basic necessity.

Insurance is mandatory in the US. Average insurance prices for someone under 24 years old is ~$2000 every 6 months, or $4000/yr (2600GBP/yr).

I'll agree that motoring in the UK is more expensive, but insurance isn't the reason why.

I have a license, and my wife has a car, but I don't drive. Haven't, with some exceptions on vacations and long road trips, since about 1998. Having grown up in a rural community where driving was compulsory, I made it a goal, upon moving to a large city to attend University, that I would live close to grocery stores, restaurants, and my workplace so that I could walk and ride my bicycle to work and class. It was a conscious lifestyle choice, and I still adhere to it, 15 years later.

Side benefits are immense. I walk or ride somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 miles each year. Overall, the pedestrian commute energizes me in the morning, and helps me quickly recover and decompress at the end of the day. The money that would otherwise go into a second vehicle, fuel, insurance, and maintenance instead goes toward higher quality food.

"I walk or ride somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 miles each year."

"The money that would otherwise go into a second vehicle"

I don't think you're going to like the math very much.

700 miles divided by 4 mph which is real slow for a bike (maybe up a hill?) or real fast for a walker, times maybe $100/hr as a consultant, equals about $17500/yr or about $1450 per month. You can rent a decent new Porsche 911 for about one grand per month as per leasetrader, so ... More realistically selections of vehicle and billable rate scale hand in hand. Or if you like a cost basis, my cost per mile has averaged under fifty cents per mile for my car so you're talking about around a buck per day, which buys like one organic apple around here. Which is better for you than no organic apples. I'm just saying the extra food probably isn't enough to fatten you up.

Note I walk about most nights after dinner and also after lunch. For health, and fun. Have to be realistic that neither of us are saving any money doing so. Long term medical bills, maybe.

Only if you bill your walking hours at a consultant's rate, which is silly. I'm making more than both of you if you calculate it that way by sleeping an hour less a night while playing World of Warcraft.

~700 miles each year is about 2 miles each day. Presumably if saintx hadn't structured his or her life around maintaining walkability then it would be necessary to travel longer distances each day. This would drive the total cost up. I don't know anyone who owns a car and only drives 700 miles each year.

"I don't know anyone who owns a car and only drives 700 miles each year."

My grandma and mother in law resemble that remark. Once you get old enough that shopping is an agony instead of a fun hobby, and you no longer work, there's not much but Dr visits. Also beyond a certain age people expect to drive to visit you rather than you drive to visit them, sign of respect or whatever. Finally, much like maintaining / living in a suburban single family house, still being able to drive a car at advanced age becomes a status symbol rather than a tool or recreation. "I might be old, but I'm still healthy enough to drive that thing... if I wanted to" An 80 year old woman in a suburban house, with a car, is pretty much the same mentality as a 40 yr old dude with red sports car and girlfriend half his age.

Sorry. What I meant was I don't know anyone who owns a car and is able to charge a $100/hr consulting rate and only drives 700 miles each year. Barring edge cases, I expect the usage pattern for the average person for car driving is >700 miles per year.

Saving money in comparison to what? To spending that extra commute time working for money, no. To spending the extra commute time driving to a gym and riding a stationary bike? Definitely.

It often takes as long or longer to accomplish daily tasks in a car-oriented suburban neighborhood as in a pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhood; for example, it's about a 5 minute walk to the grocery store in my city neighborhood and about a 5 minute drive to the grocery store in my parents' (inner-ring) suburban neighborhood; likewise it's a 20 minute walk or 5 minute subway ride for me to a mall and around a 15 minute drive to a mall from my parents' house.

The main benefit the suburbanite gets is that much of their neighborhood is empty space in the form of grass and parking lots, not that they save particularly much time.

And the long-term mental and physical health benefits from daily physical activity are difficult to assign a dollar value to, but very significant.

That said, the OP must live right in a downtown to only walk and bike 700 miles a year; I live in a city neighborhood and have a 10 mile round-trip bike commute which comes to 2400 miles a year without errands or recreation or social calls or anything.

Bikes can be faster than cars in densely zoned areas, which is why cities have bike messengers.

I think one of the big things bike messengers get over cars is that they can park a ton faster than a car.

When I ride my bike I get the same advantage.

Another advantage is that it's a lot easier to bend and break traffic laws on a bike.

> I walk or ride somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 miles each year.

That's 2 miles per day. Certainly nothing to brag about, but if I could do all my shopping or commuting without a car, and only had to walk/bike 2 miles a day, I would. Why own a car? Even walking that's a only 30 minutes a day.

"The money that would otherwise go into a second vehicle, fuel, insurance, and maintenance instead goes toward higher quality food."

I love this. It shows how so many of our lifestyle choices affect one another. I'm sure the domino effect doesn't stop here either. I've noticed how much more I feel like a part of the human race when I bike. When you drive a car you're so isolated, it's easy to get angry when someone makes an honest mistake in the next lane. When biking or walking you always have to constantly confront smiling faces and "good morning!"s and I think it's important to have this interaction with strangers.

With expensive safety features and the increasing cost of college, we are no longer in a world where most middle-class teenagers could realistically save up for and purchase a (reasonably safe) car. My parents wouldn't want me in something without a strong frame, airbags, ABS, and traction control. That puts the minimum cost of safe car at more like $5,000 than $500.

If I ever see that much money in one place (I haven't), it'll go straight to my tuition bill. No way could my family justify spending that much on my entertainment. And even if it never needed repairs, I doubt I'd break even on driving to a minimum-wage job for 2-3 years.

Owning and taking pride in our cars is not a part of life for teenagers in my town like it was for my parents in the 60s and 70s. Things have changed, and I think college and car ownership costs are a major factor.

Well, cars and college have certainly both become relatively much more expensive over time, but why are you mentioning what your parents would or would not want you to drive?

Owning a car for the sake of owning a car is blessedly less "cool" in high school though, which I think has a lot to do with it as well. Just as much as the money aspect at least, I've seen teens manage to put thousands of dollars into cars when I was growing up just because that was their hobby. For them, their job supported the car, not the other way around.

If your parents are helping you buy a car in any way, you're at the mercy of what they approve of. Parents can also make life difficult for you if you're not following their recommendations, especially if you're still at their mercy for financial support.

The teens you speak of are not the youths he speaks of. You're talking of teens without other financial obligations, living off their parents. He speaks of youths trying to make it on their own.

Sorry, I forget that there are teens out there where parents are able to help them buy a car, or remain financially involved once the kid is out the door.

The teens who spend all of the money from their job on their car are teens who are entirely supported by their parents.

Many parents would expect that some of the wages that the child earns go towards offsetting the child's own cost. Some parents may even insist that the wages more than offset the upkeep of the child, and go towards helping support other children in the family (lots of single parent households.)

I don't think $5,000 is a reasonable minimum for a car. Depending on your area you should be able to find something that's reliable for $2,000, even if it's not a Volvo.

Disagree. I live in a low cost of living area and the cheapest car sold by the local Carmax is $8K. Yes I know carmax isn't the cheapest place and they don't sell the dumpiest cars, but not by a factor of 4x...

Cash for clunkers really screwed over the lower and lower-middle classes WRT transportation.

As a side question, the $8K special is a '07 with 112K miles... Doesn't that imply a continuous equivalent average velocity since manufacture of something like three miles per hour, 24x7x365? That's crazy, almost like passenger jet aircraft that spend most of their life in the air. Now thats some owner who is not abandoning the car owner lifestyle or whatever. The math seems to estimate out to around seventy or eighty mile per day commute, maybe. Wowsers.

> I live in a low cost of living area and the cheapest car sold by the local Carmax is $8K.

You can buy used cars on craigslist, or go around looking for ones on the side of the road or in parking lots for sale.

And a 2007 model year car came out in 2006, now it's 2013, so that car has been around for 7 years. 112,000/7 = 16,000 miles per year which isn't out of the ordinary. Most people put between 12-15,000 miles a year on a vehicle.

>I live in a low cost of living area and the cheapest car sold by the local Carmax is $8K.

The cheapest car sold by my local Carmax is $10K. At a glance, the cheapest cars they sell anywhere are in the 7-10K range.

That's how a used car dealer works. They buy cars for $3K, run them through a carwash then sell them for $8K.

The classifieds are full of decent/good cars in the $2-5K range.

> three miles per hour, 24x7x365? That's crazy,

Average velocity is a pretty braindead figure here. How about an average of 1.5 hours of use per day at an average velocity of 48 mph? Doesn't sound so crazy any more.

That's a rather strong definition of reasonably safe. I will certainly push back on traction control, in situations where it impacts safety more than handling, a teenager will generally have the flexibility to just stay off the road (which is even safer).

ABS is a little more in the middle, but a safe driving mentality will provide a lot more safety than ABS, so I probably wouldn't look at it as make or break for a teenager car.

All cars have reasonably strong frames. Safer modern vehicles generally gain some of that safety by crumpling, which they do by being weaker than their predecessors. A Model T would bounce off a tree at moderate speed...

My first car had airbags, but not ABS. My parents wanted me to get something with ABS, but the opportunity came up to buy the car for $800 (auto repair shop repo'd it after customer didn't pay bill).

Repos aren't always a good deal though. My sister's second car was a repo that ended up needing almost $2k in repairs on top of the purchase price.

I live in the Wisconsin, where snow and ice do make safety features that improve handling a bit more important than they might be in the Valley. A safe driving mentality only goes so far when the roads are coated in ice for the several months.

By strong frame I mean a car that hasn't been in a serious collision yet.

I learned to drive in the U.P.

I would not hesitate to purchase a clunker for a child so that they could find a job, both in high school and in college.

This

Today's 'sheltered youth' doesn't cease to amaze me.

Your $500 car is safe (ok, maybe the $1000). It's not a VW bus, it's safe.

Get out, get a job, go to college. Drive around. Sheesh

Unless you live in an area with good public transport, so in this case dumping the car is an option.

It amazes me that all these safety features are considered required, and that the bar is so high. Yes, they'd be nice, but people managed to survive prior to the safety features being engineered.

Except for those that didn't.

Not all of them did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

Well

2012 number is around 10 deaths per 100,000 habitants. In 1990 it was 17 per 100k. These are rates comparable to 1925 (while the number of cars was still in rapid ascent)

Now, I don't know if there is a statistic of that, but it seems to me the main contributor to your road safety is yourself.

So don't speed, don't DUI, know the limitations of your vehicle and you should be pretty safe even driving a car from 1990.

A 40% reduction in fatalities does not seem significant to you? And here are historical sales figures: http://wardsauto.com/keydata/historical/UsaSa01summary - starts in 1931, but suggests that the number of cars in 1925 was about 1/10 that of 1990 (for about 1/3 the population).

And no amount of personal competence and carefulness can fully protect you against other people's mistakes.

"40% reduction in fatalities" is similar to "double the risk of cancer", it does not tell anything about the real risk

The average risk is still small by today's standarts at 17 by 100k (per year). It's probably better because of systemic improvements (and in the 90's you were adding older cars to the statistic)

Besides, you're not going to stay with the clunker forever.

Everything has a risk in life, but if some prefer to live in a bubble so be it.

The reason these safety features are considered required now is because of the number of people who did not manage to survive. The ones who lived often don't pay attention to the ones who did not until the numbers are looked at on a macro scale.

Car accidents are not always the dead man's fault.

And plenty of pedestrians and bicyclists die every year too. It's a risk just walking out your front door.

In my cursory Craigslist searching, there wasn't much of anything that would start for $1,000.

When I turned 16 (within the past decade), Dad spent $1400 and bought a 12 year old old Mazda hatchback - the thing was completely gutless and didn't even have a stereo, let alone airbags and traction control (ABS, maybe, I feel like it's been pretty much standard for years now). Many of my classmates had similarly worthless cars - "reasonably safe" has a lot more to do with the driver than the vehicle (admittedly, young drivers tend to be stupid, but safer cars will just make them more reckless (at least at the macro level)).

Also: In 2010, the median marriage age was over 26 for women and over 28 for men. More and more young people are staying in cities, where cars are much less necessary.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/09/ne...

I'm a Millennial. I went to college in a city, and happened to just stay (halfly because I'm sick of suburbia). I use public transit to go everywhere. I make enough money to buy a car, but I don't need it.

Sure it'll last. Until they have children.

Because it is impossible to have children without a car. Right!

That's correct. It's just solid, non-debatable science.

But seriously, unless you have the perfect storm of public transportation systems and public schooling systems, you're either getting a car to shuttle your kids to school or you move to the suburbs for better public schooling.

Of course there are exceptions. I'm talking trends, as this article is.

Didn't you know? In the USA, Child Protection Services will rescue kids from homes so broken that they have no car!

Have a kid, live in the suburbs, haven't driven my car since maybe February, ever since we discovered that there was a COSTCO on the train line.

Just a data point, but I am 23 and have a three year-old son. I haven't owned a car since high school. We get around by subway and bicycle.

When I started working (19) I used to fantasize about buying a new car, but everything about them is a total money hole. You have to pay for somewhere to park it (just parking on the street is illegal in my city), then car tax, then insurance, then gas...

I guess I am blessed to live in a city (Nagoya) that is quite bikeable and has an adequate public transit system.

I've been seeing a big trend amongst my peers to chose to live in walkable areas.

When someone announces they are getting a new place, they often excitedly list the places nearby that they can walk to. Even if you have kids, if you're walking somewhere, a car isn't as important. Sure, they may have cars, but they might not use them for every trip.

Correction: Until they have school age children.

It's not too hard to raise toddlers in the city and have a nice walkable lifestyle. Sure getting around to do anything outside your immediate vicinity can be a challenge but it's not insurmountable if you have access to good public transportation.

Once you have school age kids though, it's a different ball game. Private school in the city is expensive, and often puts you in an upper class income demographic with all the pros/cons that come with that. Public school can vary from being great in progressive, well funded schools to absolutely horrible and filled with violence, apathetic teachers, and rampant drug use in under-served schools. Often there's a lottery system to get into the good schools in many cities, too.

Schools are the suburbs' trump card. Most of us that would love nothing more than to get out of the suburbs and away from our car-based lifestyle are pretty much held hostage by the school systems. The one "hack" I've seen become more common is home schooling, but this requires one person to stop working, thereby reducing the income to a point where city living becomes hard to afford.

In the unknowable category, it seems like the availability of self-driving cars will drastically change the cost-benefits ratio of driving and could easily lead to a dramatic increase. Are you really going to want to fly from San Francisco to Los Angeles, spending 2+ hours in transit time, when you could get in your personal car, browse the internet or read a newspaper for the 6 hours you'd spend driving?

I strongly suspect that any theories that we will be driving less will go out the window in the next decade or two.

Proponents of self driving cars seem to be forgetting the story that electric cars are telling us right now. People (en masse) will choose the immediately cheaper and more entrenched option. Maybe an electric car will save you hundreds on your gas and maintenance bills. But it's also $5000 more upfront. So people are not buying electric cars, even with all the studies showing that a great number of people will not lose anything by being range-limited.

Will self-driving cars cost as much as gasoline cars? As much as electric cars? Or will they cost more than both option? So pulling numbers out of my ass: who is going to be buying a $50,000 self driving car when they can get the electric option for $40,000 and the gas option for $35,000? We can't even get them to buy electric.

That is a true point for the first years that self-driving cars exist, but it is not true on the timescale of a couple decades. The first Tesla Roadster was delivered in July of 2009, and they are going to ship 20,000 cars this year (compare with 5 million light vehicle sales in the last 12 months, for the sake of honesty in statistics), in an environment where their car is at a significant disadvantage due to lack of infrastructure. The first self-driving car will be expensive, but eventually it won't be, and eventually it will have a huge impact on people's driving habits. Unless everyone stars telecommuting, which is a social change that will probably happen slower than technological changes, I don't see how miles driven per year would reasonably go down.

Will they also lead the trend in riding in cars that drive themselves?

Maybe, but my theory is that this stems from a couple of factors: 1) Higher driving costs, and lower incomes/ higher unemployment. 2) Less appeal of consumerist lifestyle 3) Preference for walkable neighborhoods 4) Strong avoidance of situations that involve drinking and driving

Only the last one is a case that they'll be interested in self driving cars.

I hope so. Clearer roads for those of us who like driving. Vrrrrooom!

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