Suburbs rethink mass transit to court millennials
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is a direct response to the above quote.
Every time I read one of these articles I'm surprised that the rise of smart phones isn't cited as a contributor to this change of preference. Every minute I'm driving is a minute that I am disconnected from the internet. Constant connection is arguably a bad thing, but I'm pretty much addicted, and I would bet that everyone else is too.
Of course there are many other contributing factors to my preference for mass transit over driving. My perceptions that inform my preference (whether true or not):
* Cars are simply not safe. It isn't just that I'm worried about getting hurt in an accident. I don't want to be responsible for harming someone else. * Many forms of media have constantly reminded me as I grow up that cars are bad for the environment. * Cars are incredibly expensive. If I never buy another car, I could easily afford a small house with the money I will save over my lifetime. In addition to the car, I have to pay for gas, insurance, and maintenance.
However, in the end, I still have a car. I have a car because my city's public transit is still slow and unreliable. It is getting better. And I use it quite a lot to get to things in the interior of the city. My car gets me to the events I go to on the edge of town, and it covers me when I need to get somewhere in the middle of the night, when the bus isn't running.
I'm not sure how similar I am to other millenials, but these are the things I think about when I see a quote like that.
In addition to accident-type safety issues, I also find driving a bit worrying from the perspective of what you might call "legal safety". The chances of ending up in a negative interaction with the police seem much higher when you drive than when you travel via other modalities, because a traffic stop has a pretty low bar of evidence, and is often used as a lead-in to various other searches/etc. I probably am realistically not at that much risk (being a white middle-class person usually traveling in middle-class areas), but I still feel less exposed to the police when not driving.
Cops have a license to kill with impunity. The race hysteria is used, ironically, to maintain the status quo via the clever bit of propaganda that "white" people are not at risk. Statistically, "whites" are less at risk, but only because they happen to be the richest demographic. As the article I've linked shows, the cops go after the weak and helpless, regardless of race or creed [2].
1. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/what-i-did-af...
2. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238488045786080...
If you are pulled over for a traffic violation, 99% of the time you get a ticket or a warning and are on your way. You can't cherry pick two extreme incidents and pretend that this is the norm.
Going to need some sort of evidence for this. Anecdotal doesn't even work here because the firearms are concealed.
To the point of cops however: All cops get a 50 state exempt conceal and carry permit for life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers_Safety...
Why is it that drivers licenses, marriage licenses (both licenses to exercise privileges) covered under the full faith and credit clause, but CCW permits are not?
Also, you imply anyone with a firearm is a "threat." The USA might not be the best place for you to reside, as hoplophobia is largely futile.
(Unless, of course, you are saying that the majority of the population in countries where the police do not carry guns are all phobic, as many of them would have the same reaction.)
You use an (uncited) 99% there. Fine, let's leave it at that. So in one in hundred cases you will have an unpleasant experience, ranging from being treated disrespectfully, to jail, to being tazed, to being shot. I don't know how you negotiate SLAs, but me, I wouldn't agree to these terms.
I think the best summary I've heard of this was on CBC Radio (probably on Spark, but I'm not sure): "For older generations, mobile phones are distractions from driving. For millenials, driving is a distraction from their mobile phones."
That said, I do own a car primarily for my daily commute and weekend outings up to the mountains. In terms of safety, environmental friendliness, or cost effectiveness, none of these factored at all into the decision for me. That said, I drive a Tesla, so it's chock full of modern safety features (protecting me; for pedestrians it's a silent rolling death machine with 691 horsepower), and I could argue that it's less environmentally unfriendly than other cars, but I bought it because it looked fun, not for either of those reasons :)
I don't know about you, but I had a bad experience when I've needed to use a taxi in Beijing! Taxis are ubiquitous, yes, but they won't take you if your destination is not far enough for them, and most of them don't use taxing machines (because you know, there are plenty of tourists around), and prefer just to wait for someone willing to pay ten times the rate that they actually should bill. And there's more - you can't call a taxi in order to come to pick you up even from hotels (which is ridiculous), and most of the places where you might have some certainty that you'll land in a taxi are taxi-stops (often posted near bus-stops), and you also may have to stay in line for one!
Didi kuai che for taxis.
Didi Zhuan che if you want something more like Uber.
The latter allows you to pay electronically from your union pay account, the meter is GPS (just like Uber), so you'll never get ripped off. Beijing taxis drivers are pretty honest as China goes, of course, that is just in the city, out in tourist ghettos it can be much worse.
In regards to point a: I've never really driven in our downtown area enough to experience this problem. I hear a lot of other people complain about it though. I imagine, if I started driving in the downtown area more this would probably get added to my list of complaints.
In regards to point b: I don't drink more than 3 or 4 times a year. So this doesn't really come up for me, but I do agree that this is a factor for a lot of people.
As for not using my phone when moving between places, I don't use mine much during transit either. However, the mental pressure of being completely unable to check it when it pings seriously bothers me. With that being said, I actually spend most of my time on the bus reading books, which is definitely not something I can do while driving. I guess I could amend my post by saying that driving takes away time when I could be doing literally anything else, and, with modern advances in technology, 90% of the things I would be doing otherwise can be done on the bus.
I prefer transit to driving because I prefer walkable communities that I can connect to, rather than places full of parkades and parking meters.
I prefer transit to driving because I understand that a bus can take a hundred cars off the road, which results in smoother traffic and more efficient travel.
I prefer transit to driving because it gives me the opportunity to read a book or have a conversation with my travelling companions without one of us having to focus on the road.
From my perspective, the question isn't 'why do you not own a car?' but 'why do you own a car?' For me and the people I know, who fall everywhere from '20 hours at minimum wage' to 'cashed in on IPO', the default is not to own a car, or to own it and rarely use it. The extra time I would save driving halfway to work would be spent stuck in traffic for the other half. The cost of a lease + insurance is many times more than a transit pass, plus fuel, parking, maintenance, etc. It's just not practical.
Whenever I read someone talking about how 'maybe this new thing is why transit', I look around at Vancouver, which has had amazing transit for a long time, and think 'Why would you not?'
There are many reasons I don't use a car (I own one; I rarely use it). They're all touched on in here. But beyond a shadow of a doubt, the number one reason: fuck. traffic. FUUUUUUUUCK. Traffic.
Traffic infuriates me. It's filled with people who drive unsafely. It's filled with people who drive too fast. It's filled with people who drive too slow. It's filled with people who don't understand left hand vs right hand lanes. It's filled with people who can't read street signs or don't know where they're going. It's filled with pedestrians who think they can dart out between parked cars whenever they feel like it. It's filled with cyclists who ride too aggressively. And, most importantly, it's filled with a billion other cars.
I went on a day trip to Berkeley -> Monterey last Saturday. Google maps said "116 miles, 2 hrs 10 minutes". Door to door it was 4 hours 15 minutes. An average speed of 25 mph. On a fucking freeway rated 70. This is insanity.
Even ignoring the fury, how does anyone plan their life when traffic can swing so wildly. How does anyone get to work on time and not get fired when LOL TRAFFIC YOU'RE NOW AN HOUR LATE.
Public transit might be dirty and smelly and crowded and out of the way. But I also know that, pending someone suicidal, I will always get to work at the same time.
Is traffic that much different everywhere else in the country?
Source: Grew up in fly-over country
I think part of the problem is that the questions they ask ("Why don't millenials want cars?") come with an unstated context: millenials' parents and grandparents did want cars. The question is not so much why millenials behave as they do; it is why different generations have behaved so differently.
Saying, "Because we're sensible, and our parents were idiots," isn't really a good enough explanation. So the questions keep being asked.
It is going to take a long time for public transit in California to beat the efficiency of well planned driving on most occasions besides major events. It would be nice if everywhere had trains as punctual and ubiquitous as Japan!
Traffic is not as bad as the worst places: you can drive most places in town within about a half-hour. But when you have to run a couple of errands in the car-centric suburbs, that time piles up quickly. Try to run 2-3 errands in the suburbs and you're spending hours driving. It's horrible.
Of course, we have no light rail and the buses are really slow. Cycling is the main viable alternative.
This is not true. In my experience BART keeps to schedule pretty well but buses don't. Back when I had the option of a walking commute in Berkeley I chose that option because my walking speed was more consistent than the buses. Also, it was not that much slower, and I didn't risk running into people I knew on the bus and finding myself stuck in awkward conversations with them.
Also, I live in Atlanta now, and I'm finding that "there was traffic" is a totally fine excuse to be late.
Car-sharing isn't going to work well, in this scenario, because there'll be a bum-rush for the car-share pool at the same times in the morning and afternoon. Maybe we'll have to go back to using school busses? -gasp- ;)
Owning a car is very expensive and out of reach of fair number of people. Even driving a modest economy car, between parking ($150 monthly downtown in my city) , my car loan ($200 mo.) and good insurance ($200ish mo.) + gas ($60ish) means I'm out $600+ of income. That's $7200 yearly without maintenance. That's as much as many people's rent in many places. I'm privileged enough that I can afford this without seriously impacting my lifestyle, and I have a sinking suspicion that if more millennials could, they'd also be car owners/drivers. With the average income per person, at $26,000, owning car is nearly out of reach.
However, I suppose I shouldn't look the gift horse in the mouth. Giving more mass transit options for work is certainly a good thing.
Parking is cheap, free in many cities/suburbs, there is little tax on purchase (a $40k car in Beijing costs $20k in the USA, and lets not get to Singapore), and wow...gas.
At 34, I'm at the upper end of the millennial age range, and I have had a car for the past decade. But I'm paying about $500/month extra rent for the privilege of living close to mass transit, and if it could efficiently get me everywhere I needed to go I would ditch my car in a heartbeat.
Or to put that another way: I would pay extra for the privilege of not owning a car. I suspect that in Vancouver at least, 20 years from now the strongest predictor of car ownership will be "too poor to live close to mass transit".
I'm sure most people on here realize this, but European cities are the opposite of US cities - poor people live in suburbs outside the city, living in the city is desirable.
If you think the debate over gentrification is interesting now, just imagine what it will look like in US cities where this flip-flop takes place.
I live in the Twin Cities, MN, and see this happening to Minneapolis-St Paul as they seem to be going through this right now
Anyhow, we believe in it: We just bought a house a few blocks from a future train stop. If there's a possibility that our present vehicle is the last one we buy, I'd be very happy about that.
I would much rather live in a place where I don't have to drive anywhere. Sitting in traffic is pretty soul-crushing.
Bucharest (Romania's capital) was a typical European city like that you're describing, but it was heavily reshaped (especially in the 1977 quake event) and is continuously worked on both in access infrastructure (extending and improving) and real estate development, and they somehow manage to keep it both automobile friendly and convenient for the the rest. The automobile possession here gets more of a whim than a necessity, as the public transportation covers literally everything, even at night! This isn't that much a mater of how things tend to fit naturally, as it is cultural. I get the impression that in USA they go lengths to keep things in a state where you have to need a car.
It's probably moot for me as I currently work in the suburbs (West Bloomington) but even if I did work downtown or in north loop with the rest of the SV wannabes I doubt very much that city living would be a compelling option when compared with a suburb house or apartment nearby a light rail stop.
When I moved to a big city for the first time, I brought my car with me. The second time I moved to a big city, I left it behind. Cars are nice when the weather or lame, or when you need to go somewhere not serviced by transit, or need to transport something large, or want to go on a road trip somewhere. However, these uses constitute a VERY small portion of trips.
Whenever I dish out $6/hr for parking, or $X00 - $XX00 dollars for maintenance, it frustrates me and reminds me that cars are more expensive than I prefer. Transit means I don't have to pay attention to the road when going places and don't worry about all of the expenses/car headaches.
That said, there are some times when car ownership is nice, and I love driving... but I drive stick, so if people can get around with public transit just fine, I see little reason for people to be eager car owners. Car ownership is quickly becoming a relic for people who care to live close to everything, and can do without cars.
I'm a suburban commuter myself, and though there is a whiff of pretension to the idea of "courting" milennials, I think it's a completely rational preference.
That said, if you live in a city and get a convenient job in walking distance or on a convenient mass transit line, it's probably worth considering that this state of affairs probably won't last if you switch jobs because it's not the norm.
One you decide it's important to you to not waste hours in traffic all the time, it's easier to organize your life to facilitate that. It's not even all work, being about to run errands near your home is important too.
Not so sure. For me it certainly was a lifestyle choice - I opted to rather spend more on rent and be within walking distance of well...pretty much everything I need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
Ignoring the implementation detail of the street car form, the fundamental idea of designing a suburb neighbourhood around major transit nodes, with some light commercial at the core stops makes tons of sense. Walk or bike 5-15 minutes to the transit node, get on transit, get to town. No car necessary.
However that quite geographically large sprawl is mostly channeled along five main corridors [1], with a fairly fast commuter-rail system serving as the backbone of each corridor. That allows having large expanses of single-family homes, but still good transit access.
I think millennials probably won't adopt their parents' car-based solutions to these problems, but what they do choose will be different than what they're choosing now.
Certainly a generation living like man-children for the entirety of our 20s before starting a family will have lasting impacts on our outlook, but I predict that in 5 years we see most millennials transitioning into being the suburban boomers they all hate.
I'm 31, right on the leading edge of millennials and I have been seeing it among people my age for several years now (partially because of the coincidence with economic recovery).
Many cities like Boston, NY and SF are trying to add affordable housing but that seems to be either a few units for very low income people or micro-units that are just a couple hundred square feet. Unless you make a huge amount of money I think most families get pushed to the suburbs to try to find somewhere they can afford to live.
I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle. We need a size of home between the micro-apartment and the 2 million dollar mini mansion.
I'd love to be able to take public transit into Boston from my place in the suburbs but train stations only have a few dozen parking spots and the bus service is limited to the city areas. So I drive for now.
This, however, is primarily a policy choice: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... .
I'd like to see better designed suburbs that combine dense larger housing with public transit to connect the suburb communities with each other and the city they encircle
Me too. But suburbs have all the political veto problems described at the link above, but worse.
This is a good point. Even if we increase public transit, almost all of these plans only improve connectivity between the suburb and downtown. When you need to get from one suburb to another to see a friend from work or school, that can take hours, even if both families are close to transit. Increased options between suburbs is important too.
The bigger problem is schools. Big city public school districts are a total disaster. Though not for any inherent fact of geography, just politics and demographics.
I've done it many times when travelling in Europe (though with one baby). Unless the stroller is overloaded, you can kinda fold it up awkwardly in the event that the carriage is quite full.
I've taken full luggage, a stroller and a baby on the Paris metro in peak hour. Never again!
also consider that it might not be such a great thing for a parent to become a glorified chauffeur for their children. something is out of balance with the suburban lifestyle. there is an awful lot of driving around, with your kids in the backseat, in a big hurry to get to the next place to spend money on some junk for your kid.
It's not always some place to spend money. It can be the park that you're meeting your kid's best friend at, or the natural history museum you go to every day after school, or just your friend's house or the field that your soccer practice meets at. Sure, you can stay in the area within a few miles of your home/school and get around exclusively by bike or walking, but lots of kids and parents want more than that.
One issue I rarely see addressed in these articles is how difficult we've made it to get a driver's license in the US. I started driving when I was 14 (rural midwest roads) and got a license within a month of turning 16. In contrast my cousins (early millenials or very late GenX) couldn't even get permits until they were 15 1/2 and had to drive for nearly 2 years under adult supervision before they could get a license. That has to have some sort of negative impact on the interest or desire to drive.
to getting one in Ireland in 2014 (12 hours of instruction required regardless of your age, must have had a permit (or foreign license) for at least 6 months, and a test with a 40% pass rate where you have to bring a standard transmission vehicle if you want to drive stick legally).
Even after 13 years of driving, those 12 hours of training were actually pretty helpful. Not just for cleaning up bad habits, but for techniques I'd never properly learned in CA, like stick shift starts up steep hills with a stiff clutch. My city driving has improved as well.
If you can't drive or your driving is restricted as a matter of law, would you rather be stuck in suburbia or in a more urban area where mass–transit or cycling is possible?
This is happening to the degree that preschool admissions are now hypercompetitive because so many upper middle class parents want to give their kids the best possible chance to get into a magnet or private elementary school so they can go to a good high school and get into an Ivy League college.
I wonder if part of the reason this is happening is that kids in the suburbs are now allowed to roam and play unsupervised so much less than our generation was that it doesn't seem to make a difference whether they're in the city or the suburbs since they're going to be indoors most of the time anyway. If you're going to supervise all their outdoor time anyway, might as well just take them to the park.
Besides, you can argue that for younger teens the city is much better than the suburbs. Instead of those too young to drive themselves hanging around in bunches and making trouble out of sheer boredom, those groups walk around the (actually interesting) neighborhood, go to the park, take themselves to a movie or poke around in their favorite stores. They can get to their friends' houses without having to pester their parents for a lift, and they don't put themselves at risk getting in a car with a 16-y/o driver and multiple rowdy passengers.
The outer suburbs are pretty much the same: the supposed bucolic safety of the cul-de-sac becomes a deathtrap if you move onto the arterial roads. I've seen plenty of fourteen-year-olds riding dirt bikes without lights on high-speed roads feeding onto the interstate, because how else are they supposed to get anywhere interesting?
In the rare cases when I absolutely need a car, I rent one.
P.S.: I live in Europe.
We're not big cell-phone people either, I just hate being locked in a mobile refrigerator for hours. Not to mention that not having a car (or a second car) is just money in the pocket. We cycle instead, or carpool, use the bus. The bus is not a great option in a mid-sized city, but cycling is fine in inner-ring suburbs and downtown.
I suspect its for economical/space reason and dealing with expensive real estate. Still though it feels opposite to the their "image".
I bet dollars to doughnuts most people who work at big name tech companies in Santa Clara County, and who actually live in Santa Clara County, drive to work.
The project was originally intended to connect Redwood City Caltrain to Union City BART in the East Bay, but the (partial) funding was redirected to the San Jose BART extension. There was no real chance of the project being built before now anyway; rebuilding rail bridges is pretty expensive.
And none of the businesses seemed to be open anytime I was home, as if they just existed to run during NetApp's lunch hour. At least there's a grocery store now.
The zoning laws around Sunnyvale must be terribly strict for it to be so underdeveloped!
Google and Facebook have offices in New York (in the case of Facebook, there's a team available for most any engineering role in the NY office; I can't speak for Google, but I believe Spanner is out of the NY office), so for folks who really want a city lifestyle, this is always an option.
As for Bay Area, the big issue are schools: San Francisco schools operate on a lottery system (with the exception of a single "test school", Lowell), whereas South Bay has excellent public schools available to all those who live within their district boundaries (Cupertino School District, Los-Gatos/Saratoga School District, Los Altos SD, several schools in Fremont area, etc...). So for many, a South Bay location is actually a perk: commuting from South Bay to SF on Caltrain is a major hassle (that is assuming the offices of the company are located to close to Caltrain -- public transportation within SF proper is a nightmare unless you work and live close to BART station) and leaves no time to pick kids up from school/drop them off at school/curricular activities.
I should add that at least Google and Facebook run buses within suburban South Bay as well -- so the worst part of the commute (going North on 101 in the morning, South on 101 in the evening) can be avoided.
I should add there are also people living further in various bedroom communities in East Bay like Albany or Walnut Creek, or San Ramon (which also have good schools) and most of those folks either work for SF-based companies (keep in mind Google does have an SF office as well), or make use of company busses (Google runs busses to SF), or work from home some days a week.
This would also be a huge generalization, but one can also think of the Bay Area as the OSI stack: application/presentation in SF, mid-tier (databases at Oracle, distributed infrastructure at Google and FB) in Peninsula/Northern parts of South Bay, and physical layer (Apple, Cisco, Juniper, Intel, etc...) in Sunnyvale and further south. So for companies that do more systems-level development, there's both network effects (they're hiring people coming from other companies in the area), and the need to somewhat more experienced engineers (who are more likely to have families and to own vs. rent).
(background: lived in South Bay Area since I was 13, worked as an engineer in various South Bay Area software/Internet companies -- both in office parks as well as offices in more walkable downtown areas -- since late teens, including at Facebook in the Menlo Park campus).
And let's face it--at Google or Apple's level, the appropriate point of reference is probably industries like banking and consulting that never moved out of their high-rise urban digs.
It's hard to see why - I see a lot of pretend statistical articles on the subject but nothing validating that this group is actually any sort of cluster.
It's also interesting that when they talk about millennial, commentators are usually not talking about poor people. They mean middle class kids. I guess it's good clickbait for ads because it's a category that could describe anyone with monies children.
A suburb with good train/trolley service would be fairly appealing. I won't pretend to like National City or El Cajon (I don't), but at least Mission Hills is an option. However, Mission Hills hates bicyclists and opposes bike lines, so I'm trying to avoid that area out of principle.
The problem is that you can approach self driving cars in an incremental way, while light rail is extremely expensive upfront.
I don't have time at the moment to go into detail, but look at the Greenlight Proposal in Pinellas County (Florida). It was advertised as a light rail/bus transportation network overhaul, and it was downvoted due to being too expensive (while adding extremely minimal taxes to cover it).
We are on the verge of having self driving electric cars and most of the complaints about suburb life will seem silly.
With robot cars, in the year 2015, the imagination must jump even further, because there is no robot car industry yet; all we have are prototypes. Maybe those prototypes will become real products and maybe they won't; maybe those products will make it through all the non-technical hurdles necessary to make them a success, and maybe they won't.
In any case, the people expecting robot cars to have a significant effect on our transportation infrastructure in a mere ten or fifteen years are being wildly optimistic, and the people who claim that we can stop investing in trains and buses because ubiquitous googlemobiles are just around the corner are... well, I'll be polite and stop talking about them.
Take into account the economic bifurcation of the country, we have no shortage of (wasted) potential really cheap human drivers.
A world where a cab driver is a middle class job is probably too expensive to take a cab everywhere unless you're in the higher upper class. But if there's only 100M jobs for 300M+ hungry people, no problem creating a permanent underclass living in misery to drive the few remaining middle class to work, until their jobs go away too.
The only difference is that the single people in the cars can look at their phone instead of looking at the bumper infant of them.
The four-lane alternative to work has two lanes set aside for parking. In that case, I suspect they'll put light rail down the middle and retain two lanes each side.
I think price and convenience will mean that more people car-pool in automated ride-sharing services too.
More seriously, am I really the only person who can't stare at a phone in stop-and-go traffic without starting to feel motion-sick? Every time the robot car fantasy comes up people talk about how great it will be to sit around reading the whole time, and I just think - no, I'll be sitting there with nothing to do, and that sounds awful.
Are you sure? It seems like it would definitely have a decent impact on traffic in certain situations, like those traffic jams that are only caused by people slowing down too early and speeding up too late, compressing the traffic.
I believe a lot of problems of traffic could be fixed with self-driving cars, especially if they worked together.
Certainly you'll never make certain cities free of traffic congestion, but I think a lot could be done in smaller cities and suburbs.