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they are not part of the american dream. they are the disenfranchised. there is no golden years waiting for them. the car the house the boat, kids and a yard, gone with the wind.
The future of driving: Seeing the back of the car | The Economist This is a nuanced, global piece about the decline of cars among the young. The American car companies are very worried about this, they're focusing advertising and marketing on luring young people back into the car market. Ford has even run ads touting a low car future as a way of getting young folks to buy cars now!
This thread hasn't mentioned bicycling, which is increasing in popularity, especially among the young. In an urban area, with bicycle trips pretty practical up to a distance of about 5 miles, you can get around pretty well, especially if you use the bike in combination with transit.
There's a cultural theory that electronics--phones, tablets, I things etc.--have replaced cars as the whiz bang product of fascination of our time. That seems to be true for young people I know.
I also wouldn't be quick to assume that when (if) today's young people have kids they'll flee to ozzie and harriet land. If schools are the real/perceived issue, there are a lot of efforts to make urban school systems friendlier to these new urban young. There are also a lot of outer city/inner suburban neighborhoods that provide some urban amenities without requiring residents to drive for every trip.
All these publications only speak of a certain segment of society. Trust me, there's plenty of inner-city folks who would love to have cars. Of course they don't want to be car dependent, but they also don't want to be completely PT dependent either.
I guess I should add to my post. I don't mind driving although it is a bit routine if I'm doing the same commute for a while, but I don't pay for the car that I drive. I pay for gas (which is expensive in it of itself) and for oil changes and the like, but I don't make payments on the car nor the insurance. That's all under my parents.
However, I live near Detroit which is ranked as having the highest car insurance in the country. I'm 20 years old with no record on my license driving a 4 door sedan and the cheapest my monthly insurance payment can ever get is around $300 at minimum. If I drove a 2-door car, the rate goes up like by $200 more. I shudder to think what'd happen if I got into an accident. Then I'll have to add in car payments and/or car repairs if it's an older car. Already, I'm looking at a $1000 monthly expenditure. It's hard enough to get jobs that pay above minimum wage ($7.40 in Michigan) so it's like most of my pay check would be to pay for a car to get me to my job. Then I'd have to juggle that between college. Oh, and what a cost college is!
It's literally cheaper to live in an urban community and use public transportation if it's efficient. I don't mind the suburbs and in fact, if I had the money, I wouldn't mind growing up there. But I don't have the money and really, that's the foundation of where I make my decisions. My situation is not an uncommon one with this generation.
I guarantee once they start their family unit, they'll flee back to the burbs. Biking, and riding, and such won't become fun anymore when you have a family. Unless they plan to live like some of those wealthy folks in like Manhattan or something that send their kids on the subways to some private school.
I In fact, I would love to own some land and grow my own food someday in a rural area.
You'll still be buying 90-95% of your food at the supermarket, at higher small town prices, and pretty soon the novelty of the hard work of gardening will wear off.
You have to have a better reason than that to want to live in a rural area.
Agreed. I think some of these publications think 99% of us born after 82' are a bunch walkable city-dwelling Hipsters and Yuppies.
Which publications (or other media) are saying this is what I'm trying to figure out. I'm not saying bchris02 is wrong, but I'd like to see where he gets his info from.
Its because walkable cities usually mean its easier to get around to nightlife, entertainment etc. Plus most young people have lower paying jobs and therefore, driving is a major expense to them. Plus, the words car-centric cities conjours up a image of a sprawled out city-suburb filled with conserative people, cookie-cutter homes and nothing intersting to do.
If you believe the OP's premise I have a bridge to sell you. In fact a couple of them. And you can also buy the cars lined up on them waiting to cross. Take a look at this for example.
Portland is supposed to be one of the bike meccas of the country and it definitely is. But that does not mean all the young people have given up their cars. Not by a long shot. In fact, the many large apartment buildings in crowded neighborhoods going up in the this decade without parking spaces to encourage cyclists discouraging car ownership has been a failure.
In one newspaper interview, a reporter asked ten residents how many owned bikes. Ten said they did. But out of the ten, they also owned eleven cars between them. Although bike riding is up and the use of cars down in some areas, there are still more cars on the road than ever before. One reason could be the cutback in mass transit. But I think people for the most part are just not willing to give up their cars.
Not everyone wants to indulge in downtown entertainment and the like. Many people in Portland for example eschew that type of thing for the outdoor activities that are so great here. For that one needs a car in order to get to the mountains or ocean or the many camp sites. To say that young people all want to be in urban centers before they move to the 'burbs to raise their families is painting an entire group of people with too broad a brush.
BTW, I am 66 years old and have never owned a car so I don't fit the young stereotype the OP describes. I simply like living in cities, taking public transportation everywhere and walking. When I was younger living in Chicago I took mass transit and rode my bike everywhere. After moving to Portland in my mid thirties I gave up the bike and stuck to the bus to get around. But that has always been my preference. There's no hidden agenda here.
Adding to this that all the bike riders are not all young here in Portland by any means. They are of all ages.
What's interesting about this thread is how much fervor some folks have in denying this trend among the young. I posted an article from The Economist, which is a conservative, pro-free market publication which almost always endorses the Conservative Party in Britain. I'm not giving you Green Party literature here. It's seems that it really bothers some of you when young people take a different path from the Sprawl Generation.
By the way, on logical argumentation: You can't simultaneously argue that young people are less car-oriented because they're lower income and argue that it's some kind of yuppie lifestyle affectation.
In 1990 suburban houses in the Twin Cities cost significantly more per square foot than those in the central cities, now the cities are more expensive. This speaks to an indisputable redirection of demand from the suburbs to the cities. I would imagine the same phenomenon is happening in other metros as well.
Because I can't afford a car/car payments/gas. Generation Y has been decimated by the economic practices of our predecessors, and cars are a luxury many of us cannot afford, at least when we live in regions with good public transportation. I already work two jobs to pay back so much debt and bills; what, I need more of that?
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