It's not just millennials: As suburban boomers age, more of them won't be able drive due to health reasons. My hope is that self driving cars and better planning can help us rethink things.
Growth is geometric. Whatever has come before is the smaller part of what we will need in future. We're always, constantly rebuilding a non-insignificant amount of the US.
Want to make a long bet? You're counting on enough economic activity in the suburbs to drive the growth needed to revamp urban planning in those areas. With an aging populace in the US, we're hard pressed to pay for our existing obligations, let alone rebuilding communities on a massive scale.
The article weaves a story out of some incremental light rail in areas where it makes sense. But that's a long way from transforming what suburbs (and even sprawling cities) look like on a broad scale. IMO autonomous vehicles that can really replace car ownership are a long way away but mass transit planning is a long time horizon as well. And if/when they do arrive it's almost inevitable that they'll make driving more attractive, not less.
> IMO autonomous vehicles that can really replace car ownership are a long way away but mass transit planning is a long time horizon as well. And if/when they do arrive it's almost inevitable that they'll make driving more attractive, not less.
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).
I'm not sure you are correct - maintaining suburban infrastructure is a net drain on coffers. However, even if you are right, driverless cars would not do much to stem the new wave of urbanization.
The first suburbs were built around the public transportation option of the time, streetcars. It's a shame that most cities threw that away when cars appeared.
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.
This is more or less how Copenhagen is built. It's most famous for the high degree of biking in the city (~50% of people living in the city proper commute by bike), but if you take the metro area as a whole, it's surprisingly sprawling. Of 1.5m total people, only about 500k live in the city, and the other 1m live in the suburbs, which spread out to a surprisingly large radius considering that it's not that large of a population (the outer suburbs are about 40-50km from downtown).
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.
Dallas has a very small streetcar line. It's extremely useful for getting to downtown from uptown. If I worked in downtown I would use it every day,as many do.
It's really interesting to see companies like Apple and Google double-down on faceless suburban office parks while the rest of the country is moving past them.
It's very hard to find the kind of space they need anywhere else. And while working at Google I get the sense that they would prefer more mixed use, higher-density development near their headquarters, but local city planning officials make that almost impossible.
Then you would be mistaken. Google isn't stupid, they know huge swathes of their employee base want to live close to work and be in walkable neighborhoods. Mountain View isn't like most American towns, they're already overflowing with great tech jobs, so the fact that Google wants something doesn't really faze them.
That's definitely true, but I wonder why Google is so tied to MV specifically, given that MV is not particularly accommodating of them? San Jose has been fairly open to high-rise development (within the constraints posed by SJC landing paths), and is not far away.
Because Google already has something like 30K-40K people working in Mountain View. It is opening offices outside of MV, like in Sunnyvale, but physical proximity to the rest of campus is very important for almost all teams. Even the SF office feels like a satellite.
I remember taking the light rail everyday in North Sunnyvale on Java Drive a few years ago, and wondered why companies like Google, Facebook, etc didn't move over there-there were so many vacant buildings, all next to VTA light rail. Apple's campus has mediocre bus service (VTA 55), Google's has practically none I can think of (piss poor location for transit) and FB is banking on the unicorn-like hope of revitalizing Redwood Junction and building a Caltrain spur.
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.
Has there been any actual public discussion about revitalizing Redwood Junction? I mean, there are literally train tracks running from the Redwood City Caltrain all the way to Facebook. Curious what the main obstacles are.
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.
Here's the one big building that I always passed, and was always vacant. I never saw why FB or Goog couldn't buy this and the surrounding buildings, and tear down some of the lower buildings and build taller ones. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sunnyvale,+CA+94089/@37.41...
That are has light rail that runs by some offices but fails all other tests mentioned in the article. It is not close to housing, has no amenities in walking distance, is not close to errands, etc. And VTA light rail is extremely slow and infrequent, and unreliable.
Having to live there one summer for an internship, I was amazed at VTA light rail's route map - it seems to go to MV at one end, then a bunch of anonymous parking lots and not a single interesting place.
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).
I think you have a somewhat skewed sense of what the "rest of the country" is doing. There is an overall urbanization trend in the US but I'm not at all sure that companies are especially shifting their offices from office parks to downtown locations. Furthermore, the vast majority of US cities are not particularly amenable to a walking lifestyle. Many are sprawling and have fairly limited public transportation options.
Downtown doesn't necessarily mean in the core city. What's happening dramatically here in DC is redevelopment around the suburban Metro stations.
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.
There are examples. DC is one. The development centered in the Kendall Square area of Cambridge is another. However, I'm not sure that most cities have the mass transit infrastructure to allow people to commute via mass transit out of the city. Some tech companies have established city offices but they're usually either startups or they're satellite offices.
Yep. Since mid-sized cities are so much smaller than a place like New York or Chicago, the inner-ring suburbs may be the same size geographically as a metropolitan downtown. It's the best of both worlds for cycling: similar route distances but on much quieter roads, for improved cyclability. You end up with most of the amenities of both the downtown and the burbs.
I'd argue that the ideal of not owning car is more tethered to the lack of medium-to-high paying jobs for a huge swath of the population in the United States. I find the idea of millennials not driving simply due to aspiration sets a little nauseating, as depending on how you're slicing the age cut off, I'm part of "this generation".
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.
I'm always surprised how much cheaper it is to own/use a car in the states vs. almost every other country in the world. Even someone on minimum wage can (and often does) own one (if just used).
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.
As I've mentioned in another post around here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297375 ), it seems to be a cultural thing where car ownership is indeed strongly encouraged in the USA. You shred a little bit more light on it.
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.
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".
>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
The Waterloo region is in the midst of this transition: a huge LRT project on the central transit corridor, along with billions in ritzy new condo developments are shooting up, plus refurbished lofts and such. But a lot of the street-level changes are very much in progress: the main drag is this odd mix of upscale restaurants and yoga studios tucked in between pawn shops, tattoo parlors, and dumpy takeout counters.
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.
Unless mass transit were to become more convenient than point to point transportation via automobiles I can't see this happening. Those who can afford it will almost always value the convenience and privacy allotted by automobiles. In Europe, the cities were originally built and designed long before automobiles, trains, and streetcars and the resulting layout results in a denser environments where mass transit works better.
You're overestimating how convenient an automobile really is. I made the mistake of taking a job 25 miles away from where I lived, and the resulting hour and a half commute in stop and go traffic was a killer.
I would much rather live in a place where I don't have to drive anywhere. Sitting in traffic is pretty soul-crushing.
"In Europe, the cities were originally built and designed long before automobiles, trains, and streetcars and the resulting layout results in a denser environments where mass transit works better."
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.
This is the big problem in Portland OR and San Francisco -- they can't build housing fast enough in the inner city, and it's pricing out everyone but the rich.
I'd define anything inside of Caesar Chavez (39th) on the east side to be inner city. The property value spike seems to correspond to the areas where biking is as fast or faster than driving to get downtown.
Light rail runs quite far into the suburbs these days, and that's going to increase when the red line gets built out.
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.
As a young(-er) millennial, i'm conflicted. I grew up in a town where drivers ed was free through highschool--everyone had a car. everyone. public transit isn't good enough except for those legitimately, objectively poor (most highschool kids have jobs and virtually no expenses though, so this is not them).
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 tend to agree with this sentiment, nearly all of the people in this age range that I know work in low paying jobs and cannot afford the traditional lifestyle. The article tries to claim they are "highly educated" but most have degrees that were not challenging and do not lead to value creation.
On the other hand, you're talking about spending thousands of dollars on something that's idle %95 of the day, and is often patently awful to use (rush hour traffic). Being able to walk to work probably portends being able to walk to grocery stores, restaurants, a downtown... which a lot of more people find preferable and more healthful than a car-dependent life. And suburbs are often aesthetically dull (McMansions and cookie-cutter shopping malls) compared even to suburbs with a walkable downtown.
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.
It is and it might have been mine once upon a time. I actually could take mass transit to my first full-time job although I rarely did as it took much longer and I had free or cheap parking. And when I first moved to the area where I now live, I lived out by the office mostly because I didn't want a close to an hour commute.
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.
I cycle more than use mass transit. But, having switched jobs a couple times, this is less a big problem than you might imagine.
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.
>I find the idea of millennials not driving simply due to aspiration sets a little nauseating
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.
>> Researchers say they’re intrigued that millennials’ aversion to driving and owning a car has endured even since the recession ended.
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.
White, black or otherwise, you are quite susceptible to the tyranny of the police state [1]. The young man in that link was murdered in cold blood because he pissed off a cop. It was premeditated. The cop is still working actively on the force with zero repercussions.
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].
I'm sorry but this is just ridiculous on its face.
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.
The only time I ever interact with someone who has a gun is if I get pulled over while driving. Sure the risk is low, but the threat exists on every interaction, and is a big incentive for me to find ways to avoid driving.
If you live in a state that has concealed-carry laws, then you are likely wrong about your comment that "the only time" you interact with people with guns.
Even in those states it's not that common for people to actually carry guns, at least in cities. I lived for years in Houston, and it was very uncommon, even among people who had the license, in part because it greatly restricts where you can legally go. You can't enter any establishments that sell alcohol, post offices, educational institutions, most hospitals, sporting events, etc. Private property owners can also exclude weapons by posting a notice at the entrance. So you have to be very careful about how to plan your day if you're carrying.
The firearms are concealed, sure, but you can still talk to people. :) I do know a reasonable number of people who have concealed-carry permits, and none of them carry a gun regularly, if they're telling the truth, because it's too much of a hassle and they don't normally feel a need to. They got the permit so they can, but it doesn't obligate them to actually do so. My guess (but it's a guess) extrapolating from that is that only a small fraction of permit holders actually carry at any given time. But it would be nice to have a more solid estimate, I agree. The number of permit holders itself is about 2% of the population, but I haven't found an estimate of the utilization rate.
DC and Maryland (where I work and live respectively) have the most restrictive concealed carry laws in the country, ones that are probably unconstitutional. Illinois, where I lived before that, was the last state to enact a concealed carry law, forced by a court order after I moved out.
Minnesota was second to last, I like to think that being slow to adopt the law also means that the aggregate rate of people carrying concealed weapons is lower, or will at least take longer to reach the levels of southern states.
This unfortunate piece of legislation set back federally-mandated interstate permit reciprocity untold amounts of time.
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?
You can't kill people with a marriage license. Driving, although very dangerous, serves a purpose other than killing people. Although I'm not sure I agree with interstate reciprocity for driving licenses-- a Texan or southern California driver plopped onto a North Dakota road in the middle of winter sounds more dangerous to the public than him having a concealed gun.
When someone says, "The threat is low," I think using "phobia" to refer to their recognition that the threat does exist is ridiculous.
(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.)
Whenever someone raises these issues, there sure is someone like you putting them down by using the argument "but most of the cops are good guys, see? no problem, move along."
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 don't know why you're being down-voted for this. I wanted to stretch it further, to "there are still good [pick your choice] in there, see? no problem, move along" as a ridiculous apology that may pop up even if 99% would be in fact bad/corrupt!
The Justice Department report on the Ferguson PD is ample evidence that, there are plenty of routine traffic stops are racially biased and seriously unjust, even if the person just gets a ticket and is waved on.
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.
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."
I was born in 1983, so that puts me at the leading edge of what I think most people classify as millennials, but honestly what you're saying doesn't resonate strongly with me. I can (and have recently) lived without a car, but not for any of the reasons you cite. Instead it comes down to (a) parking is a pain in the ass in downtown Seattle and (b) if I drive somewhere, I avoid drinking while I'm there, so driving is a no-go for shows, parties, or even most evenings out with friends. Both of these are solved pretty thoroughly by Uber and (rarely) public transit. I don't tend to use my phone when I'm moving between places unless I'm running late or someone pings me; I'm much more likely to sit back and just watch the world go by.
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 :)
75 here. The first thing I did when moving to the U district at UW was get rid of my car, it is just annoying to have one there. I've had a car since, but prefered biking or public transit, and now I'm completely carless in Beijing where parking is sh*t and taxis are ubiquitous. Oddly enough, all my chinese colleagues have cars anyways since it is a precondition (along with owning an apartment) to getting married....
"I'm completely carless in Beijing where ... taxis are ubiquitous."
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 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.
Thanks, I'll keep in mind, although I don't know how much will change for those like me (I was in a tourist-related activity having to crawl in tourist ghettos). I hope my next experience with Beijing taxis will be better.
In any case, the apps aren't very useful if you don't speak chinese (a problem for some visitors). They do make life tolerable in Beijing for those of us who live here.
I was born in 1987 and I didn't think of myself as a millenial until someone told me a month ago what the definition was. I'm still not sure if I agree that my behavior matches up as closely with the behavior of the people born in the 90's as the demographics people would like.
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 owning a car is vastly more expensive
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?'
Every time I see one of these articles, I get confused. I have to wonder what mysterious world they live in.
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?
Corollary: fuck parking. It's not as bad in the East Bay, but I've easily spent one minute trolling around in the city searching for parking for every two spent stuck on the 880.
I'd imagine traffic variation increases drastically with higher population densities. It's really not much of a problem in rural areas or smaller cities.
> Every time I see one of these articles, I get confused. I have to wonder what mysterious world they live in.
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.
Yes, traffic is far different outside of the most congested cities. I live in a "city" of 250k with about 1.2M including suburbs and surrounding areas. Bad traffic might add 20 minutes to your commute.
Check Google Maps right before or when you leave for your trip. The Navigation app is nice, but you could always just hop on your computer right when as you leave or check a while before you leave too. Just figure out the times when you aren't going with traffic. In general that is towards SF evening and away from SF in the morning. Also aim for off hours (9am-Noon, 1pm-3pm, night time). Socal traffic can be exponentially worse and probably not nearly as predictable (haven't lived there but have heard stories).
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!
In a mid-sized American city, I prefer to cycle since downtown and the inner-ring suburbs have 15-20 minute bicycle trips. My wife and I split a car.
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.
Unfortunately, cycling gets you sweated and crumpled, and that makes itself a non-starter for a lot of jobs, unless at the destination you have access to showers and a change of clothes. Cycling is however an option for many other mobility needs.
But I also know that, pending someone suicidal, I will always get to work at the same time.
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.
Most of the millenials I'm friends with try to not own a car themselves. The whole leaning on the friend with a car thing seems to be enduring past college for this generation. I imagine this will work pretty well for most people until they have a kid. Not sure where it'll go then.
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- ;)
It will be interesting to see how millennials preferences change once they have kids. I lived for a few years in a large city without a car, and loved it. However, once you have kids, things change. Kids often have lots of accessories that you don't want to be dragging around with you everywhere (stroller, diaper bag, toys, books, etc). A car is a great place to store those. Kids also result in more multi-stop trips that aren't necessarily on the Metro lines.
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.
Yes. It always seems like these analyses of millennials don't account for our delay in starting a family compared to past generations.
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).
It's not just he car... most of these cities are not affordable to live in when you have kids. A 1 or 2 bedroom is fine for a young & single worker or a young couple. But bigger apartments have been converted into dorm style living in many cases since rents have shot through the roof.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
When my wife and I lived in the NYC suburbs with our infant, we never drove my car. Who wants to wake a sleeping baby to get her in and out of a car seat when you can just walk into the train with her stroller? But in New York, even in the suburbs, you can get everywhere you need to go on the train.
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.
Many public transport options have rules against open strollers. It'd be a pretty big pain to take sleeping baby out, fold up stroller, then clamber onto a bus. I guess a subway would be different, but still probably has the same rule somewhere.
Open strollers are okay I'm Chicago, both on trains and buses. They're okay I'm the DC Metro, NYC subway, and Metro North. They're ok on the DC circulator but not DC buses.
I'll keep an eye out for those rules - wasn't aware. About to visit the US for 8 weeks with a toddler and a baby, so we have our work cut out for us getting around.
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!
Extensive big city stroller experience here. The only circumstance when I have been asked to fold up the stroller was busses, and that's pretty universal. Light rail, subway, regional rail trains, etc. were all fine with it, and if you take any Amtrak, pay for a Red Cap to get you on early and seat you in one of the wheelchair seats so that you can leave the stroller open in front of you.
humans have been dealing with babies since long before the invention of cars. maybe its not such a good thing that we haul around so much child-paraphernalia that we can't even carry it without a freight wagon.
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.
Humans also had lots more kids and invested less in each one because they died frequently. When we only have 1-3 kids rather than 6-10 (of which 4 live to adulthood), it makes sense to put more energy into improving the ability of each one.
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.
Most of my Generation–X friends surprisingly stayed in their respective cities on having kids (almost all have had kids in their late 30s or early 40s). Combination of improved schools in NYC, improved living conditions, desire to not spend hours commuting, or to live in a walkable neighborhood. Even know a couple who moved to lower Manhattan from suburban Chicago (Naperville) entirely over walkability + livability vs. long commute times.
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.
It's funny that you bring up licensing being hard to get; sometimes I wonder if we're not actually (still) too lenient in who we give drivers licenses to. Maybe it's just that I'm past the point where my pre-frontal cortex is fully developed, but I can't imagine that continuing to tighten the training and requirements needed to get a license is a bad thing (and this is coming from someone who really enjoys his cars).
I tend to agree. It was interesting comparing the experience of getting a license in California in 2001:
very few restrictions if you were 18, which I was,
a laughably easy practical test with no training required,
no waiting period after getting a permit - you could take the test the same day if there was a slot available;
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.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing (that I survived my teen driving years is entirely out of luck) but when we've built up a culture (suburbia) entirely dependent on being able to drive from point to point, we can't be surprised that making it more difficult to drive turns teens and 20 somethings off from staying in that culture.
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?
I'm seeing the same among my Gen X and Millennial friends. Unlike most of our parents, we're staying in the city to raise kids despite having the option of moving to the burbs. The sidewalks in my neighborhood are choked with strollers on weekends. And apparently little league and soccer leagues are turning away a large portion of families who want to register and still having trouble finding enough fields for all their teams to play.
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.
Yep, people always talked about how the small town was "a great place for raising kids", except that is was so unimaginably boring that teenagers really had nothing much to do but a bunch of drugs and sex.
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?
Millenial here. I have a kindergarten and a school (although I don't need it yet) in a walking distance. You may assume that that is a by-accident result, but it isn't! When it was the time to look a new place to stay in, having near-by a kindergarten, a school, a pharmacy store, a green park, and a lot of other smaller things were deemed as important. It's also important to understand that these things won't happen if are not asked for.
In the rare cases when I absolutely need a car, I rent one.
My sister ('81) and I ('79) both have 1 kid; I'm in a one-car household. Everyone told my sister she'd have to buy a car b/c of the baby, but she never has.
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 assume he meant in the sense of flying personal aircraft as helicopters were widely used in the 1950s. But I agree with your broader point. A lot of people aren't distinguishing the yawning distance between being able to operate on the highway with a backup driver ready to take over control and being able to operate just about anyplace, handle changes that aren't on a map, in any kind of weather, etc. even if there isn't a human inside the vehicle. I watched a recent video with John Leonard speaking at CMU and he had some interesting video showing some of the things he had to handle over the course of just a couple of weeks commuting. (Cops directing traffic around an accident, snow, left hand turn into heavy traffic, sun glare that made it hard to see a pedestrian or a light.) He makes the case that these are really hard problems that aren't anywhere close to being solved.
I was clearly too terse; the point I had in mind was that those Popular Science handwavings about the glories of the imminent personal-aviation future were actually more realistic than the current crop of handwavings about the glories of the imminent robot car future, because working commercially-available helicopters actually existed during the '50s-era personal-aviation hype. The engineering problems had been solved, so the leap of imagination only had to cross the safety issues and regulatory challenges - which, of course, ultimately proved intractable.
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.
I fully agree. We're probably pretty close to having a lot of essentially convenience autopilot functions--however we decide to allow those to be phased in. (And however they're actually used.) But the "significant effects" require something more along the lines of robo-Uber and that's multiple decades out. It's worth noting that we already have "self-driving" cars. They just have organic computers as drivers. And you see quite a few of them--especially in Asian cities where there's a large wage gap.
I'm not sure that self driving cars will solve the expense problem. Cars are incredibly expensive to buy, insure, drive and maintain. Sure self driving cabs will make some dent in the expense, but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week.
"but I'm not sure it will be cheap enough to make sense taking a self-driving cab to work five days a week."
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.
Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion. If the region is completely car-centric in its design, with a weak public transit system, you'll still have traffic jams and lengthly commutes.
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.
One thing that might help is a significant reduction in street parking. The two-lane road (one each direction) I take to work has parking each side. Each may become another lane for cars or bike lanes once the need for parking starts to be eliminated.
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.
I'm not a fan of bumper infants, personally - prefer to keep the squishy mini-humans inside the car - but I can understand why some people might adopt that solution... ;-)
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.
> Self driving electric cars will have little effect on traffic congestion.
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.
Actually, I think the biggest market will be china, where mega cities like Beijing are incredibly congested without much more room to build anymore roads. The gov might just say: self-driving only inside the 5th ring, and the traffic would be much much better, even it just applied to limited access ring roads (though I bet they would do arterials also).
For what it's worth, I'm moving from Europe to a very car-dependent city (San Diego) and desperately trying to find a neighborhood where I and my wife will at least not need _two_ cars, and ideally none. It's a hell of a sprawling city. Bankers Hill or Little Italy seem like good choices but the jets are damned loud.
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.
For places like San Diego (sprawled and in a climate without snow), in the worst case you can opt for a motorbike or a scooter. That will give you mobility and avoid some of the car's drawbacks. It would be better if you won't have to own any transport though.
I suspect we're going to wind up as a 1 cheap car (for long out of town trips) + 1 electric bicycle household. I can deal with that. Even if we're near the trolley, it barely goes anywhere. Alternately I might see how life is relying on car2go and then decide whether I really need to own a vehicle. I really, really don't miss having a car.
My whole line of thought on this subject changed when we decided to have a child. I am/was an enthusiastic user of public transportation, but the idea of trying to have a baby and not be able to get around on precisely my own terms (that is, on my own schedule, and with the burden of stuff my little family requires to be clean and comfortable) seemed absurd to me and now, though I still take the train to/from work every day, the idea of not having a car seems untenable.
The alternative of car ownership is not necessarily the reliance on public transportation. Having no need for public transportation (in the context of parenting), like having close-by all that you'd need is even better than having a car.
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.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadThe 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).
http://www.psta.net/plansandreports.php
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Plan
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.
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.
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- ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.