> "What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits?"
It's hardly surprising that people without the money for cars are of the opinion they aren't so important anyway. Not being able to afford things tends to draw into sharp relief the difference between wants and needs.
And I realize Ford's marketing department can't do much about the slow, grinding recovery and thus are stuck worrying about long-term attitude shifts. But until the demographics show millenials moving to and staying in urban areas where transit is a feasible option, I can't imagine it's legitimately worth fretting over.
If millenials still choose to settle down to raise children in the suburbs, car ownership is pretty much necessary.
The only real threat from lasting attitude change, is that perhaps millenials will vote for more transit projects and subsidies over more car/road projects and subsidies and thus make it more feasible in more areas to not own cars.
> The only real threat from lasting attitude change, is that perhaps millenials will vote for more transit projects and subsidies over more car/road projects and subsidies and thus make it more feasible in more areas to not own cars.
The trend for mass transit is to remove options from travelers, thus making itself less useful to us. As such, it's hardly worth funding. [1]
That's not to say that it must be inherently so. Just that, so long as these projects are typical government projects that are expected to go over-budget and over-deadline with no repercussions, they will be used as a tool for political favors and cronyism, at our expense.
The old-style public transit system used cheap, flexible buses whose routes could be altered overnight to take people from where they were to where they wanted to go. When Denver first built rail, it substituted expensive but glamorous trains for inexpensive buses, but still allowed people to go from where they were–provided they were willing to drive to a park-and-ride station–to where they wanted to go–provided they wanted to go downtown. ...
This has been tried before, of course, most notably in Portland. How well did it work there? In 1980, under the old bus-transit model, transit carried 9.8 percent of Portland-area commuters to work. By 2010, with seven different rail lines and scores of transit-oriented developments, transit carried just 7.1 percent of the region’s commuters to work.
The Portland numbers are pretty much irrelevant without accompanying context. e.g. population growth, sprawl, rail expansion vs average commute distances, funding, etc.
As for the linked arugment: seriously?
People are honestly arguing that Denver should allow the problems of rail in America[1] to be exacerbated rather than addressed [2]???
Should we have built highways that went from suburban stables to urban stables because people liked their horses, owned horses and horses can go more places than cars (absent further roads)?
What kind of logical argument is that?
[1] the old "you can take the train downtown, but then you still need a car to get anywhere".
[2] say, by ensuring there are useful destinations at the other end of the rail line.
Portland's transit problems stem from the fact that most of the region's job growth over the past 20 years has taken place away from downtown. On a given morning, there are almost as many commuters driving to jobs in the west suburbs as driving to jobs in the city. Of course, the light rail doesn't go to where the jobs are in the suburbs. Not without the need to walk considerable distances or transfer to a bus.
most of the region's job growth over the past 20 years has taken place away from downtown
I think that's central to the point of my linked citation.
People stubbornly insist on buying homes where they want to live, rather than where bureaucrats claim they should. For a transit strategy to have any success, it needs to address what people are actually going to do -- or at least not pretend that it is doing so.
I live in Portland and use public transit every day. On every article about Trimet on OregonLive, there are people that cite the same numbers you do, that say that these services are useless and that nobody uses them.
Until you do use them, and you realize that every bus is full, every Max car is standing room only and for as slow as the streetcar is, it is still packed every time. Considering the growth rate in this city, it isn't surprising that numbers look like they're going down.
I complain about the continuously, almost monthly, rising costs of a Trimet pass every month, but $100/mo compared to the $600+ I was paying for insurance and car payments (and not even including maintenance) has allowed me to live a more comfortable lifestyle. Forcing me to get a bike and living in a city that embraces its bicyclists has even made it a more healthy lifestyle as well.
Of course, the die was cast in the 40s, 50s, and 60s for the automobile. It's impossible to build effective mass transit to serve a low density population. But the argument should not be whether or not to build ineffective mass transit layered on top of low density sprawling metro areas, but instead about what are our nation's transit and residential goals in the long term, like next sixty years -- because you eventually have to fix the mess we've made.
Sure, I'm not arguing against the idea itself. My concern is how to approach it without it continuing to fester as a slush bucket for cronyism.
Today, the actual effect is not addressing actual "transit and residential goals". It's to funnel tax dollars to entities favored by the bureaucrats -- return the favor for campaign donations and so on (how else to explain that they've universally cost so much more than we agree to pay, yet they fail so dismally at attracting riders?).
So I believe that we need to find out how the system continues to be corrupted, so that we can go forward with a plan that can be reasonably expected to be successful. Following this pattern just digs us a deeper fiscal hole, without doing very much to address the real goal.
Is there an example of a vote, in the last two decades, for transit projects over roads that has actually led to high density neighborhoods where residents use mass transit to get to their jobs?
The only reason I ask, is because I'm almost finished reading, in The Power Broker, how Robert Moses permanently crippled the NYC metro area and Long Island in particular, forcing them into a lower-density, automobile-centric society, when they would have been better served by mass transit, which he let rot on the vine. I imagine most other metro areas that were expanding at the time followed the same path.
> If millenials still choose to settle down to raise children in the suburbs...
I think that's an open question. Anecdotally, there are an awful lot of young families in my particular urban environment, mine included. Most intend to stay if they can, some give up and decide they "need" a bigger house than they can afford here.
As far as schools, this area is past the point of critical mass where there are enough high-earning, highly-educated families staying that they've driven the school quality up. Plus there is a huge and vibrant community of home schoolers to work with if you want a DIY education.
It's hardly surprising that people without the money for cars are of the opinion they aren't so important anyway. Not being able to afford things tends to draw into sharp relief the difference between wants and needs.
And I realize Ford's marketing department can't do much about the slow, grinding recovery and thus are stuck worrying about long-term attitude shifts. But until the demographics show millenials moving to and staying in urban areas where transit is a feasible option, I can't imagine it's legitimately worth fretting over.
If millenials still choose to settle down to raise children in the suburbs, car ownership is pretty much necessary.
The only real threat from lasting attitude change, is that perhaps millenials will vote for more transit projects and subsidies over more car/road projects and subsidies and thus make it more feasible in more areas to not own cars.