Streetsblog Capitol Hill

As we try to understand why young people are so much less jazzed about driving than previous generations, one possible explanation always comes up: Kids today just love their smart phones.

That is part of it. But the full picture is far more nuanced.

The internet, and the ability to carry it wherever you go, has changed society in so many profound ways it’s no surprise that transportation is among them. A new study by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “A New Direction,” illustrates the myriad ways mobile technology has transformed young people’s relationship with transportation.

Yesterday, we covered the report’s critique of government travel forecasting and its analysis of why young people’s driving rates will probably remain lower than those of previous generations. Technology is one of the biggest reasons. Here’s why:

Constant connectivity. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed at the dinner table or on city sidewalks, people have trouble putting down their phones. It’s not just compulsive Facebook status checking that keeps people glued to their devices. People perform an increasingly broad assortment of tasks on phones: make travel reservations, go through work email, catch up on the news, diagnose children’s ailments — the list is nearly infinite. While car companies are trying heartily to incorporate digital connectivity and social media into their cars, they still need to battle the fact that such technology is dangerously distracting for drivers. Given the option, many young people would rather take transit, where they can use their phones harmlessly, making far better use of their commuting time.

Alternative social spaces. Older adults may think it’s weird when teens would rather text each other than see each other, but hey, the world is a weird place. “A survey by computer networking equipment maker Cisco in 2012 found that two-thirds of college students and young professionals spend at least as much time with friends online as they do in person,” write report authors Phineas Baxandall and Tony Dutzik.

Online shopping. More and more people are making purchases online rather than in stores. Young people are leading the way on that, too. And it can be greener than going to the store yourself.

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At some point over the past few years, a lot of my friends started moving to Silver Spring and Takoma Park and Falls Church. These inner-ring, transit-connected suburbs of DC are still far less compact and walkable than the neighborhoods my friends moved from. So they bought cars.

Why did they do this? They’re entering peak driving age, which is historically between 35 and 54. They have more money than they did in their early 20s. But mostly, they had kids. Of all my friends, I now have exactly one that is still proudly car-free with kids.

In light of the new U.S. PIRG and Frontier Group report on changing driving habits, led by young people, the question arises: Won’t those young people also drive more as they get older?

Reports of diminished interest in driving focus on two groups: baby boomers, the generation that came of age with the automobile and settled in car-dependent suburbs, who are now retiring and driving less; and millennials, the oldest of whom are in their early thirties now and the youngest of whom aren’t even old enough to drive.

Millennials’ shift away from automobile travel is well documented, especially in last year’s report, “Transportation and the New Generation,” by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group. That report found that between 2001 and 2009, annual driving by the 16-to-34 age cohort decreased 23 percent, from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita. The same age group also made 24 percent more trips by bike and 40 percent more trips by public transit.

With more people having children later in life, the vast majority of millennials are still childless. They also haven’t hit their prime earning years, which tend to be prime driving years.

That’s true, said U.S. PIRG’s Phineas Baxandall, co-author of the new report on driving trends, but the expected increase in driving by millennials had already been factored into the reports forecasts — all of which entail far less driving than government models predict. “Our scenarios all assume that millenials will drive more when they get older,” Baxandall told Streetsblog. “The real question isn’t, ‘Will millennials drive more as they get older?’ It’s, ‘Will they drive more than their parents as they get older?’”

There are persuasive reasons to think they won’t.
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The downward slide continues.

Driving activity in America, adjusted for population, has hit a new low since before the economic downturn began. Doug Short, an independent analyst who evaluated data recently released by FHWA, finds that when controlling for population growth, it’s been more than seven years, or 92 months, since American driving activity last ticked up — a major break from historical trends.

The current per-capita reduction in driving has continued much longer than the longest previous period of contraction on record. The oil crisis of the 1970s and the stagflation of the early 1980s produced a decline in driving that took 61 months to reverse itself, again controlling for population growth. The current dip in driving rates has already lasted 50 percent longer than that. The average American is now driving as much as they were in 1995.

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We continue our Streetfacts series by looking at the data on driving in the U.S. Per-capita driving has declined every year since 2005. That’s not a blip, it’s now an 8-year trend.

The reason? Neither the state of the economy nor changes in gas prices offer a satisfactory explanation. Social preferences and demographic shifts seem to be playing a role. Young people today are less likely to own a car or have a driver’s license than young people several years ago. At the same time, America’s growing population of seniors are no longer in their peak driving years.

Whatever the combination of factors, people are riding transit, walking, and bicycling more. Even Motor Trend is examining the shift away from cars.

The upshot is that we need to start making smart transportation investments that align with the new reality: Americans are driving less.

Tony Dutzik is senior policy analyst with Frontier Group, a non-profit public policy think tank.

In 2011, the percentage of 16-to-24 year olds with driver’s licenses dipped to another new low. Just over two-thirds of these young Americans (67 percent) were licensed to drive in 2011, based on the latest licensing data from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and population estimates from the Census Bureau. That’s the lowest percentage since at least 1963.

There has been lots of speculation about why fewer young people are getting driver’s licenses (and why even those who do have them seem to be driving less). Is it the economy, which has been particularly brutal for young people lately? Is it the rising cost of gas? Is it the tougher driver’s licensing laws that make it more expensive and difficult to get a license? Is it because young people are too busy cuddling with their iPhones and iPads to get behind the wheel?

There are arguments to be made for any and all of these explanations. But less often is the question asked: Why does it matter that young people just aren’t that into cars anymore?

One important reason it matters is because today’s young people are tomorrow’s main users of our transportation systems. If the useful life of the transportation infrastructure we build today — the highways, light rail lines, bike lanes and sidewalks — is roughly 40 years, that neatly envelops the peak earning and daily travel years of people currently in their late teens and early twenties. If fewer Millennials are driving, that should influence our choices about how we invest in transportation.

The transportation behaviors of the Millennials are doubly important because there are so many of them. That youth driving should be on the decline now is remarkable since there are now more teenagers and young adults in America than there have been in years. Since 1992, America has gained more than 7.3 million 16-to-24 year olds — an increase of 22 percent — but has added only 1.2 million 16-to-24 year old drivers.

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Everything you think you know about bicycling is wrong. At the National Women’s Bicycling Forum this morning, one message came through: the underrepresentation of women and people of color in cycling isn’t simply due to safety concerns and lack of protected infrastructure, as is often surmised. It’s more complicated than that.

Megan Odett, who founded Kidical Mass DC in April 2011 to encourage family cycling, conducted a survey [PDF] of attitudes about biking with kids. She said she found men worry more about safety than women. In her survey, women ranked distance – and their own physical limitations — as a bigger barrier.

And an audience member who had worked in New York’s Chinatown found that a lack of bike lanes wasn’t what was keeping people from riding. It was the high cost of buying a bike, and the problem of where to park it.

Women represent only one out of four cyclists on the road. If you ask Odett why that might be — or why moms aren’t showing up in huge numbers to bike advocacy meetings — she’ll tell you it’s “because we’re at PTA meetings, or we’re cleaning up after supper.”

So how do you get more moms biking?

1. Identify the most likely prospects. The “low-hanging fruit” for family cycling are people who rode before they have kids, who live in a dense area, and who have moderate or high incomes (because there can be expensive equipment involved), said Odett. People with somewhat flexible schedules or work from home are also likely candidates for cycling. “I think that the core audience for family cycling and ‘mama-biking’ hasn’t really been saturated yet,” Odett said.
2. Saturate the core audience. “You want to looking at saturating this core audience first, and then letting this movement expand out to some of the higher hanging fruit,” Odett said. “That’s going to make it much more ‘normal’ to bike with kids. It’s also going to create a used equipment market, which will help lower the barrier to entry to cycling with children.” And that will expand the demographic base outward from that initial high-income set.
3. Model the benefits. Odett says women are barraged with advertising messages, as are parents – so moms learn to just tune it out. An organized PR campaign aimed at getting moms to bike might not work – but they’ll notice when their friend rides right up to the school’s front doors with a happy, smiling child on the back and everybody else has been stuck in traffic. “When I ride, I think of myself as PR for bicycling,” Odett said. “I’m on this bike because it’s an amazingly fun thing to do with my son.”

These three steps can be a good game plan to expand cycling in any demographic — not just moms.

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Many American cities are proving to be more resilient than suburban areas thanks in part to the shifting preferences of today’s young people. But as USA Today reported in a talked-about article earlier this week, the cohort that has flocked to cities is now reaching a stage of life which, historically, has been more closely associated with suburbia.

The oldest “millennials” — a generation that is larger than the Baby Boomers and many degrees more urban — are turning 30 this year. Many will begin settling down and having children — and their priorities will inevitably change.

Smart cities are doing what they can to prevent these folks from moving “upward and outward” like the generations that came before, USA Today’s Haya El Nasser reports. According to the sources USA Today consulted, this transitioning generation will be looking for good schools and recreational opportunities, but they’ll still want strong transit and walkability — a key advantage of city life over the suburbs.

Places like Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma City are looking at ways to help young families stay. Denver been mapping “day care centers, preschools, grocery stores and jobs” to see how well-served they are by transit. Cities like Charlotte, Anaheim, and Dallas are looking at ways to provide larger, more family-friendly housing choices within smaller urban lots. The school reform movement and the push to improve the quality of public education is another major piece of the puzzle.

There’s a lot at stake for all the residents of these cities, El Nasser points out: “Hanging on to residents as they age, make more money and have kids is a plus for cities because it strengthens and stabilizes the tax base while creating an involved constituency.”

Richard Florida told El Nasser that he expects 60 or 70 percent of millennials to move to the suburbs when they start families, compared to about 95 percent of their predecessors.

What is it with kids today? They just don’t seem to be that interested in driving.

Over the weekend, the LA Times ran a long story about Crenshaw Boulevard, a corridor under transformation by light rail. The story’s subtitle was: “Optimism and anxiety travel along its route, as a revived rail service push and an auto-free younger generation herald changes for one close-knit community.”

Auto-free? In LA? Yes, LA is undergoing major changes from the car-centric sprawl of yesterday. But, auto-free? Here it is from the LA Times:

This is the L.A. intersection in its emerging 21st century incarnation: full of cars, to be sure, but also kids in school uniforms on bikes and a steady stream of pedestrians heading to and from the Expo Line, which opened in April.

The story showcases the enthusiasm over the coming of rail, where even business owners being pushed out of their locations by rail construction are ardent supporters.

Cars used to be an essential element of LA’s youth culture — from cruising in low-riders in the 60s and 70s to an 80s and 90s rap scene centered around big cars — but things are changing. The Times notes that many of the car dealerships are closed or have moved. But more importantly, gasoline no longer runs through the veins of the city’s youth.
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Childless urbanites love to hate the stroller. New Yorker Laura Miller started a blog, “Too Big For Stroller,” dedicated to mocking older children who get around the easy way. Commenters on a Greater Greater Washington story about strollers on buses last year showcased surprising vitriol, saying, “Carry your child, like an able-bodied adult should” and “Pretty lousy parenting, when you could fold the stroller and hold the child” and “Keep those strollers off our buses.” There are internet rants against giant, SUV-style strollers (and, five years ago on Streetsblog, a defense). A New York Times story about stroller rage ended up plumbing deeper emotional issues around unequal social status for breeders and non-breeders.

It’s all well and good to be smug about your smaller footprint when your baby is still small enough to be carried long distances in a sling. But let’s be clear: For car-free, city-dwelling parents, strollers are a necessity — and sometimes even for bigger kids. A four-year-old can certainly walk on his own from the parking lot to the mall, but if your day involves miles of walking as your primary mode of transportation, you’re going to end up carrying that kid a lot.

“For urban parents, the stroller is the equivalent of a suburbanite’s automobile,” said the designers of a transit-compatible stroller a few months ago. ”It is the vehicle that enables mobility and freedom in day-to-day life for families with young children. But navigating metro rail systems with conventional strollers can be exceedingly taxing — and dangerous.”

Indeed, strollers don’t always make things easy. Or rather, cities don’t always make things easy for parents with strollers.

Cobblestone streets, missing curb cuts, crowded buses, revolving doors – and then subways, with their own set of obstacles like turnstiles and stairs – make baby-strolling a major challenge. Sometimes it’s easier just to carry the kid.

Here’s where Stroller-Share would come in. It’s easier for me, and for the other passengers, to carry my seven-month-old daughter Luna to the bus and hold her in my lap while we ride. Taking the stroller on the bus (where policy dictates that strollers be folded) involves quickly taking my child out as the bus pulls up, collapsing it with one hand while holding a wriggling baby with the other (including fastening a latch that is decidedly a two-handed job), and paying my fare with my third hand. Oh yeah, I don’t have a third hand. This is why I’m happy to carry her short distances. And as she gets too big to be carried, she’ll be able to walk short distances.

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