And for good measure, we gutted traditional urban centres with a double-whammy of zoning laws and infrastructure rot.

What “gutted” the inner cities was a combination of the growing affluence of post-WWII America in the 50’s and desegregation and white flight to the suburbs in the 60’s and 70’s. That’s why many Southern cities, in particular (I’m thinking of Charlotte, NC, where I lived from 1996 – 98) have an office filled “urban core”, a decaying and poverty ridden “inner ring” and are surrounded by an “outer ring” of affluent suburbs. As the wealthier people move out of the city, they take the tax base with them.

This, of course, was also helped out by the availability of cheap gasoline that made commuting from the outer ring into the urban core a sensible thing to do.

That says nothing about job growth or economic growth. It only proves that these cities ALREADY have a high concentration of people with college degress, which I did not dispute.

What you are saying is similar to the defense that GM fanboys have offered over the past few years:

“GM sells more vehicles than anybody else, so they must be in good shape!”

Never mind the trends in market share and sales, the cost disadvantages and the cultural problems that prevented GM from making the best use of its resources.

Nowhere does what you have posted prove incorrect the key facts in my previous post.

carlos.negros: “Obama carried white college graduates. Moreover, his margins were quite spectacular in a number of these states. He carried white college graduates by 11 points in California, 10 points in Delaware, 30 points in Hawaii, 24 points in Maine, 26 points in Massachusetts, 13 points in Minnesota, 18 points in New Hampshire, 15 points in New York, 28 points in Oregon, 49 points in Vermont, 26 points in Washington and 12 points in Wisconsin.”

You’ve switched tracks. Originally you said that young people are more likely to “self identify” as Democratic. This above post only shows that they voted for one particular candidate in a recent election.

People who identify themselves as independents usually end up voting for one of the two mainstream candidates in the final election. Those choices are basically “Republican” and “Democrat.”

(Plus, in many states, to vote in the primary, they had to register with a particular party, as people are only allowed to vote for the candidates of their own party. This encouraged many people to switch party registration. This is what happened in Pennsylvania.)

Obama ran the better campaign in 2008, so he got the majority of votes among younger people, who are less likely to identify with either major party.

Here is an article from The Wall Street Journal on party registration trends since the 2008 election:

In the months since Barack Obama won the presidency, independent voters have rocketed to their highest number on record. Meanwhile, the ranks of Republicans and Democrats have thinned dramatically.

On virtually every policy issue, independents are situated between increasingly polarized Democrats and Republicans. They more accurately reflect centrist national attitudes than the 11% of Americans who describe themselves as liberal Democrats or the 15% who call themselves conservative Republicans.

Hardly seems like a major realignment in favor of the Democrats is in the making (although it hardly seems like the Republicans are in line for a resurgence, either).

carlos.negros: “If you’re about graduate and are worried about finding a job in an overcrowded market, moving to a less-popular city may mean your skills are in higher demand. But for those who want to follow their fellow classmates, here are the top 10 cities this spring among college students looking to find a job:

1. New York, NY
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Boston, MA
5. San Francisco, CA
6. Chicago, IL
7. Denver, CO
8. Seattle, WA
9. Atlanta, GA
10. San Diego, CA”

Nowhere does this prove incorrect what I posted about where job growth has been occurring over the past decade.

This link does say that people want to go to certain cities…it doesn’t prove that they are successful in their job search. Nor does it prove that all of those cities are more successful at generating new jobs for those young people.

And please note that “wanting to go to a city” and actually doing it are also two different things.

Many people with college degrees go to New York City and end up working as a sales clerk at Macy’s or a waiter instead of working as an accountant or public relations executive.

Of course, that isn’t helping their standard of living.

Now, I have no doubt that living in New York City is more glamorous than living, in, say, a suburb of Kansas City or Dallas, let alone Harrisburg.

And working as a waiter or other low-responsbility job and spending nights hanging out at clubs and hitting on members of the opposite (or same) sex seems more exiciting that doing yardwork, balancing a checkbook or going to bed early because there is an early morning meeting.

Of course, that lifestyle doesn’t look as appealing at 35 as it did at 25, and seems positively pathetic by 45.

But that doesn’t prove that young people will still want to live like that when they are 35 or 40. Plus, many people are happy to trade glamour for more tangible assets like a house, a car, good schools and quiet neighborhoods.

They just aren’t the subjects of an HBO series, so they aren’t as visible.

carlos.negros: Geeber, you were wrong before the election, and you are wrong again. Keep trying.

You must be thinking of some other poster. I never said that Obama was destined to lose the 2008 election. I have pointed out that, in many cases, the emporer has little or no clothing, and he has continued many Bush policies since he assumed the Oval Office. His appointees have hardly been scandal-free (tax-dodging seems to be a particular problem, which is interesting considering that they are part of the the party that usually advocates higher taxes).

Judging the criticism President Obama has received from some on the left on certain subjects, that view is hardly incorrect.

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/03_metro_demographic_trends.aspx

“Obama carried white college graduates. Moreover, his margins were quite spectacular in a number of these states. He carried white college graduates by 11 points in California, 10 points in Delaware, 30 points in Hawaii, 24 points in Maine, 26 points in Massachusetts, 13 points in Minnesota, 18 points in New Hampshire, 15 points in New York, 28 points in Oregon, 49 points in Vermont, 26 points in Washington and 12 points in Wisconsin.”

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/pdf/progressive_america.pdf

“If you’re about graduate and are worried about finding a job in an overcrowded market, moving to a less-popular city may mean your skills are in higher demand. But for those who want to follow their fellow classmates, here are the top 10 cities this spring among college students looking to find a job:

1. New York, NY
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Boston, MA
5. San Francisco, CA
6. Chicago, IL
7. Denver, CO
8. Seattle, WA
9. Atlanta, GA
10. San Diego, CA”

http://www.careercast.com/jobs/content/ten-best-cities-college-graduates-jobs-rated

All of the above cities, except San Diego, have good or growing mass transit.

Geeber, you were wrong before the election, and you are wrong again. Keep trying.

We designed, for years, communities that benefited the automakers, city tax departments and developers—everyone except the people who’d actually have to live in them. Then we spent a lot of time and effort convincing people that this lifestyle wasn’t just the ideal, but the norm.

And for good measure, we gutted traditional urban centres with a double-whammy of zoning laws and infrastructure rot.

Totally agree that the root of the problem is poor (or non-existent) urban planning. Europeans have been living in large cities without cars for centuries, and even today’s car-owning Euros usually only take it once a month or so on a big shopping excursion–typically a trip to the Costco and big-box equivalents, which are almost always located out in the suburbs. Daily necessities, on the other hand, are purchased daily … with the attendant benefits of freshness and serendipity. The image of a French salaryman walking home from work with a briefcase in one hand and a baguette in the other is not just a quaint stereotype.

It’s not so much that people are living without cars, it’s more that for those of us who are older, that first car was a big deal (I lived a fairly middle class life and until my parents divorced in 1978 we never had more than 1 car. And that was pretty much the norm in our suburban neighborhood – 2 car families were the exception, not the rule, even when both parents worked.)

Fast forward to today – the longevity of modern cars means that there are plenty of cheap used cars out there.

Try this sometime: Imagine you are a kid with a thousand bucks burning a hole in his pocket (the equivalent in 1979 dollars – 1979 chosen arbitrarily as that was the year I got my first car – would probably be something like $400.)

Now go onto Craigslist and see how many cars in decent running condition you can buy for that little cash.

Back in 79 finding a car in running condition for a small amount of money was difficult, and was likely to lead very quickly to expensive repairs that would likely total more than the cost of the vehicle. Cars had 5 digit odometers for a reason back then. So back then a decent car was something that required a considerable investment of both money and time. Thus people tended to value and fetishize cars more.

So it’s not so much that people are living without cars (as long as there are sububs, young people will need cars, that’s just a fact) it’s that they take them for granted and don’t think much about them. A car is for getting around, and not much more (I think the sex aspect has been pretty well made moot by changing social mores.)

The really, really simple comparison, for stub-your-toe-obvious reasons, would be Vin Diesel, but there are so many others: Heath Ledger comes very immediately to mind. I could think of others, if I tried, but young male starlets are not really my thing.

Like other posters, you’re showing a lack of perspective.

I don’t agree. You’re right that a span of 50-100 years in humankind is nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially since the automobile isn’t very old. So maybe we are over-reacting. But if you’re going to criticize lack of perspective, aren’t all of us softies compared to the men of 100, 500 or 2,000 years ago?

I took him on road trips the past couple of summers and tried to treat him as a peer. We’d go all over the place…let him drive my 335i…took him across the desert at 135 mph in it…showed him how to road-trip on the cheap…drove like a bat outa hell up mountain passes…broadies in a sandy parking lot. Basicaly, being a bad influence and showing an advanture to a kid who actually needs these kind of influences to level out as “normal”. This year, my wife & I told him about all the crazy shit we did, and freedoms available to us, as car-driving 16 year olds. Weekend camping trips to the beach at just months after my 16th birthday with friends, over spring break. Road trips more than a days drive from home, up to Canada. Weekend ski vacations with my girlfriend and noone else when I was only a few months older than him.

I also showed him how to drive stick and how to do basic maintenaince, making cars in general less intimidating.

I think he actually got pissed he’s missed out on these kinds of opportunities. He immediately went home and got his license.

If we imagine college as some kind of super campus with thousands living on it – our idea of what college is today is flawed. While many students still pursue this kind of lifestyle, a growing majority now don’t. These students don’t have time for Facebook, time for social networking, and work harder than ever, while finishing a degree.

So, these folks polled a fiction, and got fictional numbers to reaffirm their prejudices.

Actually, that’s incorrect. Here are the facts:

*Since the mid-1990s, Boston, for example, has been losing educated workers, particularly those over 30. Boston is one of the very few places that is now graduating fewer bachelor of arts now than in the past decade.

*New York City has fewer private sector jobs today than it did in 1969; the recent financial collapse has accelerated that trend.

*Job creation in these supposedly “hip” cities has lagged behind that of more sprawling areas for some time now.

*Since 2003, when gas prices began their climb, suburban population growth has continued to outstrip that of the central cities, with about 90 percent of all metropolitan growth occurring in suburban communities. The most recent statistics from the annual American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, show no sign of a significant shift of the population to urban counties, at least through 2007.

*Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22 percent of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. From 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores.

*This means that people who want to live closer to their jobs won’t necessarily be moving to the central city.

*Much of the supposed wealth of many urban areas relies on two factors. The first is that uban residents are more likely to remain childless. Seattle, for example, has roughly the same population as it did in 1960. Only it now has half as many children living within its borders as it did in 1960. People who have children tend to move to the suburbs, where they want to have a car. The second is that more than a few urban residents are those who bought houses and condos BEFORE the run-up in prices, and felt wealthy. Wanting to keep certain people out and prevent change, they also pushed for policies that stifled growth and job creation.

Sorry, but Sex and the City and Seinfeld are just television shows that reflected the biases of their creators, not reflections on how the majority of Americans live, work and play.

carlos.negros: Also, remember that young people self-identify as Democrats by a large margin. Democrats in general are more comfortable with urban life.

Actually, young people are increasingly likely to register as “independent.”

carlos.negros: There is a sense of freedom in walking, being one of the crowd on a train, or riding a bike on a bike path; that you just don’t experience with red-light cameras, drunk-driving checkpoints, or by having Smokey up your ass on a lonely highway.

That is more of an argument against red-light cameras (which aren’t used out on the open highway anyway), stupid efforts to enforce ridiculously low speed limits on limited access highways and drunk-driving checkpoints than it is against owning a car.

I think we will find that the death of both the car and car culture have been been greatly exaggerated. The object of that affection will change – the SUV is on the way out; the Fiesta is on the way in – and people in the suburbs will appreciate more transportation options, but lots of people will still like cars and driving.

Incidentally, I do believe that one factor is increasing debt incurred by people who are seeking college degrees. Given that incomes have not kept pace with rising college costs, this will force a re-evaluation of how we view college. Fewer young people are going to go to college for four years, live on campus, and take on a huge amount of debt before they earn one penny. They will increasingly use community colleges, work while they go to classes or go to college after a stint in the military or the real-world workplace.

This says it all, really. We designed, for years, communities that benefited the automakers, city tax departments and developers—everyone except the people who’d actually have to live in them. Then we spent a lot of time and effort convincing people that this lifestyle wasn’t just the ideal, but the norm.

And for good measure, we gutted traditional urban centres with a double-whammy of zoning laws and infrastructure rot.**

Maybe the question isn’t about $8/gal fuel taxes or the end of automobilia as we know it; instead, it’s how can we design places that work for people so that we have enough fuel and a light enough footprint that we can keep cars for fun.

** Band-aid solutions like “more public transit” do not help. If the Right’s misconception is miscasting suburbia as the Real American’s Dream, the Left’s patent idiocy is pushing public transit (and high-density housing, for that matter) as some kind of panacea. Public transit makes sense as a way to get from hub to hub, not as a replacement for a sustainable community development or a poor man’s car. As Autosavant says, no one likes waiting for a bus, nor do they like walking a kilometer to a bus stop for the privilege. No one likes living in forty-story apartments, either, which is why real urban planners talk about mixed-use neighbourhoods and low-rise developments, not ghetto towers.

But in my summer home, I only use the much smaller car (a 5-sp lightweight 91 civic hatch with low miles, like new) to drive to offices in the big city 35 miles away, and I always walk to the only supermarket, which is a few blocks from our summer home. And I am in far better shape when i do that. And as the store is right in front of the beach where I swim, it is on my way home, and if it is not crowded, it makes sense to buy a few things every day and eat FRESH food for a change.

My parents do the same there, they go shop for groceries almost every day, never take the car, and that keeps them in great shape.

It’s next to impossible to live in a suburban Sunbelt metropolitan area and go “carless.” East Coast Intellectuals can get all goo-ey and gush all over a carless society, but we’d pretty much have to bulldoze most of our country to make it happen.

That being said, kids have a lot more choices today. Instead of “football or baseball or basketball” there’s also soccer, lacrosse, hockey, swimming, track, fencing, etc. And that’s just the boys.

The girls get all that, except football, but have field hockey.

Add in the common experiences of online gaming, and socializing, etc. Socializing is very important to them.

Peer pressure works two ways. It can steer a kid towards bad behavior, or it can steer a kid toward good behavior. If your friends don’t care much about cars or driving, and their moms and dads don’t mind driving their kids around, then there is no incentive for a kid to drive.

So unfortunately, for us car enthusiasts, we see something we love and enjoy, and it’s starting to wane. Which means that we have something to commiserate about when we see our friends and colleagues who still build ships in bottles, have massive train sets in their basements, race slot cars, build and fly r/c planes, etc.

You’ve never heard of peapod have you?

http://www.peapod.com/

I specifically mentioned that for those in major cities, public transportation was available.

My beef was why anyone would want to put themselves into a situation where they *HAD* to shop on a daily basis just to survive (ie: limited carrying capacity = not much food at home = gotta get some every day just in case). Having lived like that in Seoul, South Korea… I can attest to the fact that I *HATED* that precariousness. G-d forbid you get the flu, cause you’d be starving within a 2-3 days. (Though, I’m willing to bet that after the first serious problem, these carless wonders will see a need for personal transportation, much like how a mugging victim suddenly understands the need for personal protection.)

Furthermore, online shopping doesn’t do well for frozen goods. Additionally, you’re paying more for the shipping.

The article was about Generation Y and up not really going the ‘car’ route. Not urban dwellers. So, without living in a major city, how *DO* these carless wonders get from point A to point B.

Mooching only goes so far before your friends and family tell you to get lost.

I can safely say that driving to the store does not equate to taking hairpin turns in an Appalachian pass, and the banality of driving to the store is, in many cases, simply not amusing. The straightness of roads or the amount of traffic is to blame. This is why a lot of younger people do not appreciate driving, as they are either not given or do not have the chance to experience a situation where it can be fun.

Personally, I liken a good car to a personal roller coaster, except one over which a person has full control. However, the vast majority of my generation (the Millennials) is completely apathetic to the automobile. This saddens me, but given the state of traffic congestion and the utter tedium of daily driving, I can understand why.

COTD!

I respect Ronnie, even if I might agree with him once in a blue moon, but this is one of those statements that I feel is shortsighted

Men and women haven’t changed in their essential nature in centuries, and “home life” more or less works the same way it always has. There have been gentle cycles and regional differences, but it’s not like testicles collectively shrunk since JFK was shot.

I’d agree with aspects of that. Celebrity male role models today aren’t Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. I’m sure that either Justin Timberlake or Shia LeBeuf is capable of knocking a girl up, and probably have. But none of the young bucks strike me as the sort of guy who could handle a 1,000-hp Bugatti Veyron on a track, much less a Miata.

Timberlake and LeBoeuf are equivalent to Fabian, Frankie Valley, Frankie Avalon or Pat Boone. I think you’re being a little selective in casting your net, as well as in your memory.

The really, really simple comparison, for stub-your-toe-obvious reasons, would be Vin Diesel, but there are so many others: Heath Ledger comes very immediately to mind. I could think of others, if I tried, but young male starlets are not really my thing.

Like other posters, you’re showing a lack of perspective.

Well, shit, humanity must have sprung from the earth like Athena from Zeus’ skull in 1890, because I have no idea how they could have managed without the car.

This is your third article, I believe, on this theme and thusfar your best.

That said, because it’s not your first article, I’m not going to go with the levity angle and instead I’m going to be rather harsh because you (and many of the commenters) made these same points several times and there’s an pair of errors in judgment that I need to disabuse you of, mostly because I find them offensive—no, not offensive, annoying:
* One, is that you make the common assumption that your generation and it’s aspects are both the epitome of social evolution and “the way things should be”. Everyone does this.
* Second, that which you do not value, understand or appreciate is objectively less worthwhile, or possibly degenerate. This is also common, and it bothers me to no end.

The first assumption is incredibly common, and it happens because the human lifespan is very short, and humans are narcissistic by nature. We fail to understand that society really does not change appreciably over centuries, and that history is slow, gradual and cyclical, and thusly we end up with war babies who think that Boomers are unappreciative and spoiled, Boomers who think that Gen-X are slackers and Gen-Xers who think that Gen-Y/whatever are intellectually understimulated. All of the above fail to understand that they’re not greatly different from each other, or from the tens, if not hundreds, of generations that preceded them. It’s also not a little bit arrogant to think that one and one’s values and aspects are so different—so much better—than anyone who comes later. It’s so natural to assume that everything was better then and worse now, that you’d think more people would realize that there’s a logical flaw: if it was always better then than now, it must have been pretty fucking fantastic only a quarter-millenium ago. Yet it wasn’t.

It’s your second assumption that I find troublesome, if not outright insulting. Yes, we’ve the internet and cellphones and Twitter and Facebook. Yes, we don’t give quite the social weight to the car that previous generations did. Previous generations didn’t heavily weigh the horse, or early apprenticeship, or marriage and bearing children young, or devout religion, or knowing Latin, or being able to hammer sword blanks on an anvil. That doesn’t make one generation good and the other degenerate; it only seems that way because you don’t value those skills and—this is what bugs me—because you don’t value them they must automatically be valueless, and because they don’t value what you do, that they must automatically be degenerate in some manner. Giving a damn about the car doesn’t make you better or worse, just like being on Facebook or owning a horse does: it just means that you’re different in what you know. You, and they, are still people. As per point one above, you’re not actually that different, despite the moral decay that you imply started around 1969.

I had a similar discussion with someone, recently, who was bemoaning that people will eventually lose map-reading skills because of the GPS. I asked him “when was the last time you used a sextant, and do you know your constellations?”, because it’s an equally valid (eg, not valid at all). So are people who complain about the death of penmanship (“Can you do calligaphy with a quill or carve letters on stone tablets?”). This reminds me of that discussion: Facebook and Twitter don’t retard you as a human, they’re just contemporary aspects of communication and understanding that are relevant now. In thirty years I’m sure it’ll be different and I’ll be bitching about how kids these days don’t take the time to type and just relay direct mind-to-mind or somesuch. And I’ll be just as wrong and misguided and, quite frankly, arrogant and out-of-touch for thinking so.

I’m fairly sure you’ll find “Baby Boomer” is a term from demographers rather than marketeers.

With Great Depression 2.0 finally here

Nonsense.

When I was a high school kid, most teens had cars because used cars were cheap, and relatively easy to repair. Most of the cars of my youth still had carburetors(electronic injection was just getting started), and the most complicated bit of electronics was the “breakerless ignition” module.

Today cars are complicated, and difficult, or impossible, for backyard mechanics to repair. America is long over the hype of car ownership. Traffic is hell in most places. Traffic laws are aggressively enforced. Auto insurance is sky-high. Geopolitical conflict threatens to send gas prices to $10/gal. Kids have numerous diversions not available to prior generations — cell phones, wall sized flat screen TVs, computers, internet, iPods, etc. Is it any wonder why most 16 year old kids don’t give a shit?

For such a “tolerant” generation, you sure do a lot of hating — like everyone who came before or after you. Get over it, “baby boomers”, there’s nothing special about you, save for your narcissism and gullibility. With Great Depression 2.0 finally here, many of you are going to get your a well deserved, and long overdue, ass reaming. Now bend over, and squeal like a pig.

Pres Obama did have a Chrysler 300 muscle car before he was outed during the election for it, after castigated the D-3 for “building bigger, faster cars…” At which point he got an Escape Hybrid and dumped the 300. But yeah, I doubt he’s going to be driving anything in the next 3-7 yrs.

Urban dwellers have dealt with this for a very long time. When the stores you need to visit are along the path you walk from the train station to your apartment, you just pick up things as and when you need them. Otherwise you might do your shopping while out on an evening stroll. Little collapsible personal shopping dollies have been around for over a century and you will see people using them in cities.

No need to do a massive one to two week hauling it home in the monster truck routine for most urban dwellers.

Also, don’t forget online shopping. Amazon didn’t just post record profits and record sales for nothing.

How do you get a week’s worth of groceries, your toiletries, and maybe some nice toys (ie: a book, CD, video game, whatever)… if you can’t actually get to the stores to buy them?

And if you’re in a major city with a good public transportation system… how do you even carry all that back with you? All you have is two hands, ya know!

The thought of having to grocery shop every 2-3 days is, quite frankly, not worth it. Same for having to make multiple trips out and back due to not having enough hands to carry everything.

And lastly, why give up the joy of snaking your car down a small mountain backroad with your heart in your throat?

—

My point is that in real-life, you *HAVE* to get from point A to point B. Outside of major cities, that requires personal transportation.

And that’s the bottom line.