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Gen Z is choosing not to drive
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Cars are expensive and driving really isn't that fun outside rare circumstances that are quickly disappearing. I love cars, and I love a nice drive on a mountain road, but everything else isn't nearly as nice as it used to be when there were fewer people driving, and less dependence on it.
Not to mention, cars are pretty boring these days. The vaguely cool ones are just remakes of old models, and even Ferrari is making SUVs.
The greatest enemy of good driving conditions is and always will be other drivers. The people who really care about being able to drive should be enthusiastically supporting getting others off the roads because congestion is inevitable.
Especially since it costs less total taxpayer money that way (the classic is Houston vs NYC vs Amsterdam, which spend something like 20%, 10%, and 4% of their municipal budgets on transportation respectively). You're less likely to have congestion AND potholes in a city with trams and bike routes.
I love cars, love driving, and I work in self-driving cars because I'm convinced the only people doing it should be the people who see it as a hobby, just like riding horses. You have so many people on the roads who hate it, and drive horribly because they don't care and it's an absolute pain for them. Why should those people drive, other than the fact that we don't have the technology yet to allow them not to?
(Even better, infrastructure to support them not to need cars at all, but that's a different topic. And before we get the "trains are the solution to every problem" crew, I think self driving shuttles are a cool way to diminish vehicles vs cars, that can cover at the same cost more routes than buses, achieve a higher occupancy rate, and would need next to no infrastructure changes.)
Trains are not the solution to every problem.
Light rail intercity transportation is a good option, but it only makes sense on well-traveled routes. And while it is true that the trains induce significant demand -- that is, the route they are on will BECOME well-traveled because the train access is so valuable that people want to be near it -- this is only solving a few very narrow commute problems.
Trains ARE the solution to major commuter congestion, though, and for many well-developed metros are probably the only path to reducing congestion since you cannot just continue to add more roads.
Your autonomous shuttle idea might make sense for less-traveled routes, but pavement is incredibly expensive to maintain compared to rail and vehicles that have to carry around their power source around are seriously inefficient compared to a pantograph, not to even get in to rolling resistance. Busses are useful as a start, but in response to growth they should continue evolving sensibly -- car to bus to trolly bus to tram to fully-separated light rail is a logical progression as a city grows, but a city that knows it is growing fast is often wise to skip steps to save longterm cost.
The actual full solution to the issue of cars is the same one it has been for all 10,000 years of the human urban experiment (less the last 60ish) -- build towns that are primarily navigable on your own power. Don't create robust social policies that cut off infill and multifamily residence. Don't push all business and work sites to some far-flung corner compared to where people life. Don't subsidize a fake-rural lifestyle in islands that cannot sustain themselves at the expense of the poor people living in old-development neighborhoods. Don't build more roads that you can afford to maintain and don't permit road geometries you know are going to kill people -- zero routine deaths is the only acceptable number.
A city you can get around under your own power is less expensive to maintain and more pleasant to live in for most people.
Not to even get into the relative safety (or lack thereof for cars & roads).
The best time to drive a car was during the pandemic.
I had never seen so few cars on the road. The world felt positively idyllic.
That's part of why I only go grocery shopping at like 8pm.
Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.
Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was... congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.
I would actually attribute that more to people speeding and driving recklessly, as was endlessly documented.
I also agree that most speeds are too high to begin with, but it's way more attributable to people just choosing to drive like maniacs post-pandemic.
The road deaths have continued to rise, as the congestion has risen again with it.
So it's not just the congestion keeping us safe. It's literally some people have just straight given up caring or never understood physics to begin with.
Nah, we know this isn't the reason because in other countries that have better road design that actually takes psychology into mind for design speeds, they did not see the same uptick. Also, other countries are seeing gradual decreases in road deaths while the US continues to see increases.
You can also look at e.g., the dangerous by design reports and see very clearly WHERE the road fatalities are happening. During covid it was all over the map. Post covid, it is clearly skewing away from the blue cities.
It's a very clear natural experiment with an obvious conclusion: the US has fundamentally unsafe road engineering. We focus on speed over safety in our designs, which in low congestion works perfectly (i.e., makes roads fast and unsafe) and in nominal conditions achieves neither.
Load up all of AASHTO into rockets and shoot them into the sun.
I'm not really trying to argue, because I don't disagree about our road designs, however...
Then why are road deaths still increasing on roads where congestion is the norm, say I-5 in Seattle, for example?
I personally think it's also a cultural thing in the USA, not just that the roads are designed more dangerously. You also have more people willing and ready to drive dangerously.
It IS a cultural thing, but you're placing blame on bad actors when it's a systemic problem -- a systemic problem with the culture of US road engineering. That is, US road engineers do not have a robust culture of safety. The priority is and always has been speed and "level of service" (aka throughput) in the designs over safety or cost effectiveness or even pleasantness of the urban landscapes.
I'll never buy the idea that a wide set of diverse people across an entire continent are all just worse than the rest of people around the world. The fact that the problem is widespread is proof the issue is not bad actors.
The US does have more people who shouldn't be driving driving though, I'll agree with that much. But it isn't because they're reckless lunatics that don't care about other road users, and I'll never buy the covid arguments that people all went NUTS during covid and started mowing down pedestrians -- because no way that would've happened in JUST the US and nowhere else. It is, again, a systemic issue. The same one. Since driving is essential for most people to live their lives in the US, people who had no business driving are driving. Because of our INCREDIBLY terrible philosophy towards urban design and road constructions, we have pigeonholed ourselves into an expensive, unsafe urban landscape.
A lot of mass transit got downsized during covid, for example. That could've put more bad drivers on the roads -- but it isn't because they're monsters, it's because they have no choice.