Do young people in the West snub cars? Report Economist
In 1997, 43 percent of American 16-year-olds had a driver's license, but by 2020, that number had dropped to just 25 percent. And it's not just teenagers: One in five Americans aged 20-24 doesn't have a driver's license, up from just 1 in 12 in 1983
For Adah Crandall, a high school student from Portland, Oregon, a daily annoyance is family members asking when she will learn to drive. Adah, 16, has spent a quarter of her life battling automobile-centric planning for her city.
At the age of 12, he attended a school near a main road where thousands of trucks whizzed by every day. When a teacher invited a speaker to speak on air pollution, she and her classmates were thrilled. Within a year, she traveled to Salem, the capital of Oregon, to ask lawmakers to pass tougher diesel engine laws.
Yet her family still pesters her to get her driver's license. “It is seen as a ticket to independence. She is so glorified,” she says. Adah admits that her life would be easier if she had access to a car: she would spend less time on buses and could go to the coast with her friends. But he hates the idea of having to do it. “Why in our society is our identity so linked to the use of the car?”, he asks. “If I decided to comply and get a driving licence, it would be like giving up”.
Few technologies have defined the 20th century more than the automobile. Seemingly, the love affair with the personal automobile continues unabated into this century. The number of motorists on the world's roads continues to increase almost everywhere. The distance traveled by American motorists reached a new peak last year, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. But there are signs that the situation is changing. People like Adah show why. A driver's license was once an almost universal rite of passage into adulthood. Now it's something a growing minority of young people either ignore or actively oppose, into their 20s and beyond, writes The Economist .
This, in turn, is starting to build more support for passed anti-car policies in cities around the world. From New York to Norway, a growing number of city and local politicians are passing anti-car laws, eliminating parking spaces, blocking streets and changing planning rules to favor pedestrians over motorists. Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, boasts of having "reconquered" her city for its residents.
Activists perceive a radical change. Even a few years ago, "there was a sense that we were the weird ones," says Doug Gordon, founder of "The War on Cars," a New York-based podcast. Now, he says, "more and more elected officials are adopting positions that until recently were on the fringes." After a century in which the automobile has reshaped the rich world, making everything from suburbia to supermarkets to drive-through restaurants to rush-hour traffic jams possible, the momentum may be starting to shift.
Starting with demographics, in the country that has been most shaped by the automobile. The average American motorist travels far more road each year than most of their rich-world peers: about 14,300 miles (23,000km) in 2022, or about double the distance traveled by the typical Frenchman. Nearly a century of road building has resulted in increasingly sprawling cities that are difficult to get around in any other way. The city of Jacksonville, Florida, for example, is 875 square miles. With around 1 million inhabitants, the population density is about double that of the whole of England, of which only around 8% is classified as 'urban'.
In 1977 the Supreme Court declared that having a car is a "virtual necessity" for anyone living in America. In 1997, 43 percent of the country's 16-year-olds had a driver's license. But in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, the number had dropped to just 25%. And it's not just about teenagers. One in five Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 do not have a driver's license, up from just one in 12 in 1983. The percentage of people with a driver's license has decreased for all age groups under 40, and, according to the latest data, it continues to decrease. And even those who have them drive less. Between 1990 and 2017, the distance traveled by teenage drivers in America decreased by 35% and that of drivers aged 20 to 34 by 18%. It is especially older drivers who are responsible for the further increase in traffic, as baby-boomers who grew up with cars don't give up on retirement.
A similar trend is well established in Europe. In Britain, the percentage of teenagers able to drive has almost halved, from 41% to 21%, over the past 20 years. In all EU countries there are more cars than ever before. Yet even before the Covid-19 closures emptied the streets, the average distance traveled by each one had fallen by more than a tenth since the turn of the millennium. Even in Germany, where the internal combustion engine is an economic totem, motorists are pulling the brakes.
The trend is particularly strong in large cities. A study of five European capitals – Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Paris and Vienna – found that the number of workers commuting by car has dropped significantly since its peak in the 1990s. In Paris, the number of trips per inhabitant has fallen sharply and the number of trips made per resident has fallen below 1970s levels.
No one is entirely sure why young adults prove resistant to the allure of owning a mode of transportation. The growth of the Internet is an obvious possibility: the more you can shop online or stream movies at home, the less you need to go into town. A British report, led by Kiron Chatterjee of the University of the West of England and published in 2018, found an increase in precarious or poorly paid jobs, a decline in home ownership and a trend towards spending more time in education. The rise of taxi apps like Uber and Lyft has almost certainly contributed, as have rising insurance premiums for young drivers. In general, driving is more expensive. In America, the average cost of owning a vehicle and driving 15,000 miles increased 11% in 2022 to nearly $11,000.
Other reasons seem more cultural. An important motivation, at least for the most committed, is concern about climate change. Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who has campaigned against the oversupply of free parking in America, says he is surprised that climate change has prompted many young activists to start a campaign against car-centric development (thought local air pollution, or cost, would make a difference instead).
The decline in popularity of cars among young people under 40 is in line with the mood of planners and planners, who have been campaigning against cars for more than two decades. Sometimes they have succeeded in passing big and bold policies, such as the introduction of congestion charge zones in central London, Milan and Stockholm, which motorists have to pay a fee to enter. All three programs have succeeded in reducing traffic substantially and consistently. In New York, a much-delayed and bitterly contested congestion charging system could be launched later this year.
But in most cases, the compression of motorists has been slower and more gradual. In Britain, many councils have started to introduce 'low traffic neighbourhoods', blocking roads to discourage passing motorists from taking shortcuts between main roads. In 2020 Oslo finished removing almost all on-street parking from the city centre. The drastic drop in Paris traffic volume was in part driven by the policies introduced by Hidalgo, which eliminated parking, narrowed the streets and transformed the motorway that previously ran along a bank of the Seine into a park. In 2021, he announced his intention to redevelop the Champs-Élysées to halve the space intended for cars, in favor of space for pedestrians and urban greenery.
In America, New York has banned cars from Central Park and has also experimented with driving bans on some streets in Manhattan. In recent years, dozens of American cities, including Minneapolis in 2018 and Boston in 2021, have eliminated rules requiring developers to provide a certain amount of free parking around their buildings. California has eliminated such rules statewide, at least for buildings relatively close to public transportation.
In the past, these changes have often been imposed from above. Increasingly, they find favor with at least some voters. “Chicago for 80 years was: cars first, everyone else last,” says Daniel La Spata, a city council member in the city's northwest. Now, he says, bike activists are playing a big role in the city's local elections. In Oxford, England, residents in favor of a traffic-reduction plan have manned barricades to stop irate motorists from pushing through the barriers. Hidalgo won a second term as mayor in 2020 with a platform that included plans to turn Paris into a "15-minute city," a trendy idea where every arrondissement would have its own shops, sports venues, schools and the like shortly walking or cycling distance.
As the Oxford example shows, not everyone is enthusiastic. In Hackney, north London, council had to install special vandal-proof screens on cameras that spot motorists breaking the rules. A local councilor has received death threats. Chats on Nextdoor, a neighborhood-focused social media app, are full of disputes and furious diatribes about the measures. In Oslo, the plan to remove parking spaces was denounced by a politician as a 'Berlin Wall against motorists' and a local trade group said it would lead to a 'dead city'. (It hasn't happened so far).
Political opposition could curb the growth of anti-car policies. In New York, it was politicians from the suburbs, whose voters depend most on cars, who opposed the new congestion charge. In Berlin, centre-right Christian Democrats campaigned to protect freedom of driving. Another concern is that as car-free inner cities become more attractive, they also become more expensive, prompting some, especially families, to move to the suburbs, where they eventually need the car. In America, according to one study, homes in walkable neighborhoods now cost 34 percent more than homes in more urban neighborhoods. New technology could change that too. Electric cars can ease concerns about climate change. They are cheaper to run than fossil-fuel vehicles, which could encourage more driving.
But in the parts of Europe where anti-car policies have been in place the longest, they seem to have worked as an incentive. Giulio Mattioli, professor of transport at the University of Dortmund, notes that almost no country in the world that has eliminated a major road or pedestrianized a commercial street has decided to reverse course. “Once people see [the benefits], they typically don't want to go back.” Several studies, including the one by Chatterjee, have concluded that driving habits formed in youth appear to persist, with those who start driving later continuing to drive less, even into their 40s. If this pattern holds, the 21st century could see the automobile's heyday.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/i-giovani-in-occidente-snobbano-le-automobili-report-economist/ on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 07:12:15 +0000.