Why Are Americans Driving Less?

[marmar]

from the Infrastructurist:



Why Are Americans Driving Less?


Over the years, car ownership and driving mileage have tended to increase with great regularity. But logic suggests that this march toward complete motorization would eventually plateau — and that’s exactly what transportation scholars have begun to notice. A new study (pdf) by Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper looked at driving behavior in several countries, including the United States, and found some compelling evidence that America has reached a “saturation point for vehicle ownership and travel”:

This paper provides some qualitative evidence to support these ideas of saturation. It finds that since 2003, motorized travel demand by all modes has levelled out or even declined in most of the countries studied, and that travel in private vehicles has declined.

The great question, of course, is why. In a pair of posts over at the New York Times Freakonomics blog, Eric Morris offers a gradient of possible explanations. First Morris evaluates the weaker arguments. He denies the role of higher fuel prices (”The growth of driving began to abate around 2000, and driving flattened out around 2004; the big gas price hikes didn’t come until late in the decade.”) as well as the contention that more people are riding public transportation (though he backtracks on this denial a tad in a later post). He’s also skeptical about the influence of urban planning that has moved homes closer to work/commercial districts, a claim partially refuted by the recent rise in average commuting distance.

In a subsequent post, Morris considers some of the stronger reasons why we’re driving less then we used to. One possibility is that roads have become too congested to tolerate. Another is that the share of women in the workplace has stabilized, which means an end to a rise in female commuters. A third explanation is that people have a somewhat biological limit to the amount of travel they prefer to do in a day, and this limit — about an hour a day, research suggests — has been reached. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/02/14/why-are-americans-driving-less/#more-15397

[happyslug]

1. When I look at who is biking today, and did in the 1970s and 1980s, could be the best explanation

When I was in Collage, I was one of the few students who actually walked to my Collage (no on housing campus, in fact the "Campus" was an office buildings in Downtown Pittsburgh, good old Robert Morris Collage). Most of my fellow students took the bus or drove. I believe I was the only person who ever biked to school (and that was rare, for they was no place to secure the bike).

When I went to Pitt Law School, I tended to bike more, but also walked (Again I was living with my parents OFF Campus) but the Pitt Law School had bicycle racks to lock the bike up in. These racks were rarely full (One bike was on the rack for at least the last two years of law school, no one ever moved it, or claimed it). People biked, but it was rare.

I had to go downtown Pittsburgh last year and saw I saw no one biking on my old bike route to school (If you know anything about the Mt Washington Section of Pittsburgh, no explanation is needed for why) but a huge increase in the numbers of bikes in Downtown Pittsburgh and the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Oakland (Where the University of Pittsburgh is located as while as Carnegie Mellon) had, even in the 1970s, a large number of cyclists, but the number today is heads and shoulders over what it was in the 1970s. On the relativity flat streets of Oakland section of Pittsburgh, a bike can be as fast as a automobile, given the heavy traffic, the lights and the overall design of the streets (Which had been designed in the 1890s, for Streetcars).

Now, much of the River Areas of Pittsburgh has been redeveloped since the collapse of the Steel Industry in the 1980s. The old Steel Mills were replaced by high end housing and shopping locations (The South-side of Pittsburgh is the best example of this). My father used to joke about the housing areas nearest the mills and the rivers in the 1940s and 1950s, they were all poor white communities where a lot of violence occurred (The Inner city African Americans were either in St Clair Village on top of Mt Washington, in the Arlington Section on top of Mt Washington or in the Hill District the other side of the Monongahela River). The part near the River and the mills were the one taken over by the City in the 1980s and now are high end housing areas. As you move near and then across Carson Street (The main Road on the South Side of Pittsburgh) you still see mostly housing from the 1830s onward, for this was the area where working class people live, and still live, mixed in with a lot of collage students.

If you were to ask me about the South Side in the 1970s, I would say a declining community. In the 1980s a Community is rapid decline do to the closing of the old Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill, but by the 1990s it had turned itself around and started to boom about 2000. The old joke in the South Side is "No Parking, since 1941" for it is a density populated areas. Walking and biking are good retrofits. The Bike trail on and near the old Steel mills have helped, but so has the movement of high income people to the new housing near the river.

One Last Comment, after I graduated Collage I applied for a Job in Downtown Pittsburgh with the State. Ended up being interviewed by three potential supervisors. In that interview they mentioned where I could park my car, I responded that at that time I lived on the last Streetcar line in Pittsburgh and as such it would be faster for me to take the streetcar then to drive to work. By the expression on their face, that possibility was beyond them, you drove to work, not walked, biked, or even take mass transit. That was the "norm" in the 1970s and 1980s, even after ten years of increasing gasoline prices during the 1970s (The 1980s saw a slow drop in the price of Gasoline, continued through the 1990s till we about 2001 when it started to go back up). In simple terms, giving up their car was NOT even on their radar screen, let alone be a viable option. That is NOT as true today, as seen above, more and more people are viewing walking and biking (and public transit) as viable options in addition to the private Automobile. That change in thought may be enough to explain the drop in driving given the higher traffic density, better bike ways, and other options that came into play only over the last 10-20 years.