THE FIRST MEMBERS OF THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION WERE BORN sometime between 1980 and 1982, but, like babies with very indecisive parents, they weren’t actually named until 1990. That’s when historian and demographer Neil Howe partnered with writer William Straus on a book titled Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069.a
You might think that a book with that kind of subtitle was pretty ambitious, and you’d be right. Howe and Straus had a theory that, ever since America’s earliest days, different generations had succeeded one another in a predictable and regular pattern. Thus, what they called the “GI Generation,” born in the first two decades of the twentieth century (this was before they got the moniker “The Greatest Generation”) was succeeded by a “Silent Generation,” which was followed in turn by the Baby Boomers. America’s seventy-five million Boomers are the parents of both Generation X (or Gen X)—whose birth years stretch from the early 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s—and a good-sized chunk of the Millennials, too, eighty million of whom arrived on the planet between the early 1980s and about 2004.
Each of Straus and Howe’s generations had a distinctive flavor. The “Lost Generation,” the cohort who became adults during the First World War, was notable for its sense of disorientation and confusion; members of the “Silent Generation,” born during the Depression and World War II, were the first American generation smaller than the preceding one, which is one reason Silents experienced the largest increases in prosperity in recorded history. However, at the time they were first named, the oldest Millennials were still only adolescents, and a large fraction had yet to be born. This didn’t stop Straus and Howe from making some predictions about their future traits. Most particularly, they and their followers argued that Millennials would be, like their Greatest Generation grandparents and great-grandparents, strong community builders, the “most civic-minded since the generation of the 1930s and 1940s.” They would be charitable, politically engaged, non-materialistic, tolerant, and very concerned about protecting the environment. They would be the “We” generation.
They’re definitely tolerant. About the rest, not so much.
There are lots of impressive-sounding academic papers about Millennial attitudes and how they compare to other American demographic cohorts. The most rigorous study is one that combined two huge representative samples collected over nearly fifty years—the Monitoring the Future study of high school seniors that has been ongoing since 1976, and the American Freshman survey of entering college students that has been conducted since 1966. The two studies, collectively encompassing more than 8.5 million surveys, are like a panoramic snapshot of the views of American eighteen-year-olds from the 1960s to today. Here’s what they show:
• Eighteen-year-old Millennials are much more convinced that material success—getting rich—is important to happiness than either Boomers or Gen Xers. Specifically, 75 percent of Millennials say so, while only 45 percent of eighteen-year-old Boomers did (and only 70 percent of Gen Xers—the original “Me” Generation).
• Millennials are also a whole lot less concerned about keeping up with politics. Only 35 percent of Millennials thought this important, as compared to 50 percent of the Baby Boomers.
• When it came to saying that developing a “meaningful philosophy of life” was important, the score stands Boomers 73 percent, Millennials 45 percent.
• And, despite a widespread belief that Millennials are the most environmentally conscious generation of all time, they turn out to be, well, not. Only 21 percent of Millennials thought that taking care of the environment was critical, whereas 33 percent of Baby Boomers thought so. Three times as many Millennials as Boomers said they made no personal effort at all to help the environment. Even at the most mundane level, 78 percent of Boomers (and 71 percent of Gen Xers) said they made an effort to turn the heat down in winter; only 56 percent of Millennials did. Maybe even more relevant, when asked to identify the top five reasons for transportation choices or routines, Millennials placed “I care about the environment” dead last, behind saving money, simple convenience, or the opportunity to exercise.
With all that noise, it’s probably unfair to hold prognosticators (especially engineering prognosticators) responsible for missing some fairly important stuff. What’s way more interesting about the writers and researchers who wrote about the Millennials isn’t what they got wrong. It’s what they didn’t get at all: Millennials have a very different perspective on cars and driving than their parents and grandparents. For fifty years, American families had been addicted to the automobile and had, as a result, built a car junkie’s paradise for themselves. By the time the Millennials showed up, withdrawal was kicking in.
Let’s take a look at the era that began in 2001, when the first Millennials graduated college, got jobs, and started families. Eight years later, in 2009, Millennialsb drove 23 percent fewer miles on average than their same-age predecessors did in 2001. That is, their average mileage—VMT, or vehicle miles traveled—plummeted from 10,300 miles a year to 7,900, a difference of 2,400 miles a year, or 46 fewer miles a week.
It’s not that they stopped traveling. While Millennials made 15 percent fewer trips by car, they took 16 percent more bike trips than their same-age predecessors did in 2001, and their public-transit passenger miles increased by a whopping 40 percent. That’s 117 more miles annually biking, walking, or taking public transit than their same-age predecessors used in 2001.
When a cohort of the size of the Millennial generation changes behavior that radically, it’s a little like what happens when a third of the people on board a ferry decide to move from starboard to port: the entire boat starts to list. Which is what is happening to the United States. In every five-year period from 1945 to 2004, Americans had driven more miles than they did the half-decade before. In 2004, the average American drove 85 percent more than in 1970. But by 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles than in 2004. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers were a small part of the reason—they drove somewhat less in 2009 than in 2001—but the big cause was the Millennials. What makes this even more dramatic is that, by 2009, only half the Millennial generation was even out of high school. If all eighty million Millennials retain their current driving habits for the next twenty-five years, the US population will increase by 21 percent, but total VMT will be even less than it is today, and per capita VMT—the vehicle miles traveled per person—will fall off the table.
This is a huge development, made even larger by the fact that it came as a complete surprise, even to people who were supposed to be paying attention to the subject. Until about 2010, in presentation after presentation I referred to the driving public as a “stubborn lot.” The only time there had ever been a substantial drop in VMT was during world wars, depressions, and fuel crises, and in each case, once the cause disappeared, a jump in VMT followed. Not this time. This drop was unprecedented. In January of 2004, Federal Highway Administrator, and, soon enough, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters predicted that “VMT may double in the next twenty years.” Even as late as 2008, when the “VMT Inflection Point”—that is, when vehicle miles traveled stopped growing—was already a four-year-old phenomenon, the federal projections were still assuming that the growth in driving would return to the same accelerating pace it had exhibited for decades. As the transportation consultant Jarrett Walker puts it, “This isn’t prediction or projection. This is denial.”
Some of the consequences of what happened when transportation officials weren’t looking are unambiguously positive. Americans spent 421 million fewer hours stuck in traffic in 2011 than they did in 2005. For the first time, the number of cars being “retired” is actually greater than the number of new cars being sold.
Other results are more complicated. When the irresistible force of the Millennials hits the immovable object of America’s car-centric transportation infrastructure, there are going to be a lot of very interesting side-effects. Gas consumption in 2014 was at a ten-year low, which is definitely a good thing for anyone who thinks that US foreign policy ought not to be driven by the need to secure sources of petroleum in dangerous parts of the world. But it’s also the reason the Highway Trust Fund was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2014: less gas purchased means fewer gas tax dollars for roadways. In the same way, Millennial housing choices—about which more below—are revitalizing thousands of neighborhoods that were built before the convenience of automobile drivers became paramount, but are leaving a lot of suburban housing stock behind. In 2006—before the crash of 2008—urban planner Arthur C. Nelson wrote an article in the Journal of the American Planning Association that estimated that, by 2025, the United States will have 22 million unwanted large-lot suburban homes.
Housing values. Energy policy. Health costs. Taxes. The future of the car business. It’s probably not possible to list all the implications of the Millennial turnaround on cars and driving. But there’s one big question that can’t be avoided: Why? Why, for the first time since the Model T, are Americans less interested in driving? There are dozens of answers to those questions in wide circulation among policy wonks, urban historians, and transportation engineers—some of them better than others.
One not-so-persuasive reason that I hear a lot is the economic one. In this version, the reason for the dramatic drop-off in driving among Millennials is the recession of 2008, which was not only the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression but hit the Millennials especially hard.
If you finished college in 2008 or 2009, you (1) were almost certainly a Millennial and (2) had a really hard time finding a decent job. Meanwhile, it was true that the price of a new or used car held pretty steady during the years after 2008, and, because interest rates declined even faster than per capita VMT, the real cost of buying a car actually declined, at least for buyers who could get a car loan. However, the price of gasoline increased substantially. Between 2001 and 2010, in fact, the average American’s bill for filling up the tank increased from $1,100 to $2,300 (in 2011 dollars). In this scenario, driving less was just a rational, and temporary, expedient.
For a century, Americans have been driving more each decade, bouncing back after brief declines for wars, or recessions. Until now. David Smucker and Ranjani Sarode (Sam Schwartz Engineering) and Advisor Perspectives.
It makes sense. Except that the decline in VMT among Millennials—and everyone, really—began in 2004. And it has continued through 2014, long after the worst effects of the Great Recession have passed. It’s not that economic downturns don’t affect driving behavior, it’s that once the downturn is over, Americans have always returned to their cars. But not this time.
Moreover, if the Millennials were experiencing greater-than-average economic hardship as a result of the Great Recession, you’d think that the luckiest of them—those with jobs, and decent incomes—would be driving the same way their same-age predecessors did. But they’re not. As we have seen, Millennials overall drove 2,400 fewer miles in 2009 than their predecessors did in 2001. Those with jobs do drive more—10,700 miles annually—but that’s still 2,100 fewer miles than their employed same-age predecessors, who were putting 12,800 miles on their odometers back in 2001. Even more revealing: Millennials earning $70,000 a year or more in 2009 used public transit for twice as many miles as their affluent same-age predecessors did in 2001, they biked more than twice as many miles, and they even walked 37 percent more.
It’s not the economy, stupid.
Nor can the Millennials’ choices be explained away by college debt. Though recent college graduates are likely to have borrowed more money than previous generations to pay for their diplomas (and the amounts in question are larger than ever), there is no data showing a correlation between the amount of debt owed and the debtor’s VMT: whether a particular Millennial is debt-free or owes tens of thousands of dollars tells you nothing about driving habits. Nor is environmentalism the cause. In a 2011 poll, only 16 percent of Millennials strongly agreed with the statement, “I want to protect the environment, so I drive less.”
So if it isn’t the recession, or debt, or environmentalism, then what has completely transformed the minds of a significant portion of a very large generation? A more plausible reason for the sea change in Millennial behavior is that they are the first generation that started driving in the age of Graduated Driver Licensing statutes. In 1996, the year the first Millennials were turning fifteen and sixteen, Florida enacted America’s first comprehensive GDL program, which broke the process of getting a driver’s license into stages. At the first stage, a learner’s permit was granted upon passing a written driving exam, and the licensee was required to take a state-sanctioned driving course, frequently one that cost $500 or more. The second stage offered the new driver, after completion of a road test, an intermediate license that restricted driving in substantial ways: no driving at night, for example, or with other under-eighteen drivers. Only after completing the first two stages was a full license available. The GDL laws decreased new drivers’ mobility in order to increase their safety, and they worked so well—fatal crashes involving sixteen-year-old drivers dropped by a quarter between 1995 and 2005—that every state now has its own version of a GDL program. And GDL programs don’t just delay driving; in many cases they reduce it permanently, since history shows that, if drivers haven’t gotten licensed by the time they’re twenty, they’re unlikely ever to do so. According to a study done at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Institute, “for all practical purposes, for the cohorts born between 1939 and 1963 . . . all those who wanted to get a driver’s license did so by age 20.” Anything that slows down the process of licensing between the ages of sixteen and twenty, or raises its costs, can have a very long tail of consequences. This one sure does; a study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety revealed that only 44 percent of teenagers obtain a driver’s license within a year of becoming eligible for one. According to the Federal Highway Administration, only 46.3 percent have a license by the time they turn nineteen. In 1998, the number was 64.4 percent.
An even bigger reason for the decline in VMT among Millennials isn’t economic, or even statutory. It’s digital.
The Internet, and the spectrum of technologies that have been developed to exploit it commercially, have changed everything from the way we buy groceries to the way we find romantic partners. It is no big surprise, then, to find that it’s changed the way we get from place to place, too.
One way it’s changed our mobility patterns—and by “our” I mean anyone who has ever bought anything from Amazon, eBay, or Walmart.com—is by changing the way we shop. By the time you read these words, online shopping will account for at least 9 percent of all retail sales in the United States: more than $300 billion in 2014, up from “only” $134 billion in 2007. Not only are 190 million Americans hitting “buy” buttons on a regular basis, but they’re spending more and more every year, for an average of more than $1,700 annually.
That huge diversion of consumer buying dollars from in-store to in-home has implications for the average American’s VMT, but their magnitude is a little unclear. Back in 2001, shopping accounted for 14.4 percent of annual household VMT and 21.1 percent of the trips per household. But buying on the Internet doesn’t substitute for bricks-and-mortar shopping trips on a one-for-one basis—some of the folks who study the phenomenon most closely find that online shopping adds to in-store purchasing as well. Some people try on a pair of shoes in a physical store, then order them online from Zappos; but others buy a new phone from Amazon and then hustle over to the nearest Best Buy to get a case for it. However, the overall effect is to reduce travel. One of the best studies estimates that every one hundred minutes spent shopping from home is associated with five fewer minutes in shopping travel time and a one-mile reduction in distance traveled. Every six hours spent shopping online substitutes for one entire shopping trip.
However, while the growth of online shopping is clearly reducing shopping travel overall, it’s not so obvious that Millennials are more affected by the phenomenon than their Baby Boomer and Gen X parents. The real impact of the Internet on Millennial transportation choices is someplace else.
One of those “someplace else” possibilities is that the digital revolution affects travel for socializing as much as or more than it does travel for shopping. A 2011 survey by KRC Research asked different age groups whether they “sometimes choose to spend time with friends [via social media] instead of driving to see them.” Only 18 percent of Baby Boomers answered “yes.” Millennials? Fifty-four percent. The number one transportation trend identified by Millennials in a 2014 survey was “socializing while traveling.”
So the big impact of the Internet might not be that it makes driving less essential, but that it makes other transportation options, particularly transit, more appealing. Millions of people of all ages have grown to rely on 24/7 access to the Internet, whether they’re looking up a movie on IMDB while simultaneously watching it, or following a baseball game in real time on ESPN, or obsessively checking for Facebook updates, e-mails, and texts. But no one depends on that kind of access more than Millennials, or is more likely to feel unsettled when he or she can’t have it. You can text on the bus or the train, but—hopefully—not while driving. Even better, you can do nearly everything on a hands-free transit option that you can do at home, including checking out the transit options themselves.
That’s because the characteristic that really distinguishes public transit from the automobile is that transit delivers service according to regular schedules. Frequent users of transit, such as intercity commuters, spend enough time on the train or bus to learn those schedules, but the once-in-a-while user has been predictably intimidated by travel that requires knowing which track the 7:02 train arrives on, or whether you need a transfer to take the crosstown bus at Main Street. That was true twenty years ago, and even five. Not anymore. One thing the Internet does unambiguously well is to make information that used to be expensive and scarce now cheap and abundant. You don’t have to spend ten years learning the commuting ropes to know whether the train or bus you’re on is an express or a local, or even when it’s going to show up. You just need a smartphone. Smartphones are also all that’s needed to take advantage of other revolutionary new transportation options: ridesharing services like Via, car-sharing like Zipcar, and—especially—dispatchable taxi services like Uber and Lyft.c
However, these and other cool new businesses didn’t create Millennial distaste for driving. They just exploited it. The question remains: why do Millennials find the automobile so much less desirable than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did?
Woodbridge, Virginia, is a small suburb about twenty miles south of Washington, DC. Many of the fifty-five thousand residents commute to Washington each day and return home to the leafy suburbs replete with cul-de-sacs and single-family homes. The blocks are long, the roads are wide, and many of them lack sidewalks. In typical suburban fashion, buildings and strip malls are set back from the road with parking in front.
In 1996, at the end of a cul-de-sac called Standish Court, nine-year-old Morgan Whitcomb, inspired by her trips to Washington, DC, and the anonymous cities she saw on television, decided to design her own urban metropolis. Using sidewalk chalk, Morgan laid out a bicycle-sized street grid across the cul-de-sac. There were intersections, stop signs, one-way streets, and sidewalks. When she was done, the neighborhood kids would play “city,” and ride their bikes or walk along the streets, following the traffic rules, hand signaling when they turned. One kid would stand in as a traffic cop to direct traffic at the intersection with a “signal.” Eventually someone would become bored and the game would devolve into “cops and red-light-runner.”
When it came time for college, Morgan chose Columbia University in New York City, which was, in terms of the built environment, about as distant from the DC suburbs as Mars. And she adored it. Today she is an engineer and planner working in my company’s Los Angeles office in bike-lane design and bike-share planning for cities. She does so on a computer running very sophisticated programs rather than using a chunk of chalk on a strip of asphalt, but it’s not hard to see the line connecting one with the other.
At Sam Schwartz Engineering, a relatively high proportion of employees are Millennials like Morgan. They’re not completely typical, since so many of them live in big cities with good public transit systems—our home base is in New York, but we have offices in Chicago, Newark, Tampa, LA, and Washington, DC. In addition, most of them, like Morgan, are transportation professionals, many of whom returned to the kind of street smart urban neighborhoods that her grandparents left decades ago. When we began researching and writing this book, we asked them why so few of their generational compatriots were car owners and drivers. Their answers don’t provide a statistically reliable snapshot, but they’re intriguing, nonetheless.
In addition to financial reasons—not enough money, too much debt, a dubious economy—they had a lot to say about the psychic baggage that goes with car ownership. Almost every one of them saw car ownership as a burden rather than a benefit. While cars used to be symbols of freedom and maturity, they’re now just another buying decision, and one that has to justify itself by increasing the buyer’s convenience, not his or her status.
The most enlightening reason, though, might be this: Millennials are the first generation whose parents were more likely to complain about their cars than get excited about them.
I suspect this is because kids get their introduction to automobile travel from the car’s backseat. There, they are captive audiences to high-volume parental annoyance about driving—“high-volume” referring to both decibels and frequency. Every generation has had the dubious privilege of learning an impressive number of curses while watching Mom and Dad drive, but Millennials were driven through more traffic jams, more often, longer, and farther, than any generation in history. They were the first generation to be chauffeured not just on family vacations or the occasional trip to the supermarket, but everywhere: To the mall. To soccer practice. To piano lessons. As a result, they observed more unpleasant driving than the Gen X, Boomer, and Silent generations added together. It’s remarkable to me how many of my Millennial employees who grew up in suburbs subsequently opted out of a driving-dependent life. And, since they were the demographic cohort most likely to drive as adults—way more than city kids, anyway—their defection counted twice, the same way that a second-place team’s victory over the team they’re chasing adds a half game to the team behind and takes a half game away from the team ahead. By moving not to another suburb but to a walkable city, a suburban young adult electing not to drive isn’t quite a “man bites dog” newsflash, but it is certainly a snap at what had been a routine rite of passage since the end of World War II. After fifty years of mistaken decisions about America’s built environment, a lot of Millennials are looking for something different.
It’s also not a coincidence that Millennials were far likelier to grow up with two parents commuting. This might have exposed them to more of the exhausted complaining—from both parents—that is too often the commuter’s primary contribution to dinner table conversation. It seems plausible, too, that one reason that Millennials are less enthusiastic about suburban living is that they were exposed, from an early age, to the same sort of complaints about lawn mowing, roof repair, and mortgage payments. Moreover, while it’s true that urbanite parents are probably just as likely to complain about household repairs and living costs within earshot of their children, when it comes to chauffeuring them, they have a lot less to complain about. Volunteer chauffeuring costs suburban families between $782 and $1,742 per driver each year. Urban parent chauffeurs? Only $218 annually.
On top of the pretty interesting and highly suggestive observations from the skewed sample of my younger staff are some objective engineering facts. We can see that the speed of automobile travel in moving from one place to another peaked around 1970. My driving id (or is it ego?) finds that depressing. Before that, cars were, as advertised, improving the daily trips to work, stores, and restaurants, at least for most people. Thereafter, although cars got more and more technologically sophisticated, and more and more roads and highways were constructed, America entered Red Queen territory. We were building as fast as we could, just to travel at exactly the same speed, and soon enough even that wasn’t enough. Drivers found themselves spending more and more hours getting from place to place. From 1970 to 2004, they kept increasing the annual mileage on their odometers, but they weren’t getting anywhere any faster.
Even worse, all that driving wasn’t producing any more goods and services. Though otherwise smart people continue to equate more driving with a healthier economy, they’re doing the math wrong. A new study from Michael Sivak, at the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, shows that, whether you look at mileage per dollar of GDP or fuel consumed per dollar, the relationship peaked in 1977. After that, it started a pretty steep decline, to the point that every mile we drive is actually producing no more economic output than it did in 1946.
And we’re paying a lot more for that economic activity. When I started driving in 1966 I recall paying 25.9 cents per gallon of gasoline; anything more than 30 cents was a rip-off. This really, really cheap gas was too good to be true for long. In October of 1973, two years after I started working for the New York City Traffic Department, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries instituted an embargo on oil shipments, which raised the price of a barrel of oil by 400 percent. The price of a gallon of gas at the pump rose from about 38 cents to more than 55 cents. Gas stations were asked by the federal government to stop selling on weekends, which made it impossible to buy gas on weekdays without planting your idling car in a line that seemed to stretch around the block.
Drivers were not happy about this. At the Traffic Department we had to institute traffic changes around gas stations to handle the long queues of idling cars.
Then, six years later, a second oil crisis, this one following on the heels of the Iranian Revolution, doubled the price of a barrel of oil yet again. Gas prices spiked from an average of about seventy cents a gallon to more than a dollar. More long lines at gas stations. More unhappy drivers. The gas crises were the only times I had seen traffic volumes go down significantly in my long career until 2005 or so. It wasn’t the cost of gas that was keeping drivers out of their cars; it was the difficulty of getting gas. We made this observation after the supply crisis was over, when even though prices surged, VMT started rising again.
The purpose for reminding ourselves about the oil shocks and gas lines is not to make a purely economic argument. The price of filling a tank is, of course, higher today than it was before OPEC started flexing its muscles (and before China and India started putting millions of new cars on the road, thus increasing demand for a shrinking resource like petroleum). But it’s not quite the whole story. Gas might have jumped to a price of $1.35 a gallon by 1981, but if you adjust for inflation, it was about the same as it was in the middle of 2014: $3.47 in current dollars. When the price of gas dropped below $2.00 in many parts of the United States at the beginning of 2015, it was still higher than the 1979 price in inflation-adjusted terms. In 1920, the height of the popularity of the Model T, gas cost 20 cents a gallon, which is equivalent to $3.87 in 2015.
Gas prices go up, and they go down. More important than the inflation-corrected price per gallon is how drivers thought about the cost of a fill-up. And repairs. And insurance. And traffic jams. From the second oil shock on, their daily commute and weekly fill-up gave them more and more reasons to be annoyed about tradeoffs demanded by the six- or eight-cylinder money pits taking up space in their suburban garages. By 2004, economists were calculating that what they called the commuting effect (an increase of about twenty minutes in commuting time daily) was about as costly, in emotional terms, as breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Being economists, they tried to put a dollar figure on these costs, and found that people who commute about forty-five minutes a day should demand nearly 20 percent higher salaries for doing exactly the same job.
It didn’t stop there. I don’t know what the discipline of economics finds so fascinating about commuting, but in 2006, two Princeton economists asked nine hundred women to rank the well-being produced by nineteen different activities. Having sex (the researchers call it “intimate relations,” but they’re not fooling anybody) came in first. Socializing after work came in second. The “morning commute” was dead last, just a little worse than “evening commute.” And the effect of the commute on the ideal home in the suburbs, with or without the white picket fence, was damaging too. The comfortable suburban home that persuaded them to take on the commute in the first place might appreciate in value over time, but the enjoyment of it doesn’t. People who move to larger houses adapt to the larger size almost immediately, at which point it offers essentially no increase in gratification. The stress of the commute itself, on the other hand, is cumulative: the more years it goes on, the worse its effects. The depressing and formal term for the syndrome experienced by long-term commuters is learned helplessness: the kind of pessimistic resignation that seems to happen to laboratory animals when exposed repeatedly to painful stimuli that they cannot avoid. The road-building and housing policies that had made millions of Americans completely hostage to their cars were, to put it in slightly less technical language, pissing them off.
So they complained. And, from 1980 on, the most impressionable listeners to their complaints were—you guessed it—the Millennials. The impression they got was very consequential: Cars made you happy the day you brought one home from the dealer. Afterwards, not so much.
When I mention, in speeches, conferences, meetings, and even at dinner parties, how Millennials’ distaste for driving is changing America’s transportation future, I can often count on someone reminding me that her nineteen-year-old drives everywhere. Or that the neighbors have bought cars for each of their teenage kids as they turned eighteen. I must be wrong, they say.
Part of this is my own fault. Like anyone trying to make a point, I tend toward hyperbole: “Millennials don’t want to live in suburbs.” “Millennials hate cars.” Nuance gets a little lost. No one, least of all me, is suggesting that cars are going extinct anytime soon. Americans and Europeans and Asians will continue to buy cars and drive them. But a change in VMT occurring at the margins isn’t unimportant. If only an additional 10 percent of the Millennial generation chooses to forgo a car-centric lifestyle, that means eight million Americans are deciding to buy cars less frequently (if at all) and to live in places where cars are less necessary. If you’re in the business of selling cars for a living—if you’re Ford or Toyota—learning that the number of cars purchased by people aged eighteen to thirty-four declined by nearly 30 percent from 2007 to 2011 is the opposite of good news.
And, if the Millennial attitude toward cars isn’t marginal—if it represents a trend that will grow as they age and as the next generation appears—the change will be even more dramatic.
Carmakers haven’t given up on Millennials. They hire specialized marketing firms that promise to unlock the puzzle of selling cars to this market segment despite a lack of interest in their product. They advertise on Comedy Central and Spike. They fund Internet campaigns. They change car colors—Chevrolet tried out “techno pink” and “denim.” They know Millennials like physical activity, so they show SUVs with full bike racks headed to exciting off-road bike trails.d
Some of it will probably work. But most won’t. Because a lot of those Millennials who still like driving are choosing to do so without the burden of car ownership. According to a 2014 study by the business consultants Alix Partners, car-sharing services like Zipcar or RelayRides are responsible for auto manufacturers selling half a million fewer cars from 2004 to 2014. If the trend continues (that is, unless it gets worse), another 1.2 million aren’t going to leave dealers’ car lots between now and 2020. It’s not as if automobile manufacturers can make up for this shortfall by fleet sales to the car-sharing companies. Every new car they sell to a company like Zipcar equals thirty-two cars not purchased by civilians. Nearly one American household in ten is now a “zero-car” family.
Automobile manufacturers and oil companies, however, have some very attractive strategic options. Even as cars get progressively more difficult to sell to young Americans, they get easier and easier to sell to young Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians. The companies that make up the car industry, and especially the oil business, are international. They can continue to grow overseas even as they are barely holding their own in Europe and America.
Things are different for the other group at risk of a marginal but large change in American life choices. The suburbs themselves. If large numbers of young families decide they’d rather live in dense urban communities, the construction companies whose business is building suburban homes can’t easily reinvest in Chinese homebuilding. More important, the people who are responsible for governing those suburbs depend on property taxes to pay for virtually all local services, from sewer repair to schools. They are in deep trouble if the value of the properties being taxed declines. Which is why the biggest consequence of the changing attitudes of Millennials toward cars and driving is a powerful centripetal effect pulling Millennials toward urban life, replacing the centrifugal forces that spun their parents and grandparents into the suburbs.
In plain language, Millennials are moving to transit-friendly environments. According to a 2010 Brookings Institution survey, 77 percent of Millennials aged eighteen to thirty-five plan to live in urban centers—in “vibrant, compact, and walkable communities full of economic, social, and recreational activities.” A 2011 survey by the National Association of Realtors found that 62 percent of people aged eighteen to twenty-nine—Millennials all—prefer living in an area with a mix of single-family houses, apartments, retail, libraries, schools, and access to public transit.e In a 2011 survey by the Urban Land Institute, 50 percent of eighteen- to thirty-two-year-olds said they preferred living in a walkable community, and an additional 14 percent said it was “essential.” The 2014 TransitCenter Who’s on Board report has similar and more recent statistics. Their survey reinforced the finding that the ideal neighborhood for under-thirties is predominantly transit-oriented: 16 percent said they preferred “urban, downtown, with a mix of offices, apartments, and shops;” another 16 percent chose “urban, residential neighborhood;” and 30 percent opted for a “suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses.”
Maybe even more significant, almost half of Millennials who already own a car say they’d give it up if they could count on an alternative, and more than half would seriously consider moving to another city if it offered a wider choice of transportation options. Even Millennials living in cities that are relatively poor in such alternatives are eager to cut the cord that links them to a car: 64 percent of Millennials living in Nashville expect to live in a place where they don’t need to own a car, even though only 6 percent of them currently do so.
Many cities are meeting the demand. After decades during which the number of residential building permits in suburbs and exurbs were three and four times greater than the number granted to urban areas, the relationship is being completely reversed. In New York City’s metro area, the share of residential building permits in the central city was 15 percent in the early 1990s and nearly 50 percent by 2005. In Chicago, same story: 7 percent to 27 percent. Portland, Oregon: 9 percent in the 1990s, 26 percent in the 2000s. Boston, which started losing population to the suburbs in the 1950s, is now growing again, with a population larger than at any time since the 1970s.f In subsequent chapters, you’ll meet a dozen different mayors, city managers, and transportation commissioners from cities large and small that are creating—sometimes re-creating—urban centers that are both lively and livable, where a car is a choice, not a necessity. They’re building Millennial-friendly cities.
Whenever I meet with civic leaders in transit-poor cities and suburbs, I tell them, “If you don’t want to lose your children, invest in transportation that doesn’t depend on the automobile. Build walkable town centers.” This has been my most effective line in getting hardcore drivers to sit up and listen.
Jarrett Walker is fond of telling Millennials, “The foundation of orthodox transportation planning is our certainty that when you’re the same age as your parents, you’ll behave exactly the way they do.” But maybe the real question isn’t, “Why are Millennials so different from their parents and grandparents?” but “Why were their parents and grandparents so different from them?” The historical anomaly, after all, wasn’t the desire to live in densely populated, walkable communities. That’s how human beings have lived ever since they started building permanent habitations, and then towns and cities, ten thousand years ago. It’s how most people still live outside the United States today. What was different about the United States of America (and a few other places) from the 1920s to the 2000s was the aspiration of most people to live as far away from work and shopping as they could afford.
For a long time, the bargain seemed a good one. Houses got bigger and more luxurious. By most standard-of-living measures like per capita GDP, or wealth, or years of education, things consistently improved. If the price was time (usually miserable time) spent commuting, it was an affordable one. And they got used to it. In 1995, Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist who was studying the effects of overfishing, developed a brilliant idea that seemed obvious in retrospect, mostly to people who lacked the smarts to see it themselves. The concept, which Pauly called shifting baselines, is a cognitive hiccup that causes us to draw flawed conclusions about change by using the wrong starting point for comparison. In fisheries, Pauly’s special concern, this led biologists to estimate human impact on fisheries by comparing the number of available cod, haddock, or herring, not to the population that existed before humans started pulling them out of the sea by the millions, but to the population that existed when the biologists started collecting the data. Every generation, Pauly wrote, makes “a gradual accommodation” with the losses that occur during their lifetimes.
Some of the biggest losers, when we became a generation of drivers, were kids. As they were losing the kind of street smart childhood my own generation experienced, their parents, perversely enough, were gaining something else: anxiety. Though even suburban streets are demonstrably safer than they were fifty years ago, and cities much safer, parents have become so fearful about the strange experience of walking that they’ve forbidden their children to undertake it, at least not without some adults to provide security. This level of fear-driven parenting has gotten so pervasive that it has prompted a reaction. In 2008, a New York mother and journalist named Leonore Skenazy wrote a newspaper column about letting her nine-year-old son navigate his way home, all by himself. Predictably, attacks followed . . . but so did the “Free-Range Kids” movement, which Skenazy started shortly thereafter. Is it needed? The month this book was completed, two Maryland parents were investigated for criminal neglect when cops picked up their ten-year-old son and six-year-old daughter for walking one mile, with their parents’ blessing (and with parent-supplied maps) from their local park to their house. A neighbor, forgetting how normal this used to be, had turned them in.
This sort of willful amnesia, when an entire population updates its own perception of just what, exactly, is “normal,” is a good approximation of what occurred to American families from the 1950s through the 1970s. Their baseline expectations about the number of hours spent behind the wheel of a car every month kept shifting. The expectation was sustained by housing policies like the GI Bill that discriminated in favor of new housing, and by tax policies that discriminated against renters. It was enabled by transportation policies like the orgy of road building financed by the Highway Trust Fund. It was reinforced by white flight, by the almost deliberate destruction of inner city neighborhoods, and even by the well-intentioned but unhelpful Progressive disdain for city living. And it survived for decades.
Eventually, though, it turned out to be a losing game. For millions of people—not just Millennials, but also Baby Boomers in the process of downsizing their homes—the costs of suburban living started to outweigh the benefits. And furthermore, they also realized that there were even greater benefits to changing the scale and pace of living itself. And the realization that the best place to do so was on the kind of streets that were designed to do more than just allow cars to travel over them as quickly and safely as possible. On smart streets.
a The same generation actually goes by a few different names: Gen Y, the “echo boomers,” the Peter Pan Generation. Some European writers call it the “Precarious Generation.”
b Actually, the research was done with a standard-variety census cohort: people aged sixteen to thirty-four. In 2009, this included those born between 1975 and 1993, a group with “only” a 90 percent overlap with the generally accepted description of the Millennial generation.
c For more about the importance of information-rich transportation systems for Millennials and everyone, see Chapter 7.
d There’s something perverse about using bike riding to sell cars.
e Actually, everyone likes the sound of that kind of place. Though the percentages are highest among the young, more than half of forty- and fifty-year-olds reported a preference for living in mixed-use communities.
f One consequence is that supply and demand are increasingly out of whack in desirable—that is, walkable—cities and neighborhoods. This leads inevitably to higher housing costs, and more and more stratification among Millennials: as prices get bid up, fewer and fewer low-earning families stay, which leads to a self-reinforcing cycle. Prices that go up tend to keep going up. One perverse result is that the highest-earning families end up with the lowest transportation costs. Households in drivable suburban neighborhoods spend, on average, 20 percent of their family incomes on transportation. Those in walkable neighborhoods, half that.
