Posted on Monday October 12th by Jebediah Reed | 374
- “Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.” Therefore congestion pricing isn’t necessarily that green. So argues a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
- John Kerry and Lindsey Graham offer a bi-partisan proposal from climate change legislation. More nuclear, they say. But also they want the US to be “the Saudi Arabia of clean coal.” (Ugh.) And also trade tariffs on stuff from countries that pollute a lot, like China. (NYT)
- That big chemical company Dow is making solar shingles. Yay? Indeed: Yay! You can just nail them straight onto your house and they’re 10-40% cheaper than non-shingle solar “solutions.” Dow estimates a $5b market in the things within 5 years. (Env Capital)
- From Michigan, a plan to turn underused rural roads into “green highways”: “The idea is to retrofit roadways with charging stations and tailor routes to low-speed, limited-distance electric and muscle-powered vehicles, including EVs, hybrids, bicycles, scooters, horses and Segways.” Think of it as “slow travel.” (Time)
- Amtrak’s ridership over the past year has been 27.2 million. That’s off 1.5 million from a year ago–mainly a result of a decline in business travel due to recession–but still the second highest ever. On time performance was 80 percent for the kind-of-pathetic-but-still-doing-the-best-they-can state rail company. (AP)
- What do the young people these days think about cars? “Meh,” is the answer. New market research shows Americans in their teens and 20s don’t see cars as particularly interesting or necessary. Chinese kids, on the other hand, are still wild for ‘em. (LA Times)
October 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Those AMTRAK numbers are pretty impressive, considering that AMTRAK as a rail company does its worst to do everything a rail company is supposed to do right…well wrong. Yea its a combination of factors that contribute to the dismal state of the Company but can you imagine if they actually came to the party proper and made an attempt at improving even 5%? I reckon they could get that up to 30 million.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I definitely saw a lack of interest in cars with my students. Teenagers today can tell you everything there is to know about their cell phones and don’t really care about their cars at all. I imagine this has to do with the fact that there are hundred of other industries fighting for attention. For one, millennia’s have grown up with video games and DVDs. You don’t have to leave the house to have a good time anymore. The Facebook is almost 5 years old this year, which means that many teens can’t remember not having their lives on Facebook or MySpace. There is just so much more stimulation for kids these days. Couple that with the fact that a gallon of Gas costs over $2.50 now, and even kids with part-time jobs can’t afford to go out and ‘cruse main’ every night if they even wanted to. Cars are just becoming less and less important to social life.
I say good riddance.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Yea good riddance to the cars I say, now get the DART Green Line done so I can train it from my house.
It’s all the MyTwitFacing going on, that also has most of the kids not running about outside being kids. I go for a stroll with my kid everyday morning and night and Saturday for the first time in almost 6 months I saw the neighbors kids playing outside. Very sad. They are little pillsbury dough boys to be fair, good to see them out and about though.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
From the LAT piece: “Also, with the advent of social media and other forms of electronic communities, teens perceive less of a need to physically congregate, and less of a need for a mode of transportation,” the study concluded.
Well, I’m 25, and thus smack-dab in the middle of the “early careerist” segment of “Gen Y” (christ, do I hate that label - can’t we come up with something more creative? what happens after “Gen Z”?), so maybe I’m not quite as up on the Facebook and the Twitter as some of my teenage generational cohorts seeing as I didn’t grow up with them. However, while I’m all for ‘demotorization,’ if THIS is the reason behind it, I say let’s all get in our SUVs and guzzle that gas, come hell or high water. No need to “physically congregate,” .i.e., socialize, i.e., what humans have been doing since THE BEGINNING OF TIME, all because of FACEBOOK? That would be very, very, sad.
However, I suspect the study’s “conclusions” went something like this: young people are less enamored of cars, and they are using social media, ergo, the two are related. Somehow, I doubt it - my prediction (hah) is that predictions that the internet will be the end of in-person social interaction, or “physical congregation,” will always be proven wrong. Beware of anyone who tells you that teens or twentysomethings don’t need to socialize because they’re using Facebook. It’s a bunch of crap.
I suspect the real reason for declining interest in the automobile - and this is a real phenomenon - is a broader shift in young people’s conception of what constitutes a good life. People born in the 1980s grew up watching ‘Seineld’ and (shudder) ‘Friends,’ they envied older relatives who lived in urban areas (or at least I did) and found the suburban, car-centric lifestyles of their parents to be stifling. The reaction to that lifestyle was to desire live in the city, rather contrary to our Boomer parents who dreamed of the open road. Twentysomethings associate urban life - which is frequently, though not always, car-free - with freedom, and cars with sitting in traffic on the Garden State Parkway with Mom and Dad bickering over whether they should’ve taken a different route. The myth of the open road is just that - a myth - and we realize that now. Finally, some of the study’s conclusions about newer technologies like laptops and cell phones taking some of the air out of the automobile play a role, too.
(I should note that this is coming from someone who lives in an urban area and has a car and, generally, likes driving. But my car is old and utilitarian, and I would not want for it to be my only transportation option. I do not drive to work. It enables me to do certain things and go certain places that would be very difficult otherwise, but I’m realistic about what it is and what it means and could probably live without one. All of which is to say, I am not anti-car, but I suspect, and hope, that we are moving towards a more ‘European’-like vision of the automobile’s role in society, where it is viewed as simply one transportation option, appropriate for certain roles and situations, and not a given part of everyone’s life.)
October 12th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
You fail to note that this represents Amtrak’s second best year ever in terms of ridership. And 80% OTP is good for Amtrak, given how little control they have over it in most areas.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
James,
Well, no… that little factoid is very much present in the item, actually.
Jebediah
October 12th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
You can get a lot more twittering and facebooking and surfing and texting done riding mass transit than you can while operating 4000 pound piece of deadly distracted machinery.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
In my high school Latin class the other day, the teacher asked us (in Latin) which mode of transportation we liked best, and although several students liked boats and planes and trains and bikes, no one liked cars. Of course, it’s an inner-city high school in Seattle, where a large majority of students take public transportation to school and we have one of the best bus systems in the nation…
But I don’t really think it has anything to do with social networking sites. My friends and I and practically all the people I know just take the bus downtown or to someone’s house to hang out, not just talk online.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:43 am
I’m Canadian and 21, and I can tell you that social networking has nothing to do with my lack of car ownership, or that of anyone else I know.
Between the costs of car ownership, fuel, maintenance and (perhaps worst, here) insurance, it’s just priced outside the reach of most of us. I don’t even have a drivers license; I know people who are turning 30 and just learning to drive.
Maybe Vin is right, and we do not see the car as “freedom,” but an encumbrance, but I never watched “Seinfeld” or “Friends”. What I did watch, and am watching, was myself creeping deeper and deeper into the red as I’ve advanced into my education. While trying to finance student debt, a car would just be (another) albatross around my neck.
An entirely unnecessary one, at that.
I walk, bus, bike, and am happy– commuting from the suburbs, no less!
Funny thing is, I nearly became a gearhead. My grandfather was a mechanic, my father a mechanical engineer. Both do all their own car repairs, etc. I appreciate a fine automobile from an engineering standpoint; I ooh and ahh at performance figures, and enjoy talking shop about automobiles. It has nothing to do with not appreciating the car. I love cars–they’re beautiful bits of engineering. (some of them, anyway.) So were steam locomotives, though, and I don’t insist on barreling through town atop one of those.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:58 am
That WSJ article on congestion is trying to be contrary without much substance. Yes, congestion makes people miserable, which is one way to get them to switch to transit.
Sufficient congestion pricing or other tolls will also be able to do the same. And congestion isn’t only bad for the environment — it’s also bad for overall quality of life, for economic productivity, for the health of the commuters stuck in traffic pollution, for deliveries, and for emergency vehicle use.
The article’s main piece of evidence is ramp metering — which has nothing to do with tolling traffic, but with regulating it to reduce variability in traffic flow and decrease crashes. See this page which was the apparent source of some of the numbers: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/rampmeter/rmstudy.html Is more people dying or being injured on the highways really an acceptable cost on the road to making transit more attractive?
If you force people to pay $20 for their morning highway commute (in a place with transit alternatives but few road alternatives), driving will decrease and so will its environmental impacts. This is not that complicated.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Wow…sorry. I don’t know what I thought I was reading or commenting on.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Tyler August: good point about debt. Our generation is just finding its way in a very, very different world from that of our parents. There are economic as well as cultural reasons for the decline in interest in automobiles, no question.
October 24th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Teens not interested in cars is such a LIE. It all depends on where you live. I live in the NW suburbs outside of Houston, TX and everyone wants/needs a car. Yeah, we all do use Facebook and social networking sites and stuff, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting to meet up or do something fun.
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If you don’t have a car here, you’re really in a pickle if you don’t have good connections with people that do drive cars. You can’t use nonexistant public transit, walkability and bikeableness is also nonexistant, so a car is what you have to depend on.
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While there is a decrease in wanting to RELY on cars to get around, there isn’t a decrease in DEMAND to have one for necessity sake’s.