Young people are putting the brakes on car culture

The days of North America’s car culture seem to be numbered.

You wouldn’t think so stuck in traffic at rush hour, or navigating a congested parking lot at Canadian Tire. But a large portion of the latest generation of young people are not embracing the car culture that largely defined the 20th century.

To be sure, the Great Recession has played a role. So have recent restrictions on driving by many high schools, colleges and political jurisdictions across the continent, as have spiraling insurance premiums. And so has global warming, among a youthful generation more sensitized to environmental concerns than any in history.

But the Gen-X and Millennial demographic groups began tuning out car culture long before all that. At a time when people aged 21 to 30 make up slightly more of the U.S. population (13.9 per cent now compared with 13.3 per cent in 1993), the share of kilometers driven by that age group has dropped to a mere 13.7 per cent in 2009 from 20.8 per cent in 1995.

Quite simply, driving is hostile to the digital media and technology that are defining the first half of this new century.

Texting, cell phone use, working on your laptop and watching mobile TV while driving are dangerous and increasingly illegal. Meanwhile, the new digital devices work well on public transit. Improving signal technology is steadily reducing lost connections.

“Younger people today – in fact, people of all ages – no longer see the car as a necessary expense or source of personal freedom,” says Toronto-based urban futurist Richard Florida.

“In fact, it is increasingly just the opposite: not owning a car and not owning a house are seen by more and more as a path to greater flexibility, choice, and personal autonomy.”

J.D. Power and Associates, the venerable auto consulting firm, warned in a November report that: “Millennials don’t talk about cars the way previous generations did. It used to be that when you turned 16 you went down to the DMV and got your license. Today young people care more about their cell phones than they do their cars.”

Personal-vehicle use is a time thief.

“Time becomes really valuable” to young people,” says William Draves, president of educational consulting firm LERN. Draves is convinced that the Internet, not the sour economy or heightened environmental concerns, is killing off the car culture.

Young people are more assertive about guarding their time. “You can work on the train,” Grave says. “You can’t work in a car. And the difference is two to three hours a day, or about 25 per cent of one’s productive time.”

The trend might be even more pronounced were public-transit systems worthy of the name available in more than 30 of America’s 100 cities accounting for three-quarters of the population.

The auto industry is putting a brave face on this. “Driving is more likely ‘delayed than denied’,” argues Paul Taylor, chief economist at the U.S. National Automobile Dealers Association.

“That cohort may eventually get married and have children,” Taylor says. “Living near work is something you do when you’re young and single, and when you start picking out schools and amenities you want for your children’s development, people are less willing to live near the office.”

True. But what’s delayed often is denied, as with non-smoking adults who didn’t get hooked in youth. If you make it to 30 by cycling, public transit use, and innovations like Zip Car rentals, vehicle ownership may strike you as an expensive superfluity.

A decline in the car culture will hurt not only the auto industry but big-box merchants like Wal-Mart, Costco and Ikea. Their business model requires customers to lug purchases home by car over long distances.

Conversely, the trend is a promising one for inner-city commercial districts. And for public transit system anticipating a better chance of covering their costs from higher ridership.

The combination of youth and retiring Boomers driving less prompted Carlos Gomes, analyst at Bank of Nova Scotia, to alert clients in February that growth in U.S. new vehicle sales will be just 0.6 per cent annually over the next decade. That’s about half the growth rate of the previous decade.

Gomes said of his own children and their friends that “they just prefer to take the train.”

The satirist Mort Sahl could say in the 1960s: “Ask a Californian who he is, and he points at his car.” Ask a 20-something today in Bloor West Village or Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she points at her app-laden smartphone.