I found an interesting article on the Financial Times website (which is behind a pay wall) this morning about young adults driving less. I’ve been thinking about this ‘theory’ for a while, as I’ve read and heard about this, but nothing to back it up with statistics. This is the first article that shows a definite trend of young Americans driving less, biking more, and utilizing public transportation more frequently. This shift is not totally unexpected… As cities get more saturated, public transportation has a higher frequency of visits to each stop and bike lanes become more accepted into the culture of drivers (it’s safer to bike on roads mean for cars than ever, especially in warmer winter climates).

The article puts forward that the reasons could be economic. Less hours to work equals less pay, and less money to invest in an automobile. At this point, I’m not convinced this shift is purely financially driven. If the economy were better, I’m sure there would be more miles driven by this age group. But I have this sense that this new paradigm is not completely correlated to economic status. It also states that young adults could be using social media today that used to be a face to face interaction.

It’s only my opinion, but I think this generation of young adults are much more aware of their individual impact on the world… I don’t think that one or two cars that sit in a showroom and not on the road are going to change some outcome that we may or may not know. But I think they are more sensitive to this potential change than the generations before them.

Maybe it’s education, maybe it’s cultural, maybe it’s financial, and maybe it’s something bigger that we don’t know or can’t see yet. But now there is data that shows this trend is real.

The car is simply one of the most iconic symbols of America… Being American. We are the car. The car is us. The intriguing part of this story to me… How will the car manufacturers respond? How are they going to change their products to adjust to changing buyer tastes?

Here are the links to the data:

http://www.frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/transportation-and-new-generation

& a PDF file from the University of Michigan:

www.umtri.umich.edu/content/rr42_4.pdf

The image used in this post is courtesy of the U of Michigan, from the PDF file.