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Genz can’t afford a car. Even used cars cost too damn much
Same shit as when Millennials were killing home ownership.
And not buying diamonds.
Though I admit, part of the reason I don’t buy diamonds is specifically to fuck the diamond industry. Because fuck those scammers.
Maybe they’d have money for cars and homes and diamonds if it weren’t for all that damn avocado toast!
Yeah, but then the headlines would be blaming millennials for killing the avocado market.
Is applebees dead yet or do we have to continue the war on “family restaurants”?
You must tip your microwave at home. Like the one at applebees, a microwave is a slave of the service industry that relies on panhandling your dinner table to survive.
And eating at casual dining restaurants.
AFAIK similar articles (about driving less) were also penned about millennials and genxers.
yea. it’s not entirely by choice.
Millenials can’t afford cars…
That’s the real issue. It is 100% not that they’re more environmentally cautious. Between less 16 year olds having jobs and cars and gas and insurance being so much more, less can afford a car. E bikes probably even have more to do with it than environmentalism does.
The Internet replacing the need to go places (e.g. chatting on social media vs. hanging out in a dead mall) probably helped too.
You also have ride hail services that weren’t available a generation ago. You can get places in a car without owning a car.
True enough. Cruisin, video gaming on split screen, and malls got replaced by social media and online gaming with voicechat.
Lucky to get a hand-me-down as well.
Years ago when my Gen Z nephew was turning 16 (minimum driving age in USA), the conversation went like this:
- “Are you excited to start driving and do you want car?”
- “Nah, not interested”
- “Why not?”
- “Where would I go?”
- “Wherever you want!”
- “Everything I want is right here at home”
I thought about my own Gen X early driving experience with the freedom to go to the mall or the movie theater whenever I wanted and to drive to school or work.
- His school (and eventually job) were both within walking bicycling distance.
- He had streaming services I never dreamed of when I was his age piping a flood of big budget movies right to his TV whenever he wants
- malls are dead
I couldn’t really argue with his logic. Years later he did get a car when he moved out and lived farther away from work. However, it was many years after the minimum driving age which was a big departure from generations prior.
For me the appeal of a car was having somewhere private to do drugs, awkwardly make out with girls, and hide from my parents.
I feel like those things are somewhat timeless?
All of those things can and always have been accomplished without the use of a car.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t make it easier, or make sure that when your friends are smoking you are there getting free hits and your gas money. Between the free beer, weed, and gas my shit box might have paid for itself.
Parents force their kids to share their location, so it isn’t like the kids can hide as they used to.
I’m so glad I grew up when the internet was only used by nerds like me…
Even as someone who didn’t try any drugs until I was 20, I fully agree with you. But also gals and bois for me.
My son is about to turn 18 and is of much the same mind. We pushed him a bit to get his license but he rarely drives and has about zero interest in owning his own car. He just doesn’t have anywhere he needs/wants to go. I imagine it’s a little different for kids with more activities outside the home. Sports, clubs, jobs… He doesn’t have any of that going on at this point. I’m admittedly a little sad about that, but I can’t really force him to be interested.
Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don’t have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they’re not hanging out online, then they’re probably at somebody’s house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there’s no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don’t want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.
The whole expression of personal freedom thing feels like older people parrotting something they heard on a TV commercial. It makes sense considering that a generation or two would go television commercials were highly effective method of brainwashing and statements like that have little bearing on reality
I completely agree, as I’m pretty sure it was a line fed to Americans by the government and car companies as part of selling the suburban American Dream to them while they bulldozed entire neighborhoods to put up a highway overpass.
that makes sense. were the past couple of generations just stupid or was the media environment just so limited they had no way of knowing they were being lied to? or was it a bit of both?
Definitely the second one mixed with the specifics of the time period and the fact that nobody knew where this would lead combined with corporate greed. This was a time when we didn’t even know that putting lead in gasoline was a bad idea and having a TV in your house was a futuristic idea. Before the TV became common, they barely had a way to know what was happening across the country, and they definitely had no idea what would happen to end up where we are today.
The suburbs and cars were sold to the post WW2 American public as these symbols of the burgeoning wealth of the new middle class (plus the suburbs meant that white people didn’t have to look at black and poor people). The idea that everybody could own their own house and drive across the entire country on the newly created international highway system (just ignore all the stuff paved over to make it happen, it was mostly just poor people’s houses anyways). They were sold the dream that you didn’t have to live within walking distance of the factory anymore, you could live in a nice house with a white picket fence, and drive to your fancy office job in a skyscraper.
The only reason my kids want to learn to drive is to go on road trips to visit their friends across the country. Which sounds awesome and I want to buy a couple beaters so we can do the trip together.
Hmm
Gotta package wealth disparity as a feel-good environmentalist story :)
“Gen-z is choosing to be homeless.”
These crazy kids are forgoing the tradition of having a roof over ones head in favor of urban camping. It definitely has nothing to do the kleptocracy that made housing unaffordable by converting it into a speculative market for Wall Street and foreign nationals to park dirty money.
I am reading the article to say “even living out of your car is an unobtainable dream for man Gen Z.” When combined with the headline I saw recently about the return of company owned housing, the world is looking pretty bleak. We should expect unions to be making a comeback, but many seem to be brainwashed against them.
Don’t forget insurance, either. A new driver will pay sky-high rates for the first few years. And while one can technically have a license but not pay for insurance if they don’t own a car, if they ever do get a car insurance may end up even higher, since they dont have a history of good driving under insurance while their peers do.
I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.
It’s just nuts. Used vehicle prices are through the roof in no small part because new vehicles are now ABSURDLY big and expensive.
AAA is now rating the cost of a new car to be something like $0.50-$1 per mile to operate. Or an average of $12k per year. When you carefully do the math, a lot of people are finding that the rideshares aren’t much more expensive – plus now they don’t need to deal with the non-monetary costs of car ownership (maintenance, parking, fear of accident/theft, etc). And you can get blackout drunk to try and tune out the chaos of a dying planet and still be able to get home.
Not to mention car accidents are still, last I checked, the main killer of young people.
This is why I think owning a self driving car won’t be a thing. Uber and such will just have a fleet driving around all day
Yep, and the technology to operate that fleet is only 5 years away. Just like it has been for the last 15.
Anything to make communities think it is safe to refuse to invest in any other transportation mode.
I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.
They’re also 22. Are they also male? I’m on insurance with my mom (a 50 year old woman) and even then when I hit 25 my insurance dropped like 15%. Insurance has always been expensive as hell for men, women don’t get quite as screwed.
My kids insurance for full coverage when they got their license was $35/month.
In the article they noted this was the same for millennials and gen x before them. I’m going to assume the standard for youths purchasing cars was with the baby boomer generation. I know my dad told me when he was young, you would purchase a cool car that didn’t work for the equivalent of $100 dollars, get a friend to tow it home, then work on it for a few weeks to get it running. He told me how much he missed his MG Midget, which let’s recognize as a cool ass car for a kid to have. He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars*. All his friends would be doing the same.
Nowadays it would be a $1k junker, and you’d need to have a computer science degree to fix the onboard computer while having all the specific tools to get into their proprietary parts. There are older cars too, but the standard of fixing a car has increased, all the while each generation has less time and money to do it.
- This was a typo, but I love this typo. You say deck of cards, I say deck of cars, Thank you @[email protected] !
_He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars.
Well yeah, having a whole deck of other cars would make it pretty simple!
Is it really a choice if they fundamentally cannot afford to do so?
Many can and choose not too. Fuck cars.
Don’t disagree with you but north american infrastructure is not set up for public transit
i mean, sadly
With any luck, over time, we’ll learn proper city building infrastructure from the europeans and implement it locally. Florida will probably be several feet under the ocean at that point, but hopefully when everyone relocates to higher ground we’ll build half decent cities for them to live and work in.
Hopefully.
… hopefully.
Honestly Japanese city infrastructure and planning is better than the european one, so americans should learn from Japan in that regard not europe.
- Especially integrating train stations with shopping malls.
- Make train companies real profitable by making the stations profitable by integrating them with businesses like hotel chains supermarkets and more using the location to their advantage
- Parking in your own garage or Parking House required, no curb side parking making roads smaller more unobstructed improving visibilty and safer.
Definitely agree with you there, I would also posit that everyone should be following the Japanese recycling, compost and trash models as well.
No reason why anyone is doing anything different than what the Japanese are doing in 2024.
Huh? Cars are more unattainable than ever, and third spaces are fewer than ever. Gen z has “no” money.
I’m a millennial, but I fucking hate driving and gave it up a while ago. My eyesight is really bad due to misformed corneas so I have trauma from being forced to drive at a younger age. I eventually moved to a major city and got rid of my car the first chance I could (fun fact, leases are scams!). I love being able to walk/take public transit anywhere I want now, but unfortunately leaving the city is incredibly hard.
Fuck cars.
Well how the fuck are they supposed to drive when car payment at 500+, gas is 3+ a gallon and car insurance is 1500 per premium! Not to mention potential repairs.
I make 80k a year and I can barely afford my car!
These articles are so bad. There is no actual research behind them. It’s all “it could be this”…well fucking dig into that maybe and get back to us with actual journalism.
Not to mention it’s all based on ba consulting firm findings. It’s McKinsey so they probably just want to lay people off and are using this research to support that recommendation.
Millennial chiming in. Donated my car to the humane society a couple years ago. Thankfully I live close enough to walk to work, have plenty of amenities near by, and a bus line a block away when it runs. I’ve saved so much money about it. If I need a car for a couple of days I rent and it’s still less than owning. Do not regret it at all.
Every now and then I think about buying a used car and the prices are absurd on top of all the maintenance, insurance, registration.
Ah, so it’s not just my kids (I’m Gen X). Neither has expressed any interest in driving. One’s a starving student, so I guess there’s that. But the other’s graduated and scored a cushy job where he could certainly afford wheels if he wanted. I asked him about it and he’s like nah. I’ll just take a lyft or whatever if I need it. And he’s a software dev so he spends the time on his laptop. I guess if he were driving, his time would be less productive? I dunno.
We actually went to the same tech convention last fall in Denver and shared a hotel. I knee-jerk rented a car thinking Denver sounds like a driving town. But parking at the convention was exorbitant and we wound up ride-sharing there anyway, so I am beginning to see the merit in his way of thinking? The only time we got any use out of the rental was the last day when we had a little free time before the flight and drove up to Red Rocks. But seriously, for that one trip, the rental was hardly worth it.
There’s been a big boom in interest in urbanism in recent years and increasing awareness of just how the US got so car dependent. Toss in a quick trip to Europe at some point, add in people explicitly saying “the reason you liked these old cities so much was because of transit and lack of cars”, and it’s an idea that spreads itself.
Yeah I hate urban sprawl and how the city planners where I live keep wanting to perpetuate it. I commute most days on an ebike and try to drive less. The only major exception is in my side-gig as a musician in a band. Just too much gear to carry around without 4 wheels.
Adding a trailer to your ebike let’s you have 4 wheels and the ability to carry gear without having to use a car.
I have actually thought about this. In the worst case, I would need a fairly large flatbed that could accommodate heavy bulky items like amps, PAs, and boards along with awkwardly long gear like mic stands. At least my new ebike has a fairly capable motor.
One possible advantage to biking to a gig might be that you could get closer to the venue for loading/unloading? What sucks hard is when you have no choice but to park at a lot several blocks away and haul everything over. This can be the case in old-town touristy areas with little vehicular road access.
For out-of-town gigs, we often carpool. If someone else is bringing the stage gear, I could possibly ebike with fairly minimal equipment to where they’re loading the van?
Of course if the venue has a proper stage with sound provided, much is this hassle goes away. At that point, I’d just need my instrument and a small pedal board.
Cars are expensive and driving really isn’t that fun outside rare circumstances that are quickly disappearing. I love cars, and I love a nice drive on a mountain road, but everything else isn’t nearly as nice as it used to be when there were fewer people driving, and less dependence on it.
Not to mention, cars are pretty boring these days. The vaguely cool ones are just remakes of old models, and even Ferrari is making SUVs.
The greatest enemy of good driving conditions is and always will be other drivers. The people who really care about being able to drive should be enthusiastically supporting getting others off the roads because congestion is inevitable.
Especially since it costs less total taxpayer money that way (the classic is Houston vs NYC vs Amsterdam, which spend something like 20%, 10%, and 4% of their municipal budgets on transportation respectively). You’re less likely to have congestion AND potholes in a city with trams and bike routes.
I love cars, love driving, and I work in self-driving cars because I’m convinced the only people doing it should be the people who see it as a hobby, just like riding horses. You have so many people on the roads who hate it, and drive horribly because they don’t care and it’s an absolute pain for them. Why should those people drive, other than the fact that we don’t have the technology yet to allow them not to?
(Even better, infrastructure to support them not to need cars at all, but that’s a different topic. And before we get the “trains are the solution to every problem” crew, I think self driving shuttles are a cool way to diminish vehicles vs cars, that can cover at the same cost more routes than buses, achieve a higher occupancy rate, and would need next to no infrastructure changes.)
Trains are not the solution to every problem.
Light rail intercity transportation is a good option, but it only makes sense on well-traveled routes. And while it is true that the trains induce significant demand – that is, the route they are on will BECOME well-traveled because the train access is so valuable that people want to be near it – this is only solving a few very narrow commute problems.
Trains ARE the solution to major commuter congestion, though, and for many well-developed metros are probably the only path to reducing congestion since you cannot just continue to add more roads.
Your autonomous shuttle idea might make sense for less-traveled routes, but pavement is incredibly expensive to maintain compared to rail and vehicles that have to carry around their power source around are seriously inefficient compared to a pantograph, not to even get in to rolling resistance. Busses are useful as a start, but in response to growth they should continue evolving sensibly – car to bus to trolly bus to tram to fully-separated light rail is a logical progression as a city grows, but a city that knows it is growing fast is often wise to skip steps to save longterm cost.
The actual full solution to the issue of cars is the same one it has been for all 10,000 years of the human urban experiment (less the last 60ish) – build towns that are primarily navigable on your own power. Don’t create robust social policies that cut off infill and multifamily residence. Don’t push all business and work sites to some far-flung corner compared to where people life. Don’t subsidize a fake-rural lifestyle in islands that cannot sustain themselves at the expense of the poor people living in old-development neighborhoods. Don’t build more roads that you can afford to maintain and don’t permit road geometries you know are going to kill people – zero routine deaths is the only acceptable number.
A city you can get around under your own power is less expensive to maintain and more pleasant to live in for most people.
Not to even get into the relative safety (or lack thereof for cars & roads).
The best time to drive a car was during the pandemic.
I had never seen so few cars on the road. The world felt positively idyllic.
That’s part of why I only go grocery shopping at like 8pm.
Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.
Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was… congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.
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When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.
I would actually attribute that more to people speeding and driving recklessly, as was endlessly documented.
I also agree that most speeds are too high to begin with, but it’s way more attributable to people just choosing to drive like maniacs post-pandemic.
The road deaths have continued to rise, as the congestion has risen again with it.
So it’s not just the congestion keeping us safe. It’s literally some people have just straight given up caring or never understood physics to begin with.
Nah, we know this isn’t the reason because in other countries that have better road design that actually takes psychology into mind for design speeds, they did not see the same uptick. Also, other countries are seeing gradual decreases in road deaths while the US continues to see increases.
You can also look at e.g., the dangerous by design reports and see very clearly WHERE the road fatalities are happening. During covid it was all over the map. Post covid, it is clearly skewing away from the blue cities.
It’s a very clear natural experiment with an obvious conclusion: the US has fundamentally unsafe road engineering. We focus on speed over safety in our designs, which in low congestion works perfectly (i.e., makes roads fast and unsafe) and in nominal conditions achieves neither.
Load up all of AASHTO into rockets and shoot them into the sun.
I’m not really trying to argue, because I don’t disagree about our road designs, however…
Then why are road deaths still increasing on roads where congestion is the norm, say I-5 in Seattle, for example?
I personally think it’s also a cultural thing in the USA, not just that the roads are designed more dangerously. You also have more people willing and ready to drive dangerously.
It IS a cultural thing, but you’re placing blame on bad actors when it’s a systemic problem – a systemic problem with the culture of US road engineering. That is, US road engineers do not have a robust culture of safety. The priority is and always has been speed and “level of service” (aka throughput) in the designs over safety or cost effectiveness or even pleasantness of the urban landscapes.
I’ll never buy the idea that a wide set of diverse people across an entire continent are all just worse than the rest of people around the world. The fact that the problem is widespread is proof the issue is not bad actors.
The US does have more people who shouldn’t be driving driving though, I’ll agree with that much. But it isn’t because they’re reckless lunatics that don’t care about other road users, and I’ll never buy the covid arguments that people all went NUTS during covid and started mowing down pedestrians – because no way that would’ve happened in JUST the US and nowhere else. It is, again, a systemic issue. The same one. Since driving is essential for most people to live their lives in the US, people who had no business driving are driving. Because of our INCREDIBLY terrible philosophy towards urban design and road constructions, we have pigeonholed ourselves into an expensive, unsafe urban landscape.
A lot of mass transit got downsized during covid, for example. That could’ve put more bad drivers on the roads – but it isn’t because they’re monsters, it’s because they have no choice.
Gen z earns like $15/hr.
Obligatory fuck McKinsey.
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I can’t drive because I’m visually impaired. I know I’m too visually impaired to drive because I can’t even grocery shop properly with my shit eyesight - with a basket, let alone pushing a trolley!
But I pass the eye exams they make you take before you get a license and ive double checked with my optometrist and yes, my vision score is within the legal limits to drive as long as I wear my glasses… It’s baffling, because I absolutely should not be driving! I can’t see shit!
So I don’t drive.
When I say “I’m too blind to drive” some people ask if I can just lie about my vision and fake my way through, because “you really need a licence” and when I explain I can legally get a licence I just don’t, for everyone’s safety, they act like I’m being a selfish child for not doing the adult thing and getting my licence. Just because it can doesn’t mean I should.
I do cycle, pedalling a 20kg frame of metal at 15km/h on a bike path feels a lot safer than driving a 1 tonne hunk of metal at 80km/h on a highway. Without my bike I’d be pretty fucked in terms of my independence and being able to do what needs to be done as an adult. Fortunately my vision isn’t degenerative.
But in the last 5 years, especially since 2020 covid locksdowns, I feel like there are more people on the road that shouldn’t be. There’s just a huge increase in the frequency of “silly mistakes” - people swerving into the bike lane without looking to avoid a speed bump, people running a red turn signal because they’re looking at the green straight signal, people merging lanes at dangerously low speeds, no one putting their headlights on in the rain, everyone forgetting to indicate, people stopping more abruptly instead of slowing and anticipating a stop sign, and my personal favourite, everyone cutting corners in residential areas like they’re a formula 1 driver, just turning into the oncoming traffic of the street they’re turning into.
