The other day I showed Pew data on the things Americans consider necessities. I speculated that the economic crisis has brought us to an inflection point. We’re seeing the decline of the old auto-housing consumption bundle which powered post-war growth. And while certain new trends in consumption and lifestyle are emerging, nothing has yet come to form a “new normal.”
Writing in Esquire, the ever-insightful Nate Silver looks into whether or not America’s once-great car culture is coming to an end.
(Graph via Esquire)
To sort this out, I built a regression model that accounts for both gas prices and the unemployment rate in a given month and attempts to predict from this data how much the typical American will drive… [The results of the model are shown for the month of January in each year since 1980 in the graph above.]…
Americans should have driven slightly more in January 2009 than they had a year earlier. But instead, as we’ve described, they drove somewhat less. In fact, they drove about 8 percent less than the model predicted.
For people like me who live in big cities where one does not need a vehicle to get by, there is a certain romantic attraction to this story. Why, if only all those Bubbas could ditch their SUVs, take the monorail to work, and buy their families a bunch of Schwinns, life would be just grand!… In the real world, of course — outside perhaps a half dozen major metropolitan areas — American society has been built around the automobile.
Still, there is some evidence that more Americans are at least entertaining the idea of leading a more car-free existence. Between October 2004, when gas prices first hit two dollars a gallon, and December 2008, when they fell below this threshold, three cities with among the largest declines in housing prices were Las Vegas (-37 percent), Detroit (-34 percent), and Phoenix (-15 percent), each highly car-dependent cities. Conversely, the two markets with the largest gains in housing prices were Portland, Oregon (+19 percent), and Seattle (+18 percent), communities that are more friendly to alternate modes of transportation.
The exceptionally sluggish pace of new-vehicle sales, moreover, in the face of extremely attractive incentives being offered by the automakers might imply that Americans are considering making more-permanent adjustments to their lifestyles. And the denigration of the brand of the Big Three automakers in light of their financial difficulties — about one third of Americans have generally told pollsters they will buy only an American-made car — might reduce some of the patriotic associations with the activity of driving. Building a light-rail system might not persuade Bubba to get rid of his vehicle — but forcing him to buy foreign might.
If Silver is right (and his analysis looks good to me) that’s another nail in the coffin for old fordist consumption bundle.
May 7th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
As with high speed rail, the change comes when transit is more convenient, cheaper and faster than driving. In the past I’ve lived in NYC, Cambridge, MA and the SF Bay Area without a car and did just fine. In Portland, transit friendly place that it is, we still have two cars. Sometimes one doesn’t get driven for several days at a time, but it’s backup and a time saver. Because of our peculiar schedules, I often take the bus 3 days a week. I get around downtown on streetcar/light rail, sometimes even if I have a car downtown.
I don’t know what it would take to get me to buy an American car again. I have a friend with a Ford and it seems OK. When I rent American, generally GM, they seem badly designed. Something would have to convince me that the known quality of Japanese was worth leaving.
May 7th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Maybe part of this great reset process is the motor vehicle being seen more as a utilitarian thing, and less as a status symbol or personal statement. Something like a dishwasher or stove. While a few people are extra brand conscious, most of us care about whether it works and maybe whether it’s colour suits our kitchens. I dont’ think too many people in the USA worry about “Buying American” when it comes to their appliances and this could be happening with cars too.
If the American big three all become foreign owned, which is possible, then owning a Dodge won’t carry any extra patriotic weight than an American-built Honda.
Also, when the motor vehicle becomes just one transportation option among many at your disposal that work well depending on the circumstances (bike, walk, bus, metro, streetcar), and you spend less time in it, then exactly which one you have will match the uses you need it for more than any status requirements. And if you part it in a condo parkade, where no one can see it anyway, instead of your suburban driveway, the status effect is somewhat lost.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:01 am
My friends report that it is the long trips they have reduced, not the local driving. They are also expecting to keep their older, still reliable and stylish-looking cars longer. Bad news for Detroit …
May 8th, 2009 at 8:18 am
I would be interested in examing what other factors contributed to the large variance between predicted and actual in earlier years (1980, 1990, 1995 & 1999 especially); economic boom and bust? Silver’s work is always thought-provoking.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:18 am
“Why, if only all those Bubbas could ditch their SUVs”
Nice. If the author wanted to make a snide comment, maybe he could have been more accurate and said pick-up trucks. Most people I know driving SUV’s are women/men with families, taking the kids to the soccer practices, grocery stores etc. Yes, there is a reason SUV’s were so successful and that’s because they could carry a great amount of cargo.
“take the monorail to work, and buy their families a bunch of Schwinns, life would be just grand!”
Yeah, we could all sit around in a drum circle with our organic food, and talk about how to make life more “fair.” All the while making sure we never actually come into contact with the people who are different from us.
May 8th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I don’t understand the conclusion that Americans should have driven more in January than a year earlier. If that prediction was based on gas prices and unemployment, then it should have been predicted downward, not upward. You must also to include economic sentiment in a prediction as well, which deflated mightily after the stock market crash last fall.
Also, Why start in 1980? The car culture reaches back to the 1950’s. The early 1980’s recession was bottoming out at the start of the above graph, and the effects on miles driven from the gas shortages a few years earlier aren’t even on the graph.
Looking closer at the data, one sees that miles driven appears to be a lagging indicator. In 1982 the “actual” miles bottomed even though the “predicted” line had turned into an upward trend a year earlier. From ‘84 through ‘88 “actual” trailed “predicted,” only to overshoot significantly by 1990.
Note a similar divergence in 1999 to now, yet “actual” miles increased to eventually surpass “predicted” miles for several years this decade. In short, the current divergence between “actual” and “predicted” miles is not inconsistent with the overall upward trend demonstrated over the entire graph.
Just sayin’.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:28 am
In a way I am glad to see this car culture be contained. Houston has millions of acres of freeway frontage dedicated to CARS! This is just insanity. Perhaps this crisis will also be a boost to expanding public transportation models?