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To bring some numbers into this otherwise useless exchange of made-up anecdotes: half of all households in Berlin do not own a car. To get back to useless anec
by shaki-dora 8y ago
To bring some numbers into this otherwise useless exchange of made-up anecdotes: half of all households in Berlin do not own a car.
To get back to useless anecdotes: as far as I can tell, this is not a result of poverty. Indeed car ownership is far more prevalent among the poorer immigrant community than the younger hipster community. I know people owning apartments but not cars. It’s simply a shift in the value system.
- varjag 8y agoYounger people tend to have both smaller incomes and smaller families, so it's neither anything new nor surprising. Give them 15 years.
- shaki-dora 8y agoYou missed the part where I mentioned people owning apartments yet not cars, and also where I explicitly referred to my (admittedly subjective) impression of a subset of car owners as ‘poorer’. To expand: this is a rather well-known cultural effect, with first-gen immigrants valuing wealth and its symbols more than the postmaterialistic boheme. The families I know generally use attachable bike carriages for their children, and car sharing for exceptional needs.
- varjag 8y agoMeh, I owned an apartment and didn't own a car until I was 30, until the kindergarten commute with two bus changes really started to get old. You extrapolate the trend from an early datapoint. Maybe where you live car ownership is for poor, but not here. A rustbucket in Norway would buy you a great car in Germany.
- nicoburns 8y agoWell sure, but if half a people living in an area don't have a car, that's a very significant difference to everyone having a car. When the young people grow up, they'll be new young people to replace them. And fewer families tend to want to live in city centres anyway.