7 ms·

The young are falling out of love with home ownership, cars, dating, drinking etc. I suspect a lack of money is the common factor.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I don’t think that car ownership is related to poverty or absence of disposable income. In fact, a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car and can get away without one. Subreddits like r/solarpunk, r/fuckcars, r/notjustbikes, along with the push for 15 minute cities are a testament that young people dont want to be in the grip of petrol companies or owning a car as they are not sustainable, cause traffic, accidents, and on and on.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  > In fact, a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car and can get away without one. You can get away without one, that is if you don’t mind sharing transit with violent junkies in any North American city. Transit can be down right terrifying to use these days.
  - afunctionof 4y ago
    I would be interested in seeing a graph comparing the rate of automobile fatalities to the rate of public transit fatalities.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      I'm not sure what value there would be in that comparison. Cars and public transit are not filling the same role in society, regardless of how often that claim is made on HN. And that's completely ignoring the counterfactual of how mortality overall would change if we actually tried to make public transit fill all the roles cars have today.
  - knowledge-clay 4y ago
    I’ve relied on public transit for 7 years in 3 different cities and never once have I encountered a “violent junkie”. It’s far safer to take transit than to drive. Cars kill 40,000 people a year in the US. Cars are the leading cause of death for Americans age 15-24. These are deaths we just normalize and wave away because it’s the living cost of car-dependent infrastructure. But it’s not and shouldn’t be normal or acceptable. => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    It depends. Anecdotally, in Boston the MBTA is one of the "falling apart" systems. I could still rely on it to commute to my college / job, and the worst that has happened was sometimes being late due to delays. There are certainly a lot of sketchy people, but I have never seen someone attacked or have anything stolen or been harassed myself - then again I am a man and I'm certain it's different for women. But more importantly, when living in Boston I never had to use the train. Only when commuting. Because when I lived in Boston everything was at most a 3 mile walk. Even in the really bad weather I could layer up still get places without public transit. Now I'm in a less urban area but it's the same: I don't have a car and rarely end up using transit / Lyft. I do get groceries and things delivered though, but my job and everything else is within walking distance. I still agree it would be a lot better if public transit was more reliable, but I think many people in cities can be well-off without a car. Not anecdotally I know that most of the college students in Boston don't have a car (especially because there is basically no parking...)
    - dublinben 4y ago
      There's no shortage of parking in Boston, the market price of $40/day or $400 a month is just unaffordable for most college students. The ones driving exotic sports cars sure don't have any problem finding parking in the city. As you point out, when you can find all of life's necessities within a reasonable walking distance, the need to own a car is significantly diminished. That's the goal that "anti-car" activists are pushing for.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Subreddits like r/solarpunk, r/fuckcars, r/notjustbikes, along with the push for 15 minute cities are a testament ... that the Internet is dominated by the small niche of loud people who think other people want to hear their opinion. That's it. Anybody who is not deep inside the Reddit (and HN, for that matter) bubble can quickly appreciate how dissimilar the viewpoints on Reddit are from the real world.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Yes, most people are lurkers. That doesn't mean that lurkers can't show their presence with interactions in the form of up or downvotes or that the different subreddits, hashtags, and so on aren't a mirror of the user base. Now, I understand your cynicism, but you'd be naive to believe that small pockets of change are not happening. But then again, what does a European know about European cities? Anyhow, I found this somewhere on HN, I am certain you will enjoy the irony. > everyone is preening, bragging, trying to seem better than you, claiming to have the moral high ground, or the only correct answer.
    - danaris 4y ago
      > Yes, most people are lurkers. No, most people are not on Reddit.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      Berlin is super progressive. You absolutely don't need a car in Berlin. Berlin certainly has the highest percentage of people (in Germany) aggressively telling everyone that you shouldn't want a car. Around 30% of households in Berlin do not own a car. The "I like bikes and I bike everywhere" group is a small minority. I know, I'm one of them. As soon as it's even slightly rainy mine is the only bike in front of the super market (though I'm sure it would be slightly different in Berlin, or at least in some parts of Berlin). But if you looked at surveys, you'd think that driving your car to the super market would be the exception. People on reddit talking about how much they hate cars aren't representative.
      - 4y ago
- randomdata 4y ago
  > a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car Even in this small town (~2,000 people) in which I live I have almost no reason for a car. Everything I need is in comfortable walking distance... Other than family and friends who live in other places that I like to visit from time to time. When I was young there was enough economic hardship around that people had to disperse to make a living, leaving those social ties I established all over the place. With the strong economy we've been living for a number of years one has been comfortably able to stay put; living a great life anywhere they want. Now everyone in your life is able to remain close. If I could walk to their homes, that would certainly remove the last reason I keep a car. The younger people have that option. I wonder if that's what has changed?
lnsru 4y ago
I absolutely share your opinion. There is no money left for a car after paying all the bills in euro inflation zone. 200€ just to own something, another 100€ insurance with maintenance and the insanely expensive fuel on top. Let’s say 150€ when car is used occasionally.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Yeah, the European economy is in complete collapse. "You will own nothing"...
  - suction 4y ago
    [dead]
throwayyy479087 4y ago
Ehhh I know a lot of wealthy young people who LOVE bikes.
CalRobert 4y ago
I have plenty of cash and a paid-off house and I'm planning to spend even more money so I can live somewhere I don't need a car.
- Xylakant 4y ago
  I have plenty of cash because I’m living in a place where I don’t need a car.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    It certainly helps! But in California (my home) at least neighbourhoods that are walkable and nice often have very expensive homes. We liked South Park, San Diego, but there were almost no homes under $1 million for instance.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      Changing that is the entire goal of the "anti-car" crowd, right? They want city-planers to build neighborhoods that are walkable, accessible by public transport and don't require owning a car. And they want them everywhere, for everyone.
      - hooverd 4y ago
        The anti-car crowd has in the US has that new convert zeal. If you poke them enough, a lot will say that no one anywhere should be allowed to own a car. Not that are cities aren't horribly car centric though, but I don't think we should empty out the countryside to get rid of cars.
        CalRobert 4y ago
        I'm deep in the anti-car crowd and virtually _nobody_ says that.
      - CalRobert 4y ago
        We definitely want them available to everyone! strongtowns.org/ were at the forefront of this and they're not even "anti-car" really, just "anti-forced-car". It shouldn't be illegal to open a restaurant without a bunch of parking around it, etc.
randomdata 4y ago
But then why would they have no money? Their parents are rich (per the article) and they're young (high school age) so we should be able to assume that their basic costs are funded by those rich parents. Is it because of this intense fear of getting a job that was starting to emerge when I was young and seems to have really taken off since?
- tristor 4y ago
  > Is it because of this intense fear of getting a job that was starting to emerge when I was young and seems to have really taken off since? Something odd, that I haven't seen many folks talk about, is that a lot of jobs are tacitly considered "beneath them" for Gen Z who grow up in middle class or higher affluence families. This is despite the fact that their parents don't think this, but the kids see a lifestyle on social media and an expectation that they have set for themselves that is not realistic and refuse to accept anything less. My own teenager is going through something similar, and it's a huge argument every time we talk about her getting a summer job. The type of work I did (stocking shelves and later running a till at a grocery store) when I was her age appalls her, even though it was by my standards pretty easy since at least I was inside in the air conditioning while working during the summer. At the same time, hardly anyone in Gen Z would dare utter any statement that might be considered to be classist, because many Gen Zers believe in some chopped up Marxist fantasy, and consider classism one of the deadly sins, saying that those jobs are beneath them and they think they're better than the kids who take those jobs would get them cancelled. But that's exactly what they're thinking. They all want to be YouTubers or influencers, not the person who works the drive through at McDonald's.
  - scottLobster 4y ago
    To be fair, no one wants to be the person who works the drive through at McDonald's. Back in the day it used to be good money for a high school kid, and maybe it arguably still is, but high school kids, particularly high performing ones, don't have time for part-time jobs that aren't contributing to a college resume. Let alone time to spend any money they make with friends.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
N=1, I am young, have a great job, I don't own a car, I haven't owned a car in 5 years, and I deliberately avoid living in places where I need to own a car. I am not interested in owning a "house", too expensive, there is little to no reason to strap myself with long term responsibilities. I am also not interested in drinking, given all evidence on how bad alcohol is, I am not keen on destroying the only tool I have that allows me to live as well as I do. Unless of course you mean drinking for social reasons, which is another thing entirely but I don't do that either.
- dymk 4y ago
  > there is little to no reason to strap myself with long term responsibilities equity, retirement
  - bootsmann 4y ago
    Stocks are better for that in every way. If you buy a house you are dependent on political will to arbitrarily keep house prices high while for stocks the political incentives for growth are guaranteed to go in your favour.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      You don't need the value to remain in any one place. You just need your house to not tank relative to the rest of them so that you can leverage up when you get rich and develop a fetish for "good school district" and downsize when the next is empty. It's a store of value, not an investment. The goal isn't to get rich. It's to not have to pay rent in retirement (yes, I know property taxes).
    - karim 4y ago
      Especially given current population trends — there are no guarantees you'll be able to sell your house for much more than you bought it in 30 years.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  And never experienced a severe rent shock or an asshole landlord apparently. I hope that remains the case. Having been a renter for the last 10 years, I'm sick of landlords dragging their heels on repairs (in one case I had to take a landlord to small claims court) and my monthly rent spiking 6-10% or else going up by a mere 2-3%, forcing me to lock-in longer term leases to save money. Especially now that the wife and I are in the family formation part of our lives, buying a house in the suburbs is looking more and more attractive. More space, room to do stuff at home, a fixed-rate payment to plan around etc. But I'm assuming that doesn't apply to you at your current stage of life. From a financial perspective, renting is great for staying relatively mobile, but if you're planning to stay in one place for more than a few years, buying is probably the way to go. Nerdwallet has a good calculator comparing the two with a couple of dozen factors taken into account: https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/rent-vs-buy-calculator https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/rent-vs-buy-calculator I agree with you that at the end of the day housing is an expense, I'd much rather fund my retirement with stocks. Although once the kids have moved out downsizing might be able to net a few hundred grand more, but that's a decision for 30 years from now.
jacknews 4y ago
I'm by far not a millennial, and not cash-strapped, but I've completely fallen out of love with cars now I live somewhere where there is ubiquitous and cheap 'automated' transport, ie public transport, uber, grab, etc. I use a bike when I want to be 'free' to just wander. A car can never be that anyway, in a city. I get that a car is the only realistic option in the 'great outdoors', but anywhere even slightly dense, they're a pain to buy, to maintain, to drive, to park. If you want the fun of driving, go to a track. If you want to get around, there are often better options. Car ownership seem like an outdated aspiration, IMHO.
trgn 4y ago
No. Young people always have had no money. It's the nature of being young. Cars are really just trash technology that has made city life worse. Older generation have an emotional attachment to cars, and project a lot of virtuous attributes onto it (freedom, independence, wealth, ...). Younger generations just do that less. They accurately see what cars are. The young have that luxury. They're not at that age yet where they need to capitulate to the cult of the car. Once you have children, the thousands of vectors pushing a family in all directions, car life in some burb is the only one that's financially affordable. It's the other way around. Youth reject cars because cars are objectively shit. As people get older, options dwindle, aspirations get adjusted, and people submit.
- noobermin 4y ago
  I feel like cars are only good for older people of a certain age, and as healthcare (for now) has gotten better for well-to-do people, they can continue on older than the greatest generation could. But, when they hit 80 or 90 or so, or they get disabled, the car centric cities will turn out to be very inhibiting for older folks, and many end up feeling isolated. It is also a major problem with car centric city planning that isn't as well discussed IMO.
  - trgn 4y ago
    Absolutely. It's a huge cliff. Old people eventually can't drive, and in car centric places, immediately lose all independence. we're going through it right now in my family. Keep your ears open and you hear it all the time; "grandpa drove into a parked car, not sure if he should still be driving". I plan to retire (finances willing) in a walkable city, for just that reason. Same argument at the other end of age spectrum. American children have no independence, only because cities are dangerous because of cars.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
The young have embraced a generational change against the poison of materialism. Asceticism is the future.
somethingreen 4y ago
It's probably this. Best things about cars are luxury, not strictly utility. Having to own a car and drive it everywhere every day can be pretty miserable. Being able to afford owning a car and not having to drive it all the time is wonderful. Freedom of having an option to just go anywhere at any time is not something I ever thought I would appreciate so much before I had to get a car for security reasons. But it absolutely is a luxury as even mediocre public or commercial services will get you 90% of own car utility. And good public or commercial services can eliminate whole categories of car use cases.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

I don’t think that car ownership is related to poverty or absence of disposable income. In fact, a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car and can get away without one. Subreddits like r/solarpunk, r/fuckcars, r/notjustbikes, along with the push for 15 minute cities are a testament that young people dont want to be in the grip of petrol companies or owning a car as they are not sustainable, cause traffic, accidents, and on and on.

BizarreByte 4y ago
> In fact, a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car and can get away without one. You can get away without one, that is if you don’t mind sharing transit with violent junkies in any North American city. Transit can be down right terrifying to use these days.
- afunctionof 4y ago
  I would be interested in seeing a graph comparing the rate of automobile fatalities to the rate of public transit fatalities.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I'm not sure what value there would be in that comparison. Cars and public transit are not filling the same role in society, regardless of how often that claim is made on HN. And that's completely ignoring the counterfactual of how mortality overall would change if we actually tried to make public transit fill all the roles cars have today.
- knowledge-clay 4y ago
  I’ve relied on public transit for 7 years in 3 different cities and never once have I encountered a “violent junkie”. It’s far safer to take transit than to drive. Cars kill 40,000 people a year in the US. Cars are the leading cause of death for Americans age 15-24. These are deaths we just normalize and wave away because it’s the living cost of car-dependent infrastructure. But it’s not and shouldn’t be normal or acceptable. => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  It depends. Anecdotally, in Boston the MBTA is one of the "falling apart" systems. I could still rely on it to commute to my college / job, and the worst that has happened was sometimes being late due to delays. There are certainly a lot of sketchy people, but I have never seen someone attacked or have anything stolen or been harassed myself - then again I am a man and I'm certain it's different for women. But more importantly, when living in Boston I never had to use the train. Only when commuting. Because when I lived in Boston everything was at most a 3 mile walk. Even in the really bad weather I could layer up still get places without public transit. Now I'm in a less urban area but it's the same: I don't have a car and rarely end up using transit / Lyft. I do get groceries and things delivered though, but my job and everything else is within walking distance. I still agree it would be a lot better if public transit was more reliable, but I think many people in cities can be well-off without a car. Not anecdotally I know that most of the college students in Boston don't have a car (especially because there is basically no parking...)
  - dublinben 4y ago
    There's no shortage of parking in Boston, the market price of $40/day or $400 a month is just unaffordable for most college students. The ones driving exotic sports cars sure don't have any problem finding parking in the city. As you point out, when you can find all of life's necessities within a reasonable walking distance, the need to own a car is significantly diminished. That's the goal that "anti-car" activists are pushing for.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> Subreddits like r/solarpunk, r/fuckcars, r/notjustbikes, along with the push for 15 minute cities are a testament ... that the Internet is dominated by the small niche of loud people who think other people want to hear their opinion. That's it. Anybody who is not deep inside the Reddit (and HN, for that matter) bubble can quickly appreciate how dissimilar the viewpoints on Reddit are from the real world.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Yes, most people are lurkers. That doesn't mean that lurkers can't show their presence with interactions in the form of up or downvotes or that the different subreddits, hashtags, and so on aren't a mirror of the user base. Now, I understand your cynicism, but you'd be naive to believe that small pockets of change are not happening. But then again, what does a European know about European cities? Anyhow, I found this somewhere on HN, I am certain you will enjoy the irony. > everyone is preening, bragging, trying to seem better than you, claiming to have the moral high ground, or the only correct answer.
  - danaris 4y ago
    > Yes, most people are lurkers. No, most people are not on Reddit.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Berlin is super progressive. You absolutely don't need a car in Berlin. Berlin certainly has the highest percentage of people (in Germany) aggressively telling everyone that you shouldn't want a car. Around 30% of households in Berlin do not own a car. The "I like bikes and I bike everywhere" group is a small minority. I know, I'm one of them. As soon as it's even slightly rainy mine is the only bike in front of the super market (though I'm sure it would be slightly different in Berlin, or at least in some parts of Berlin). But if you looked at surveys, you'd think that driving your car to the super market would be the exception. People on reddit talking about how much they hate cars aren't representative.
    - 4y ago
randomdata 4y ago
> a well off person in a well functioning city has little if any reason to own a car Even in this small town (~2,000 people) in which I live I have almost no reason for a car. Everything I need is in comfortable walking distance... Other than family and friends who live in other places that I like to visit from time to time. When I was young there was enough economic hardship around that people had to disperse to make a living, leaving those social ties I established all over the place. With the strong economy we've been living for a number of years one has been comfortably able to stay put; living a great life anywhere they want. Now everyone in your life is able to remain close. If I could walk to their homes, that would certainly remove the last reason I keep a car. The younger people have that option. I wonder if that's what has changed?

lnsru 4y ago

I absolutely share your opinion. There is no money left for a car after paying all the bills in euro inflation zone. 200€ just to own something, another 100€ insurance with maintenance and the insanely expensive fuel on top. Let’s say 150€ when car is used occasionally.

nivenkos 4y ago
Yeah, the European economy is in complete collapse. "You will own nothing"...
- suction 4y ago
  [dead]

throwayyy479087 4y ago

Ehhh I know a lot of wealthy young people who LOVE bikes.

CalRobert 4y ago

I have plenty of cash and a paid-off house and I'm planning to spend even more money so I can live somewhere I don't need a car.

Xylakant 4y ago
I have plenty of cash because I’m living in a place where I don’t need a car.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  It certainly helps! But in California (my home) at least neighbourhoods that are walkable and nice often have very expensive homes. We liked South Park, San Diego, but there were almost no homes under $1 million for instance.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Changing that is the entire goal of the "anti-car" crowd, right? They want city-planers to build neighborhoods that are walkable, accessible by public transport and don't require owning a car. And they want them everywhere, for everyone.
    - hooverd 4y ago
      The anti-car crowd has in the US has that new convert zeal. If you poke them enough, a lot will say that no one anywhere should be allowed to own a car. Not that are cities aren't horribly car centric though, but I don't think we should empty out the countryside to get rid of cars.
      - CalRobert 4y ago
        I'm deep in the anti-car crowd and virtually _nobody_ says that.
    - CalRobert 4y ago
      We definitely want them available to everyone! strongtowns.org/ were at the forefront of this and they're not even "anti-car" really, just "anti-forced-car". It shouldn't be illegal to open a restaurant without a bunch of parking around it, etc.

randomdata 4y ago

But then why would they have no money? Their parents are rich (per the article) and they're young (high school age) so we should be able to assume that their basic costs are funded by those rich parents. Is it because of this intense fear of getting a job that was starting to emerge when I was young and seems to have really taken off since?

tristor 4y ago
> Is it because of this intense fear of getting a job that was starting to emerge when I was young and seems to have really taken off since? Something odd, that I haven't seen many folks talk about, is that a lot of jobs are tacitly considered "beneath them" for Gen Z who grow up in middle class or higher affluence families. This is despite the fact that their parents don't think this, but the kids see a lifestyle on social media and an expectation that they have set for themselves that is not realistic and refuse to accept anything less. My own teenager is going through something similar, and it's a huge argument every time we talk about her getting a summer job. The type of work I did (stocking shelves and later running a till at a grocery store) when I was her age appalls her, even though it was by my standards pretty easy since at least I was inside in the air conditioning while working during the summer. At the same time, hardly anyone in Gen Z would dare utter any statement that might be considered to be classist, because many Gen Zers believe in some chopped up Marxist fantasy, and consider classism one of the deadly sins, saying that those jobs are beneath them and they think they're better than the kids who take those jobs would get them cancelled. But that's exactly what they're thinking. They all want to be YouTubers or influencers, not the person who works the drive through at McDonald's.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  To be fair, no one wants to be the person who works the drive through at McDonald's. Back in the day it used to be good money for a high school kid, and maybe it arguably still is, but high school kids, particularly high performing ones, don't have time for part-time jobs that aren't contributing to a college resume. Let alone time to spend any money they make with friends.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

N=1, I am young, have a great job, I don't own a car, I haven't owned a car in 5 years, and I deliberately avoid living in places where I need to own a car. I am not interested in owning a "house", too expensive, there is little to no reason to strap myself with long term responsibilities. I am also not interested in drinking, given all evidence on how bad alcohol is, I am not keen on destroying the only tool I have that allows me to live as well as I do. Unless of course you mean drinking for social reasons, which is another thing entirely but I don't do that either.

dymk 4y ago
> there is little to no reason to strap myself with long term responsibilities equity, retirement
- bootsmann 4y ago
  Stocks are better for that in every way. If you buy a house you are dependent on political will to arbitrarily keep house prices high while for stocks the political incentives for growth are guaranteed to go in your favour.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    You don't need the value to remain in any one place. You just need your house to not tank relative to the rest of them so that you can leverage up when you get rich and develop a fetish for "good school district" and downsize when the next is empty. It's a store of value, not an investment. The goal isn't to get rich. It's to not have to pay rent in retirement (yes, I know property taxes).
  - karim 4y ago
    Especially given current population trends — there are no guarantees you'll be able to sell your house for much more than you bought it in 30 years.
scottLobster 4y ago
And never experienced a severe rent shock or an asshole landlord apparently. I hope that remains the case. Having been a renter for the last 10 years, I'm sick of landlords dragging their heels on repairs (in one case I had to take a landlord to small claims court) and my monthly rent spiking 6-10% or else going up by a mere 2-3%, forcing me to lock-in longer term leases to save money. Especially now that the wife and I are in the family formation part of our lives, buying a house in the suburbs is looking more and more attractive. More space, room to do stuff at home, a fixed-rate payment to plan around etc. But I'm assuming that doesn't apply to you at your current stage of life. From a financial perspective, renting is great for staying relatively mobile, but if you're planning to stay in one place for more than a few years, buying is probably the way to go. Nerdwallet has a good calculator comparing the two with a couple of dozen factors taken into account: https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/rent-vs-buy-calculator https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/rent-vs-buy-calculator I agree with you that at the end of the day housing is an expense, I'd much rather fund my retirement with stocks. Although once the kids have moved out downsizing might be able to net a few hundred grand more, but that's a decision for 30 years from now.

jacknews 4y ago

I'm by far not a millennial, and not cash-strapped, but I've completely fallen out of love with cars now I live somewhere where there is ubiquitous and cheap 'automated' transport, ie public transport, uber, grab, etc. I use a bike when I want to be 'free' to just wander. A car can never be that anyway, in a city. I get that a car is the only realistic option in the 'great outdoors', but anywhere even slightly dense, they're a pain to buy, to maintain, to drive, to park. If you want the fun of driving, go to a track. If you want to get around, there are often better options. Car ownership seem like an outdated aspiration, IMHO.

trgn 4y ago

No. Young people always have had no money. It's the nature of being young. Cars are really just trash technology that has made city life worse. Older generation have an emotional attachment to cars, and project a lot of virtuous attributes onto it (freedom, independence, wealth, ...). Younger generations just do that less. They accurately see what cars are. The young have that luxury. They're not at that age yet where they need to capitulate to the cult of the car. Once you have children, the thousands of vectors pushing a family in all directions, car life in some burb is the only one that's financially affordable. It's the other way around. Youth reject cars because cars are objectively shit. As people get older, options dwindle, aspirations get adjusted, and people submit.

noobermin 4y ago
I feel like cars are only good for older people of a certain age, and as healthcare (for now) has gotten better for well-to-do people, they can continue on older than the greatest generation could. But, when they hit 80 or 90 or so, or they get disabled, the car centric cities will turn out to be very inhibiting for older folks, and many end up feeling isolated. It is also a major problem with car centric city planning that isn't as well discussed IMO.
- trgn 4y ago
  Absolutely. It's a huge cliff. Old people eventually can't drive, and in car centric places, immediately lose all independence. we're going through it right now in my family. Keep your ears open and you hear it all the time; "grandpa drove into a parked car, not sure if he should still be driving". I plan to retire (finances willing) in a walkable city, for just that reason. Same argument at the other end of age spectrum. American children have no independence, only because cities are dangerous because of cars.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

The young have embraced a generational change against the poison of materialism. Asceticism is the future.

somethingreen 4y ago

It's probably this. Best things about cars are luxury, not strictly utility. Having to own a car and drive it everywhere every day can be pretty miserable. Being able to afford owning a car and not having to drive it all the time is wonderful. Freedom of having an option to just go anywhere at any time is not something I ever thought I would appreciate so much before I had to get a car for security reasons. But it absolutely is a luxury as even mediocre public or commercial services will get you 90% of own car utility. And good public or commercial services can eliminate whole categories of car use cases.