Why Americans, particularly millennials, have fallen out of love with cars

[the urban politician]

^ I’m not insinuating anything related to red or blue states.

Don’t confuse me with Crawford’s nonsense. I’m just saying that in Chicago’s more affluent suburbs, you don’t see people driving pickup trucks unless they are tradesmen. There is a working assumption here that a pickup truck is not an appropriate vehicle for a professional.

Cross the Wisconsin border and it’s like night and day. You see pickup trucks everywhere. Both are blue States. It’s just a socioeconomic and cultural thing. Perhaps well to do people in Texas drive pickup trucks, but around here that’s not the culture.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Don’t confuse me with Crawford’s nonsense. I’m just saying that in Chicago’s more affluent suburbs, you don’t see people driving pickup trucks unless they are tradesmen. There is a working assumption here that a pickup truck is not an appropriate vehicle for a professional.

Which is exactly what I wrote. There are different status cars in (say) affluent suburban Chicago as compared to (say) affluent suburban Dallas.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

^ I’m not insinuating anything related to red or blue states.

Don’t confuse me with Crawford’s nonsense. I’m just saying that in Chicago’s more affluent suburbs, you don’t see people driving pickup trucks unless they are tradesmen. There is a working assumption here that a pickup truck is not an appropriate vehicle for a professional.

Cross the Wisconsin border and it’s like night and day. You see pickup trucks everywhere. Both are blue States. It’s just a socioeconomic and cultural thing. Perhaps well to do people in Texas drive pickup trucks, but around here that’s not the culture.

I agree. Chicago has a strong identity of its own and that really doesn't include trucks. Even in the 'burbs, I found the area has a strong urban/ city oriented vibe. Texas cities still strongly identity with Texas...which means guns and trucks. Even liberals have guns and trucks.

[C.]

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ke...of2&yptr=yahoo

Ride sharing is cheaper than car ownership, especially in an urban area.

[jmecklenborg]

Some states still have a lot of dirt and gravel roads. All you have to do is look at a map for gravel bicycle races and see where those are. https://gravelmap.com/#@39.803023403...96144,8,hybrid


Your Chevy Cruze isn't going to do well in those areas. The counties are generally in charge of paving those roads and they often don't in order to keep taxes low.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Some states still have a lot of dirt and gravel roads.

true, but you don't need a jacked-up F-150 to drive down a gravel road.

every summer we go to a family reunion at my cousin's place in rural SW michigan that requires driving down some gravel country roads and our little AWD mazda CX-5 handles them with aplomb.

[JManc]

98% of these huge trucks will live out their lives as mall crawlers.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by CIA

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ke...of2&yptr=yahoo

Ride sharing is cheaper than car ownership, especially in an urban area.

It's also vastly inferior..

[Jonesy55]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

It's also vastly inferior..

Depends what you use it for. Obviously it makes no sense if you are commuting daily by car, but if you are a car owner who mostly uses your car for going to the supermarket a couple of times a week and maybe a trip somewhere for a few hours at the weekend then a Zipcar type service would probably be better than ownership.

[Jonesy55]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Some states still have a lot of dirt and gravel roads. All you have to do is look at a map for gravel bicycle races and see where those are. https://gravelmap.com/#@39.803023403...96144,8,hybrid


Your Chevy Cruze isn't going to do well in those areas. The counties are generally in charge of paving those roads and they often don't in order to keep taxes low.

Keep taxes low by not paving roads to save households a few hundred $ per year, which then means those same households have to spend many thousands of $ extra on offroad capable vehicles. Doesn't seem like the most efficient plan to me!

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Jonesy55

Keep taxes low by not paving roads to save households a few hundred $ per year, which then means those same households have to spend many thousands of $ extra on offroad capable vehicles. Doesn't seem like the most efficient plan to me!

The habit of truck ownership is a leftover from when there were still a TON of gravel and dirt roads, all over the United States. I can speak from first-hand knowledge that the expanse of gravel roads in rural Indiana was far beyond what exists now when I was a kid in the 1980s. Tax revenue from the riverboat casinos was used to pave hundreds of miles of Indiana gravel roads in the late 1990s, sometimes against the wishes of area residents.

In the neighborhood where I was raised, they kept one road in the business district gravel in order to discourage its use. Here it is:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2116...7i13312!8i6656

If you zoom out, you will see that it would form an awkward 5-way intersection if it were paved.

As a wild pop culture footnote, Carmen Electra (yes, the former Baywatch babe and ex-wife of Dennis Rodman and Dave Navarro, and former Prince girlfriend) grew up on that odd gravel road.