Millenials Even See Transportation Differently

Have you ever noticed that Gotham’s subways are crowded? The phenomenon causing those crowds isn’t just making your commute worse. It’s wreaking havoc across the whole country.

The economic and political truths that have governed America since the end of World War II — that everyone wants a big house and a car to drive to and from that big house — are disintegrating.

Any of the politicians running for president could distinguish himself by acknowledging that for many young people — and old people — freedom isn’t sitting in traffic, but sitting on a train or on a bike and bypassing that traffic.

It’s not just environmental nuts who are saying that people want to use transit and bikes. Listen to the investment community. As Standard and Poor’s, the bond-rating agency, warned last week:
“Millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2000 — “are driving less than older motorists did” at the same age — “and when they do get behind the wheel, they are . . . in smaller, more fuel-
efficient cars.”

The numbers are striking. The number of miles people travel each year in cars or SUVs peaked nearly a decade ago, in 2007. You might think that’s because we had the biggest economic bust in modern history starting right around then.

But young Americans’ driving declined more than 20 percent in the decade before the recession. Meanwhile, mass-transit use in the past two decades is up 36 percent, nearly twice the car-usage rate.

Sam Schwartz, New York City’s Koch-era traffic commissioner, has a simple thesis in his new book, “Street Smart”: “Millennials are the first generation whose parents were more likely to
complain about their cars than get excited about them.

As kids, “millennials were driven through more traffic jams, more often, longer, and farther, than any generation in history.”

Young people today don’t see a car as freedom; they see it as a trap.

What’s freedom to kids today? A walk, a bike ride or a short car ride — and, more often, a smartphone.

It’s all wonderful, then, that people are changing their behavior — except for the fact that the country needs for people to keep driving ever more miles so that it can fund its highway and transit infrastructure. Remember: Just as not everyone needed to default on his mortgage to cause a housing bust, not everyone needs to take the bus instead of a car to cause a roads bust.

To wit: Without money from gas taxes pouring into federal highway coffers, taxpayers have had to bail out the nation’s highway fund for the past half-decade. I-95 from Florida to Maine needs at least $8 billion in bridge repairs — and we don’t have the money to make them.

Transit infrastructure is falling apart, too, even as people increasingly crowd trains and buses.

It’s tempting to want to keep bailing out the highways, just as we bailed out our housing market seven years ago.

It’s also foolish. Just as the 2008 housing crash was a necessary market signal that our way of life — bigger houses and bigger cars, all paid by bigger debt — was unaffordable, the traffic crash is a necessary market signal, too.

More people want to spend their lives working or with their families, not sitting on their butts behind a steering wheel.

Need another market signal?

You can buy a big house anywhere in the country, dirt cheap — as long as it’s nowhere near an efficient mass-transit system.

It’s also an opportunity for pols to say that we need a new way of funding our infrastructure. Sure, we should raise the gas tax — to what it would be if it kept up with inflation.

Over time, though, charging people by the amount of gas they use or even the amount of miles they travel may be a losing game, as people travel less. Nearby real-estate owners who benefit from
keeping up a highway may have to kick in.

And we should also give the individual states more responsibility for roads and transit, rather than having the feds do it. New York, then, could invest in its overcrowded transit rather than subsidize Louisiana’s roads. And we need to cut back on the union-labor costs that make our infrastructure so expensive.

One thing is clear, though: Even if presidential candidates are too afraid to talk about this stuff, they sure shouldn’t run against cities, when the voters are running toward them.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post