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Category Archives: Active transport

From Brazil: Millennials Show Apathy Towards Cars

Thursday, April 5th, 2012 | Editor | No Comments

Original Article by Itir Sonuparlak, The City Fix

Young Brazilians Prefer Quality Public Transportation Too

These trends are not unique to the United States. Young people in Brazil are starting to display similar disinterest in cars. The research agency Box1824 surveyed thousands of millennials on their expectations for the future in a project called “The Brazilian Dream” and found that millennials show an enthusiasm and willingness to change, especially in the face of urban and social challenges.

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One Reason Why I Hate Cars

Thursday, January 26th, 2012 | Editor | No Comments

From Peter Hitchens’s blog, Daily Mail

“I think our roads are statistically safer largely because soft targets, particularly child cyclists, have almost entirely retreated from them. But the roads are not really safer. It’s just that people have learned to avoid them unless they themselves go out in armour, and have narrowed their lives as a result.” – Peter Hitchens

On Sunday morning a woman rushed out of a side road in a quiet Oxford suburb, violently knocked me off my bicycle and mangled the machine I was riding.

Quite understandable, some of you may think. It’s the only sort of treatment I would understand. But in fact the person involved had nothing against me, didn’t know me, and was quick to apologise for the hurt (even quicker and more comprehensive,  once she had been given quite a large piece of my mind). She also paid for the damage to be repaired.

But, as some of you will have guessed,  there was another element in all this – an element which makes an apparently shocking and inexplicable event make perfect sense.

My assailant was driving a car.

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Millennials Prefer Car “Access Over Ownership”

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

From The City Fix and Zipcar

Zipcar, Inc., the world’s leading car-sharing network, released its second annual independent study of Millennials (18-34-year olds), which examines this generation’s attitudes toward personal transportation and car ownership.  Millennials are an important segment for Zipcar, comprising more than half of all members. Millennials account for about 23 percent of the general population, according to the 2010 US Census.

  • 55 percent have actively made an effort to drive less, compared to 45 percent in the same 2010 study
  • 78 percent say owning a car is difficult due to high costs of gas and maintenance
  • 53 percent would participate in a car-sharing service, like Zipcar – mobility and convenience is still important
  • Millennials are the most likely age group to participate in the “sharing economy” (67 percent would participate in media sharing and 49 percent in home/vacation sharing)
  • 40 percent say they would participate to save more money for retirement or buying a home

Millennials & Driving: A Survey Commissioned by Zipcar

MPG of a Human

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

– by Tom Murphy
Do The Math

On Do the Math, three previous posts have focused on transportation efficiency of gasoline cars, electric cars, and on the practicalities of solar-powered cars. What about personal-powered transport—namely, walking and biking? After stuffing myself over Thanksgiving, I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation?

Okay, the “miles” part is straightforward. And we can handle the “per.” But what’s up with the gallon? A gallon of what? Here we have all kinds of options, as humans are flex-fuel machines. But food energy is not much different from fossil fuel energy in terms of energy density.

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Are We Reaching ‘Peak Car’?

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– by Anita Elash
The Globe and Mail

Anyone who has been stuck in big-city gridlock lately may find this hard to believe, but millions of Westerners are giving up their cars.  Experts say our love affair with the automobile is ending, and that could change much more than how we get around – it presents both an opportunity and an imperative to rethink how we build cities, how governments budget and even the contours of the political landscape.

The most detailed picture of the trend comes from the United States, where the distance driven by Americans per capita each year flatlined at the turn of the century and has been dropping for six years. By last spring, Americans were driving the same distance as they had in 1998.

The data are similar in Europe, Australia and Japan. And, although Canada doesn’t keep national statistics on individual driving habits, Australian researcher Jeff Kenworthy has found that driving in the nation’s five largest cities, combined, declined by 1.7 per cent per capita from 1995 to 2006.

If developed countries are reaching “peak car,” as some transportation experts are calling it, it’s not just a product of high unemployment or skyrocketing fuel prices, as the pattern began to show up years before the 2008 financial crisis.

Nor is it primarily a matter of people feeling guilted into reducing their car use for the sake of the climate and the environment – the threat of separating people from their wheels (or taxing their fuel use) has long been one of the green movement’s biggest stumbling blocks.

Indeed, the shift is so gradual and widespread that it’s clearly not a product of any “war on the car” or other ideological campaign. Rather, it’s a byproduct of a stage of development that cities were probably destined to reach ever since the dawn of the automobile age: Finding themselves caught in an uncomfortable tangle of urban sprawl, population growth and plain individual inconvenience, people, one by one, are just quietly opting out.

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