A Twitter conversation last night reminded me that I meant to do a little more digging into car ownership to find out if millennials are really less likely to own cars than previous generations. For starters, here’s overall car ownership:

Starting around 2003, car ownership rates started to level off for an obvious reason: we had hit a rate of nearly one vehicle for every adult in the country. There just wasn’t much higher to go. Then, when the Great Recession started in 2009, car ownership dipped modestly.

Now here’s the rate of householders (owners + renters) who are car-free:

We have more recent data here, so we can see that car-free living went up during the Great Recession but then dipped back down when the economy picked up. The recession hit young people worse than the middle-aged, so a sizeable gap had opened up by 2011. That gap narrowed a bit by 2016 as people started buying cars again, but it was still bigger than it was in 2005. Young people weren’t giving up their car-free status quite as quickly as everyone else.

Is that because more millennials had decided to give up on cars? Or because millennials were hit harder by the recession and didn’t recover as quickly? Here’s a Fed study that looks into that question:

The far right column shows the change in car ownership. The number for millennials is slightly higher than the others, but they’re all very close to zero, which suggests no change by age group once you control for income. In other words, millennials have reduced their car ownership slightly, but mainly because they were harder hit by the recession.

Overall, I’d say the evidence suggests, at most, a very slight decline in millennial preference for cars. The notion that they’ve given up on cars in favor of bicycles and mass transit just isn’t true.

So why is this so commonly asserted? At a guess, it’s because the people who write about it mostly live in large cities, where it’s common to be carless—and became even more common during the recession. That led to lots of feature stories about young people who don’t even have driver’s licenses anymore, and eventually to a vague conviction there was some kind of trend here. Not only was this an overreaction to something that was mostly a symptom of the recession, but it’s also a bit of a “no one I know voted for Nixon” thing. Even if millennials in New York and San Francisco are driving less, that’s only a tiny fraction of the whole country. When you broaden your focus, there’s really nothing much going on.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate