Is America’s love affair with the automobile cooling?
A study out this month by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute finds that a larger share of U.S. households do not own a car, light truck or SUV. In 2012, 9.22% of all U.S. households were without a vehicle, little changed from 9.29% in 2011 but continuing an uptrend started since 2007, just before the economy fell into recession.
Ownership rates vary greatly among the 30 largest cities, says the study’s author Michael Sivak, director of Sustainable Worldwide Transportation at Michigan. New York had the highest share of non-car households, 56.5%, while San Jose had the fewest, 5.8%. Sivak calculates that 21 of the 30 cities have seen a rise in non-ownership since 2007.
What’s behind the vehicle avoidance?
Sivak writes that many factors can influence a household’s decision to own a car, such as income, availability and cost of parking and local weather, but “the five cities with the highest proportions of households without a vehicle were all among the top five cities in a recent ranking of the quality of public transportation.”
Looking at nationwide data Sivak concludes, “we now have fewer light-duty vehicles, we drive each of them less, and we consume less fuel than in the past. These trends suggest that motorization in the U.S. might have reached a peak several years ago.”
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