The condition of the roads may be an issue, but I’d say it’s due more to couple of other things. First, you’ll often hear people say how unnerving it can be to be in a tiny car surrounded by much bigger ones. That’s not really an excuse, and eventually, as it becomes unaffordable to operate larger personal vehicles, that issue will take care of itself. Secondly, if I’m correctly picturing the kind of car you mean, I can see how families with small kids are reluctant to drive one. It’s not just the car seats but all the kids’ stuff the parents have to carry around whenever they take the kids anywhere.
I would have liked to say this issue takes care of itself when the kids grow out of babyhood and the parents don’t have to cart the seats and other paraphernalia around anymore, but now our benighted regulators want kids up to 4’8" to sit in booster seats. I usually don’t complain about safety regs but I think this is just ridiculous. It’s so embarrassing for the kid, especially if he’s smaller than his peers and the only one that has to do that.
As an aside, do you visitors from across the sea have to mention our damn roads over and over? We know they’re bad. We get it. Lack of commitment to their maintenance is an issue in many places, but another side of it is that there are so many more miles of road to be maintained.
As a 6’0", 250lb man, I find the backseat and frontseat of my Jetta equally (in front) and more (in back) comfortable and roomy than my dad’s Suburban.
Many lighter cars also have significantly better power-to-weight ratios, and smallish hatchbacks/wagons have more than enough space for the average two-child family.
Can’t argue here.
In other words, the popular beliefs about many of those things are just…well, I doubt any of those folks who’d believe the first two have ever sat in a Jetta with the turbo engine and paddle shifters. =P
What? I drive a sort of small car and it’s unnerving to be driving down the freeway surrounded by SUVs because far too many drivers of those things don’t seem to understand how to use their blinkers and/or rear view mirrors. My car isn’t tiny by any stretch of the imagination, but it is frequently overlooked by drivers of large vehicles who want my lane before I’m done with it.
This is actually the set-up I am using. I have a conventional bicycle plus panniers. I bought a helmet and front and back lights too- it isn’t exactly free.
I mostly only ride it for the 5 or so months the weather is nice, and not even always then. I live very close to work and also everything else, so I doubt I burn even 1/2 gallon of gas a day even if I drive everywhere.
I can bike to and from work, or carry groceries &etc. in the panniers. I’m single, but moving into a lxry apt. w/my hot gf sometime soon. We’re paying a premium to live in town, which is worth it to us, plus the whole situation will amount to very much less driving that before.
Still, even though I may present a sort of “tough-guy” image to certain people in rl, the fact is that at the first hint of cold weather I become a quivering-lipped weenie. I don’t bike those days, no way! Too cold! It makes me sufferrr, arrrrr! (Also, I am in love with my natural gas furnace). I continue to drive my late-model Corolla because 1)it still gets 25+ mpg even though it used to get 30 and 2) it NEVER breaks down. Once Subaru offers a PHEV Forester, or something equivalent becomes available, I’ll buy a new car. I think 10 years of a plug-in starting in 2013 will be a decent financial decision, but even if I’m wrong it isn’t like they come and take the car away or anything.
So over a 12 month span I’d be surprised if my bicycling displaces even 20% of my gasoline usage. I dunno. It is certainly something, I know that much.
If there was a million dollars (that you cod only spend on fun stuff- not on rent) waiting for you at work every day, but only if you didn’t drive solo, I promise that all of you would find a way to get to work without your car- be it walking, biking, busing, carpooling, moving closer, moving to a transport-friendly city, or whatever. You would make it work.
So it’s not that you “can’t”. It’s that it isn’t worth it to you. That’s fine.
Sure - I’m not suggesting that a ford KA is a good family runabout. But eg I’m a grad student, and most of my (20-something, single) US friends drive what to me are relatively big cars - honda accords, toyota corollas, etc. Something like a KA would be quite useful here, but the roads might make it a bumpy ride!
I’m a bit sceptical about American claims to only drive because they need to because of my experience here in Chapel Hill. I’m one of only a couple of the people I know who doesn’t have a car, and I am routinely surprised at trips that my US friends will drive, rather than walk or take the (free, regular) buses.
eg I lived with some undergrads in my first year of grad school, about 1.5 miles from campus. I walked every day. Several of them (perfectly fit and healthy) drove, and paid huge amounts for parking. There is a cultural difference, I think.
Well, I wasn’t mentioning them to be a dick in this case, I was genuinely positing them as a reason.
But also we know the US doesn’t have good public transport infrastructure, but that people drive everywhere. So it’s a bit of a shock to see how bad the roads are.
Yeah, but I’d only have to go to work for two days, then I’d quit
In all seriousness though - yeah, we drive as much as we do (nowhere near three gallons a day worth…about half that I’d say) purely due to the cost benefit ratio. Getting to our normal driving destination (kids school) is just too expensive on public transport. If it cost less than driving we’d probably do it a lot more often, but it’s about 3 times more expensive in petrol terms - maybe only twice if you count wear and tear on the car.
In some ways I’m kind of looking forward to the price of petrol going up some more. I suspect we’ll get some action on more frequent bus routes then. Trains will be a pain though - they’re already crowded, and getting the infrastructure down to put more of them on the line is going to be seriously painful.
Well in support of this (since there is no other reason I can see) Canada raised their gas prices last night by $.06/litre to 1.39/l. Last year at this time the radio reports prices were hovering around .98/l. If we continue on this pace I suspect that most people will be looking for more fuel efficient cars soon. There were already people interviewing that they will be selling their cottages because the cost of getting there is getting so high.
What? Apparently you missed the part where I said “truly small cars”. The Jetta is not a truly small car. In fact, by anything except American or Australian standards, it’s not a small car at all.
I was responding to a post by pdts, who was asking about cars the size of the Ford Ka. The Ka is about 11 feet long. A Jetta is 15 feet long.
I just noticed I forgot to qualify my asterisk in that post. I was pointing out that Americans as a group don’t care if their cars ride or handle well, which is why Japanese small cars work better for us.
I wish it would take care of itself pronto. It’s beginning to terrify me to drive my nice little going-on-14-year-old Nissan Sentra, not because of its overall size, but because of its height, which is really low to the ground even in comparison to newer Sentras. We moved about a year ago to a neighborhood where people seem to drive a disproportionate number of really tall SUVs and pickups, and we have a parking spot in the alley. We’ve had quite a number of near-misses trying to get out of the alley, because all the cars parked where the alley meets the street are much taller than ours, so the visibility sucks. And with the other SUVs whipping down our side street far too fast, one or the other of us would likely be a pancake in a collision.
Someday the little Sentra will die, and whatever replaces it will for sure be taller, if not larger overall. (I don’t even like driving bigger cars, but **Tom Scud **is a rather leggy 6’2”, and his knees are just about hitting the dashboard of the Sentra. The car predates him in my life by nearly 10 years, and I’m 5’1”, so legroom wasn’t exactly a big consideration at the time. Hopefully we can find a compact car that makes us both happy when the time comes – luckily neither of us is a car nut.)
I did miss that part, or not parse it correctly–You gotta cut me some slack here, the smallest vehicle my parents owned while I was of driving age was a Jeep Grand Cherokee (others included a full-size raised-roof touring van (yes, my dad was that guy for many years), multiple Suburbans and Tahoes, and multiple trucks in the Silverado 3500 class)
In all seriousness, your comparisons apply to the way a lot of Americans think about family cars as well–which a Ford Ka won’t help you with, but the Jetta, well…I could easily imagine taking road trips with a family of five in it without much problem. Since I have a family of three, it seems positively roomy to me–meanwhile, my parents thought a Volvo XC70 was “too small” for the two of them for trips.
I should also note I’d buy the heck out of a Ford Ka if they sold 'em over here. With the Jetta for car trips and family errands, I desperately need to replace my Neon with something that is in the same universe as environmentally friendly–and all the plug-ins offered on this side of the pond are outlandishly expensive.
I imagine that most of them have their cars because a parent said “here, take the old family car, now that you’ve moved out I’m buying a car I like”. Seemed typical up here.
As for why so many college students have cars? I couldn’t tell you–I was a bus guy myself when I was in college and/or living in apartments where the buses actually came.
Or less selfish–most of my reasoning boils down to “the bus takes three times as long and that means a half-hour less time I get to spend with my daughter in the evening before she goes to bed.”
Compare apples to apples. On Thursday, May 5th WTI crude oil futures did drop below $100/bbl from $109.24 to $99.80. That same exact day, RBOB gasoline futures dropped by $0.2271/gal from $3.3225 to $3.0954.
I have no idea how reliable the data is for this, but the graph on this page is somewhat related to your post. Check out the biggest users of gasoline on a per barrel per year per capita basis.
Wyoming
North Dakota
South Carolina
Alabama
Iowa
Mississippi
Missouri
New Hampshire
South Dakota
Vermont
A lot of places with “lots of middle of nowhere” in that group.
The gasoline futures market is backwardated (prices in future are below current prices), but unfortunately not to the extent that would be needed to bring retail gasoline prices down to $3.50. Of course that doesn’t mean the futures market is a great predictor of the future; however, most reputable experts and analysts believe oil prices will be higher in the third quarter this year, so I wouldn’t plan on lower prices.
This is likely a circumstance of the market. Grad students typically don’t drive new cars, but rather used ones, the choices of which are necessarily affected by market conditions years ago when the cars were new. And when people do buy new cars, they generally hang onto them a lot longer now than they used to.
We have yet to see waves of VW New Beetles or Cooper Minis entering the used car market. Meanwhile, some of the relatively recent entrants into the American Market, such as Kia, were so shoddy when they first appeared that some banks wouldn’t finance them. Although that brand, for example, has improved significantly since then, it would be just plain foolish to buy a '99 Kia, if there still are any that run.
I am skeptical too, because I lived this experience, and I have to cop to it. God what a lazy fool I was; I used to drive across campus to study in the library in the evening – and I lived there! I can’t justify this, but back then I was very lazy physically. Just a skinny dude with no interest in physical exertion of any kind, I was. By contrast, more than 30 years on, I love to walk places whenever I can, and am more than willing to use public transit when I need to go farther. Although, in L.A. this isn’t always practical; most of the local public transportation is still just buses, and bus transit just isn’t suited to long trips across town.
I wonder if the roads worse than usual in NC. IME in L.A., potholes usually are repaired reasonably promptly although they are an annual nuisance following the rainy season. In general though, I never see local streets that I wouldn’t want to drive a small car on.
I keep running into this - we conserve in one area so us big-brained humans think, “Woohoo! Lookkit all that extra room we have to waste now!” I’m not sure at this point that we’ll ever get it as a species - it’s not enough to reduce in one area if we’re just going to pick up the slack in others.
We must not have been to the right places; we were in awe of how good the roads were everywhere we’ve gone in the US compared to Canadian roads.
That’s what I’m talking about; people are so quick to use the word “can’t” when what they really mean is, “For various reason (some good and some less good), I’m choosing not to do that.”
