Jet lag.
Heh, that’s when I moved out. Bucking the trends, that’s me!
Here’s the short answer for any particular zip code that was already built up by e.g. 1970, but especially for urban / suburban areas dating from the e.g. 1950s or before.
While your area’s population has almost doubled of over most of our lifetimes, the commercial airports and highways are not twice as big or twice as numerous. The museums and stadiums are not twice as large, nor twice as numerous. Maybe grocery stores and malls are doubled, but not those other things we think of as “culture” or “infrastructure”.
But it gets worse ...
Here’s a useful graph of inflation-corrected GDP per capita over the relevant time period:
United States GDP per capita - Economic history of the United States - Wikipedia.
GDP is not personal income, but it’s highly correlated and especially for the non-poor people and the non-rural parts of the country. Which is who / where we’re mostly talking about.
So in constant dollar terms, those sorts of Americans now have on the order of 4x the real income versus the early 1950s. Which translates into more cars per capita, more driving mileage = road space occupancy per capita, more travel, and more general spending on being out and about per capita.
Bottom line in very broad-brush arm-waving terms …
So 2x the people each armed with 4x the money. That creates a big crowd.
This is just my personal experience and opinion, but I suspect that there have been many cultural shifts that affect this. Let me describe a comparison between my own life in the 60s and that of my niece’s family today:
My family was traditional, with a working father (middle-income), SAHM, and four kids. My niece’s family also consists of two parents and four kids.
The difference is that my brothers and sisters used to engage in local activities by biking around town. Most of our activities were school-centered. We would sometimes go into San Francisco to see a couple museums or a special event. I don’t think we ever went to a professional athletic event, though my father would take us to the drag races every year.
Both my niece and her husband work in good jobs. My niece’s family does and goes everywhere you can possibly imagine. The kids are all in athletic activities that require being driven. They are at professional or athletic events at least monthly. They take at least two vacations a year, usually a Disney park and then the mountains or the beach. They do something every weekend, such as a trip to a museum, a hockey game, a local fair or event, and so forth, and often do even more. There’s a lot going on and the ability to promote it through social media is hugely greater.
I’m not saying that my family life was better or worse, but things were much different 50 - 60 years ago. And I can absolutely see that my niece’s family activities would have a much, much larger effect on the general perception of “more people.”
BTW, my niece and her family are wonderful people and I love them dearly. Things are just…different.
I think people are more mobile and active than they ever were; which means more time spent traveling from place to place. People commute further distances (although WFH/Covid may change that trend), have more activities, and are willing to go further from home for entertainment, dining, activities.
Yup, that sounds about right. And, again, when we moved to this suburb in 1996, it wasn’t that way. About the only time that you can now count on traffic being light is either late at night, or on Sunday morning.
Absolutely agree with this. More on that below.
Now compare that growth to Metro Toronto (GTA). Today’s population in metro Chicago is 1.78 times what it was in 1950. Today’s population in the GTA is well over 6 times – nearly 6.5 times – what it was in 1950. The question is why.
There’s more than one factor, but a very major one is immigration. Canada needs skilled immigrants, and is consequently one of the most welcoming countries in the world to qualified immigrants (and also to refugees, for that matter). The immigration screening process for education and marketable skills generally works pretty well. What does not work so well is where these people choose to locate, which tends to be major urban areas where most of the jobs are. The effect on the highway system and just about all other infrastructure has been disastrous.
The highway system of course is far bigger than it was in 1950, but it simply cannot grow nearly as fast as the population is growing, The busiest highway in North America is not a freeway in or around LA as one might think, it’s the 401 over the top of Toronto. Bumper-to-bumper congestion is no longer a rush hour phenomenon, but pretty much an all-day scourge. The Don Valley Parkway leading to the downtown core literally resembles a parking lot day or night, and so does the Gardiner Expressway running along the lakeshore.
This was a major reason I got the hell out of the city a few years after I retired and got as far away as I could while still being within occasional driving distance of big-city amenities. Yet even here in the distant burbs, the growth rate is extraordinary, and although new expressways have been built and more are planned, the process is agonizingly slow.
Public transit is an obvious solution in some cases, but it has to be good enough to attract the middle class. In the greater New York Metro area it is for example.
Let’s look at public ridership totals since 1990 for the US and Canada.
| Year | Total Ridership (000s) |
|---|---|
| 1990 | 8,956,479 |
| 1995 | 8,490,116 |
| 2000 | 9,403,443 |
| 2005 | 9,805,757 |
| 2010 | 10,172,352 |
| 2015 | 10,626,931 |
| 2019 | 9,923,287 |
| 2020 | 4,709,727 |
| 2021 | 4,808,094 |
| 2022 | 6,129,175 |
| 2023 | 7,114,301 |
Even ignoring 2020+ Covid, those aren’t promising numbers. I don’t know what’s going on before 2019 but annual excel data is available here.
I take public transit here in the Chicago area: I ride on Metra (a commuter rail service) from my home in the suburbs, to my job in downtown Chicago.
At least around here, there are two factors going on, even beyond the recent effects of COVID and WFH:
- Many public transit systems, such as Metra, were built around the premise of transporting workers from their homes in the outlying city neighborhoods, or the suburbs, to their jobs in the central city. The system is still well-suited for that, but when many businesses relocated from downtown to the suburbs, the system became poorly-suited for getting workers to outlying workplaces.
- The CTA (which operates the “L” trains and the buses in the city itself) is a real mess. Due to budget issues, staffing issues, and deferred maintenance, the trains and buses are unreliable, and are often delayed – and the CTA’s online tracker can give inaccurate information. They’re also often smelly and dirty, and many riders now feel that they’re unsafe.
Typo here. In fact, the state’s population increased by 9 million between 2000 and 2022. Still huge, not not amazing.
Yeah - this equation makes the most sense to me. Not only more people, but those people have more $, likely more leisure time, and the infrastructure/attractions have not (cannot?) expand accordingly.
All makes spending time in my lovely home/yard all the more attractive!
Here’s my example. When I lived in Champaign, Illinois in the late '70s, there was nothing on Neil Street (I think) between the Ford dealer and the airport at least five miles away. When I went back 20 years ago there were houses all the way. The farm land was gone.
Not hard data, but hardly unique.
Thanks for catching that. If it were correct we’d be buried in U-Haul trailers.
And I doubled up a word in my correction. Gaudere’s Law strikes!
Sometimes you have to go to the Louvre in the afternoon because you were at the Musee D’Orsay in the morning. Paris has more attractions than most people have vacation days.
The population in 1950 was 2.5 billion people. Now, only 74 years later, it is over 8 billion people. Quite a few people here have lived through that huge change, so I would imagine that virtually everything is significantly more populated than it was in your youth.
True.
Other times last night’s extensive eating and drinking adventure ended well after midnight foeed by attempted sex w your SO at your romantic Paris hotel.
8 hours’ subsequent sleep means wake-up is between 10 & 11am. Then there’s 2 people getting cleaned up in 1 bathroom, both getting breakfast someplace, and suddenly the day is really getting underway just a bit before 1pm.
Unless one of you is a dawdler; then it’s the crack of 3pm.
There’s a specific factor of the overall “return to the city” movement that’s at play here too. @What_Exit and a few others touched on this. The 1980s and 1990s were the nadir of urban living in the US, and while the best museums and libraries and civic attractions remained near downtown, there wasn’t much else to do. I remember the Chicago loop pretty well closing down after 6:00, but River North would be hopping. Downtown Cincinnati still has a ways to go in retaining after-hours activity, but the neighboring Over-the-Rhine historic district is full of restaurants, bars, and new apartments. Instead of taking a trip downtown just to see the Field Museum and get out of Dodge, there’s dozens of activities, restaurants, and shops to go to.
More broadly, cities outside of downtown were pretty dowdy for decades. Stagnant at best, declining at worst. Your typical northeast and midwest city lost 1/3 or even more of its population, after they were all re-rengeneered in the 1950s and 1960s for the flood of automobile traffic and demolition of their public transportation systems that came about. As the population moved outwards, those city streets became underutilized (unlike the new highways built past these neighborhoods to serve the suburbs) and barren. However, now that people are starting to move back in, the lack of public transit and a population that expects more mobility is quickly overwhelming the capacity of the street network.
It doesn’t take many cars to congest a street, but many cars does not equal many people. With housing prices so crazy, more adults are living together driving to separate jobs clear across town. Any couple who does want to raise a family has to drive their kid(s) to all sorts of activities, and even to school itself, because there’s too much traffic and no safe routes. This is a self-perpetuating problem. Too much traffic breeds resistance to things like bike lanes, bus lanes, light rail, and comprehensive mixed-use planning. So the problem just gets worse.
There’s a concept in traffic planning (I may be mis-remembering or pulling it out of my butt) that above a certain threshold, increasing traffic volume by only 10% increases congestion by 50%. That would need to be somewhere near the limit of capacity, but in any case, the point is that once you reach that threshold, things come crashing down fast.