Young Washingtonians leave the car behind

"Short-hopping on somebody else’s wheels has become common among the generation of suburbanites-turned-city dwellers, many of whom grew up being ferried about by mom and dad," The Washington Post reports.

More than a quarter of the households in the District of Columbia do not own automobiles, the paper says. Slightly fewer than than half of DC households own just one car. Mass transit, bicycles, and short-term rental cars such as Zipcar provide the mobility that many of the District's younger residents want, according to The Post.

Some of the impetus for avoiding car ownership is economic. The paper says, "Surveys of young people show that more than a third have been underemployed or unemployed during the recession and that they graduated from college with an average debt of $23,200, according to the Institute for College Access and Success." 

The car also seems to have lost some of the status it once had. In urban areas nationwide, people younger than 24 drove six fewer miles per day in 2009 than in 1990. 

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000227 EndHTML:0000007904 StartFragment:0000003371 EndFragment:0000007868 SourceURL:file://localhost/Volumes/RS%20Happiness/RS%20Happiness/Better-cities/content-to-product/content-to-product.doc @font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Times-Roman"; }@font-face { font-family: "Times-Bold"; }@font-face { font-family: "Times-Italic"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

• Subscribe to New Urban News to read all of the articles (print+online) on implementation of greener, stronger, cities and towns.

• See the July-August 2011 issue of New Urban News. Bike sharing, bike-ped issues, downtown makeover, agrarian urbanism,  TIGER III livability grants, unlocking remnant land value, selling the neighborhood, Landscape Urbanism vs. New Urbanism, new urban resort, granny flats, The Great Reset.

• See the September 2011 issue of New Urban News. Topics: Walk Score, sprawl retrofit, livability grants, Katrina Cottages, how to get a transit village built, parking garages, the shrinking Wal-Mart, Complete Streets legislation, an urban capital fund, and much more.

• Get New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, packed with more than 800 informative photos, plans, tables, and other illustrations, this book is the best single guide to implementing better cities and towns.