{"id":1386,"date":"2010-04-01T09:58:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T14:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/?p=1386"},"modified":"2010-04-01T10:54:27","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T15:54:27","slug":"americans-ditching-deathmobiles-in-droves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/americans-ditching-deathmobiles-in-droves\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans Ditching Deathmobiles in Droves"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Highest & Best Use<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the first time in history,\u00a0Americans scrapped more cars than they bought<\/a>.<\/p>\n

WOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, liberals anguish. And Detroit is more worried than ever.<\/p>\n

Of course, they tried to put a brave face on it: “It foreshadows what may be pentup demand.” Yeah, that’s it, pentup demand! They’ll be back in the showrooms in no time! Willy Loman would be proud.<\/p>\n

While the article may be partially right in that any rebound in employment will result in more cars bought, I seriously doubt it will ever go back to the levels of the years just before the bust. There has been a growing awareness across the generations that the car-oriented lifestyle just isn’t sustainable on any level. People of all ages have discovered biking, transit & walking. Mature families are happily letting their 2nd car die, scrapping it, and not replacing it. Younger people are going without a car altogether and loving the economic freedom. Car sharing is booming (both formal & informal). And a growing number of people across the generations & socio-economic divides are determined to simply not own a car at all. No way. No how.<\/p>\n

It’s over Detroit. Retool to build buses, streetcars & trains. Embrace the hipster entrepreneurs struggling to gain a toehold in your city<\/a>. Establish urban farmsteading on those empty lots<\/a>. Cherish your ruins and foster industrial ruins tourism<\/a>. Let go of the dreams of the glory days of Motown. The days of mega-industry anchoring the economy of your city are over. Deal with it.<\/p>\n

And if places like Madison, Wisconsin don’t get a handle on their car-mandatory development patterns (to the detriment of our schools and economic future, I might add), it too will suffer the fate of every other rust belt city of its size.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans scrapped more cars than they bought over the past 15 years — Wooooooh-Hooooo!!!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,760,10,5,123,4],"tags":[766,762,763,767,14,764,184,765,761],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-business","category-economics","category-energy-efficiency","category-environment","category-public-transit","category-society","tag-adapt-or-die","tag-car-free-living","tag-car-mandatory-places","tag-decline-of-the-car-industry","tag-detroit","tag-hipster-economy","tag-madison-wisconsin","tag-ruins-of-detroit","tag-scrapped-cars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions\/1398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanthoreau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}