There is a reason why advertisers target the young, and why they are willing to pay more for media that attracts a young audience. It isn’t that they young have more money; they have less today and, as a result of public policies, their own spending habits, and the decisions of prior generations in the marketplace, today’s young people may also have less throughout their lives. Despite this, advertisers target the young, and opinion leaders among the young, because there are apparently very few people with open minds. Most people, it seems, do and think what people around them do and think, rather than deciding how they are to live and what they will believe. And once they have been shaped in a particular way, this tends to get locked in. The general unwillingness to be open to new ideas has implications both for politics and public policy, including transportation policy.
Take the transit renaissance, with ridership growing both in New York City and throughout the country. In the 1950s, after the automobile was well established but before the city’s economy and transit system nearly collapsed, New York City’s subways carried about 1.5 billion riders per year. At its low point in the early 1980s, ridership had fallen below 1 billion, but today it has returned to 1.5 billion. One may interpret this as evidence that riders left the system and returned.
In general, however, that is not what happened. Those who left the transit system and “moved up” to the automobile and the express bus do not want to go back, and will not consider doing so. These are people whose opinions were formed in the 1970s and 1980s, when the only people still riding the subway, particularly in non-rush hours, were the poor and minorities. As far as others were concerned, anyone who was a success in life drove their own car. One can observe the native attitude in Windsor Terrace where I live, a neighborhood with an unusually large number of holdovers from the past, many with three generations or more living nearby. These aren’t people who chose to live in New York City; they are people who happened to grow up here, and (unlike most people like them) didn’t leave. And they were here when the city was at its worst, willing to stay only because they were able to find, or at least imagine, places of refuge separate from what was around them.
When my wife and I moved to the neighborhood in the 1980s many locals hadn’t been on the subway, or in Prospect Park, in years. One neighbor would drive two blocks to the local commercial street and park, because she was afraid of getting mugged. A large share of the children at the school my children attended are driven to school every day; parents remain afraid of what might happen to them otherwise. They probably remember having a group of four or five kids surround them and demand that they give back the coat they had “stolen,” or else. Their own coat.
You can hear the attitude of multi-generation New Yorkers in the congestion pricing debate. The “middle class,” in their view, drives, even to Manhattan. The underclass does not. Many maneuvered for years to get that coveted free parking space or permit, and become one of the “elite.” And now they would be expected to join the low-lifes on the subway, while some “undeserving” person who is merely willing to pay in money takes their place? Some have in fact returned the park and subway and are pleasantly surprised. Others, particularly those older, never will.
My attitude is different, but then my experiences were different. Our parents had removed my wife and I from Brooklyn and Southwest Yonkers before middle school, so we didn’t experience the trauma of the bad old days is those locales. Once out on our own we made a decision to live in a place where we could walk to things, take transit, and have a public park with shared amenities. We didn’t just end up here. If one isn’t going to ride the subway and spend a lot of time in public parks, in my view, there is absolutely no reason to live in New York City. One would be better off in the suburbs or in a cheaper metropolitan area with no transit, no parks — and more free parking. To live here and rely on one’s own auto and backyard is taking the cost of living in the city without enjoying the benefits. Which, of course, is how many people perceive congestion pricing — an added cost, with no benefits.
The city’s population has turned over enormously since the early 1980s. A huge share of the population, more than half, is either first generation immigrants or the children of first generation immigrants, from all over the world. Another huge chunk is college graduates from all over the country; my own neighborhood is awash in twenty-somethings from somewhere else. All of these people have made a decision to move to New York City as New York City, and they all use mass transit. In other words, transit ridership is up not because older people have returned, but because new people are riding. That, I believe, is what the data shows.
One thing the new people have had little effect on, however, is politics at the state level. This is not only because the majority of state legislators live outside the city and are hostile to those living inside, but also because those who represent the city often have more in common with those living outside than the majority now living inside. In the absence of term limits, and with seats passed down among relatives or within a small circle of club members, our state representatives reflect the past much more than the present, let alone the future. The future is something to be hocked, or prevented, to some of them. Change is reflexibly opposed, although deals like more special tax breaks for seniors and earlier retirement for public employees are always in order. There are still some voices from the past on the City Council, folks who argue about whether to name a street after a member of a demographic group that is shrinking in the city, and the relatives of past elected officials who are out front opposing congestion pricing. But term limits, despite the presence of those relatives, has caused the City Council to change with the times. Not so the state legislature.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s moving to New York City, particularly the part outside Manhattan, and riding the subway every day was not something one did as a matter of course. It was a choice, and not a mainstream American choice at that. Is there an equivalent today? I would have to say that riding a bicycle is the equivalent, because for bicycles it is still the 1970s. You have physical danger, with riders injured or even killed after being hit by motor vehicles. You have a sky-high theft rate. Even if they don’t take the whole bike, you have the theft of front tires, seats, and accessories, or just random vandalism. Remember “this car has no radio?” This bike has no nothing! Using a bicycle to get around the city is as radical an idea today as riding a graffiti-covered subway car outside of rush hour to the outer-boroughs was in 1983. It is in some ways even more radical – not even the poor do it.
And like natives of Windsor Terrace my age, younger people growing up here today have been shaped by their experiences. My children, who I taught to get around on their own via transit when they were 12, have bicycles, but they almost never use them. They would be afraid to ride on the street, and I would be afraid for them if they did. The only place they ever went by bike is to the farmer’s market or the library at Grand Army Plaza, via Prospect Park. And after a couple of thefts at the library, from the bike rack the guard told us we were fools to use, they don’t go the library anymore. Ride a bicycle to school? Inconceivable. Since they didn’t grow up riding bicycles, they aren’t that interested.
I suppose that if the City of New York really wanted to make New York a city of bike riders, it would write off the native adults and focus on the kids and the newcomers. It could mass order simple, cheap bikes for all the kids age 8 and older and loan them through public and parochial schools, the way some schools have sought to provide laptops for all the kids. The bikes could be simple one-speeds with coaster brakes, with the children required to return the bicycles once each year (to show that they still have them) and given new, larger ones when they did so, until they finished high school and would be required to hand them back. Perhaps the city bikes could be built with an odd piece of frame that identified them as the property of the City of New York. Bicycle racks would be installed in the schools, bicycle lessons and safety instruction would be given. In 15 years, or less time that it takes to study, plan, design and build at three-station extension of the BMT Broadway Express on Second Avenue, the city would have tens of thousands of people in their 20s getting around the city by bicycle as a matter of course, fewer of whom presumably be obese.
This strategy, however, would face both political and practical difficulties. Practically, it would sentence some unknown number of children to death and disability in traffic accidents during a transition period until bicycling becomes more established. Death and disability due to obesity, on the other hand, is a result of the influence of private advertising and thus does not represent a public choice. The policy would be costly, because the theft rate for the city bicycles would probably be enormous, no matter how cheap and well marked they were. Even if every child had a bicycle, they could still be stolen and sent elsewhere. Politically, providing bicycles to children wouldn’t do anything for senior citizens, and would thus, in the eyes of the state legislature, represent an unreasonable diversion of public resources. And the policy might face opposition form bike shops worried about losing customers, although in the long run they would gain sales to children under eight and over 18 if bicycle riding became more established. The provision of cheap bikes would be more likely to take sales from the big chains.
Even so, such a policy is at least conceivable at the city level, thanks to the turnover in the City Council brought about by term limits. Eight years isn’t enough for entire generation, so it is unlikely that seats will be passed down to grandchildren the next time the Council turns over. They’ll have to go to cousins, who move back into the city from the suburbs. Perhaps the cousins will have a different point of view.
What about the state legislature? Since we do not have a democracy, the gradual evolution of Communist China rather than change in the marketplace is a better example of how it may change. Deng Xiopeng was purged in the cultural revolution in the mid-1960s, but after the initial communist leadership including Mao Zedong died off, he led a “second generation” and fundamentally changed the country. Similarly, the widespread uprising in 1989 was put down, but so was the uprising in Europe in 1848. Fifty years later most of Europe was governed by democracies. Given the faster pace of change today I’ll bet that when the existing Chinese leadership dies off, and a generation quietly remembering 1989 takes over, China will be a democracy as well. I don’t expect Silver, Bruno et al to change, but I do expect to outlive them, and remember 30 years ago the State of New York was considered one of the best run states and the City of New York one of the worst run changes. “Some time in the next quarter century, if we keep the pressure on, everything changes.”
How about politicians facing actual elections, either because they are trying to move up or are running for open seats? If younger generations engaged, and their issues and concerns can be addressed, they can be a powerful and untapped political base. I think Mr. Obama is right that many people are sick of the concerns of the 1960s, and worried about the ongoing build-up of generational inequities.
Meanwhile, President Bush may have created a whole generation of Democrats the 1970s created a whole generation of Republicans and the Great Depression created a whole generation of Democrats. With group-think well established, Republicans will have a hell of time changing their minds.