The average American car owner drives fewer miles today than ten years ago. The statistics are indisputable. Miles per car peaked in 2005, and the number has been declining ever since.

Maybe the purported love affair between Americans and their cars is coming to an end.

Several recent studies show that this trend is particularly evident among young people. In an article published in the Atlantic in January of this year titled The Decline of the Driver’s License, Julie Beck reports on a study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The evidence clearly shows that young people are seeking alternatives to driving their own cars.

“The percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups,” Beck reports. “For people age 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983. It’s especially pronounced for teens—in 2014, just 24.5% of 16-year-olds had a license, a 47% decrease from 1983, when 46.2% did. And at the tail end of the teen years, 69% of 19-year-olds had licenses in 2014, compared to 87.3% in 1983, a 21% decrease.”

I never fully bought into the advertising-driven idea that Americans love their cars. For a small percentage of car owners, the metaphor of a love affair is apt. These are the hobbyists and enthusiasts, the people who spend their spare time working on their cars, waxing the paint job, tricking out the stereo system, going to car shows. But I think the vast majority of car owners view their vehicle as a necessity, a notion that the greater culture, until recently, has done little to challenge. It’s less a love affair than an addiction.

I accepted the inevitability of car ownership for longer than I’d like to admit. From the ages of 18 to 49, I almost always owned a car. The brief periods when I didn’t weren’t by choice. A car would die a few weeks or months before I could replace it. I had a car stolen once in San Diego. Members of a weekly writing group to which I drove chipped in to get me on the road again, for which I’m still grateful. But these days I would carpool or take the bus.

The IT majors joined hands with contractors in the town to contain deluxe to the lifestyle of their employees by producing Kharadi, a browse description tadalafil canada mastercard preferred residential location. The negotiation process can go buying viagra a long way provided the seller has enough time at his disposal. Moreover, you avoid a conspicuous wonder, which is gastric disturbance made by pharmaceutical medicines. http://amerikabulteni.com/2018/03/09/diplomasi-yanlilarinda-john-bolton-endisesi/ viagra without prescriptions uk acts more rapidly. Look for additional nutrients, such as vitamin amerikabulteni.com buy levitra online C, that may promote more youthful skin and better circulation to the member. Another study, this one by TransitCenter, a New York-based philanthropic group dedicated to promoting public transportation, shows that the so-called millennial generation is far friendlier to public transit than their baby boomer predecessors.

“People under 30 are far more likely to ride public transportation and to express positive feelings about it than older people, regardless of what part of the country they live in or what kind of neighborhood they grew up in,” writes Sarah Goodyear in CityLab. The trend continues even when they start families. “Across all income brackets, parents under 30 used transit significantly more than those between 30 and 60,” Goodyear writes. “Forty-five percent of the under-30 parent group with incomes above $75,000 said they use transit weekly, compared with 16% of parents between 30 and 60 in the same income bracket.”

Furthermore, Goodyear observes, they are doing so despite the example of their baby boomer parents. Millennials are “less likely to have been encouraged to walk or bike by their families as children or to have had easy access to transit, and were more likely to have gotten the message from parents that transit was unsafe (as well as the message from peers that it was uncool).”

There’s more good news. Attitudes toward public transportation are improving all over the country, and up and down all income brackets. Even people who can afford cars are turning to public transportation as a more economic alternative.

But much remains to be done to accelerate this positive trend. People are five times more likely to use public transportation if offered incentives by their employers, as the University of Maine, Husson University and other area schools do. Car owners need to be persuaded that spending tax dollars on transit benefits them, too. Parking needs to be priced so that non-drivers no longer subsidize it, and businesses need to offer discounts to customers who arrive by other means than car. Alternatives need to be promoted and encouraged, in both public and private sectors.

Attitudes change slowly, over generations. The bailed-out, subsidized automobile industry still spends millions of dollars in advertising to addict Americans to their product and make them think they’re in love. But fewer of us are falling for it.

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Two years before he would successfully run for president, my great-great grandfather, James A. Garfield, came to Maine to campaign for Republican candidates prior to the mid-term elections of 1878.

Until last week, I never knew that he ever set foot in Maine, let alone in Bangor, during his too-short life, tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet and an incompetent doctor two months before his 50^th birthday. But local historian Richard Shaw pointed me to a house on Broadway near its intersection with Cumberland Street, where the future president was a guest at a reception during what was likely his only visit to the city.

Travel was different in those days. The first Model T would not roll off Henry Ford’s assembly line for another thirty years. There were no interstate highways, of course, and few bridges across the rivers that divide Maine’s coast. And yet Congressman Garfield gave speeches in Portland, Lewiston, Damariscotta, Rockland, Camden and Belfast before arriving in Bangor on September 7, where he spoke at Norumbega Hall and stayed at the home of former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin.

All of this is documented in his diaries, the pertinent parts of which were shared with me by Todd Arrington, site manager at the James A. Garfield Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, just east of Cleveland and a few miles south of Lake Erie. It was here that the Congressman and future President lived with his wife Lucretia and their five surviving children until moving into the White House in 1881.

Congressman Garfield left Mentor on the afternoon of Thursday, August 29, 1878, accompanied by his oldest son Harry (my great-grandfather), then 16 years old. They traveled by horse-drawn buggy to the nearby town of Plainesville, where the Congressman boarded a train at 3:36 p.m.

The train traveled along much the same route plied by Amtrak today, through Albany and western Massachusetts to Boston, where Garfield changed trains for Maine. By the evening of Friday the 30^th, he was in Portland. The trip did not take appreciably more time than a similar train trip does now.

Garfield spent several days in southern Maine, traveling by local train to give speeches in Lewiston and Biddeford and to swim in the surf at Old Orchard Beach. On Wednesday, September 4, he took a train to Damariscotta, gave another speech, spent the night at a hotel, and departed by train the next morning for Rockland.

Apparently he was much in demand as a speaker, a rising star in the Republican Party. He was driven overland via horse-drawn carriage to Camden and then Belfast, delivering speeches in both places before boarding a steamship that took him up the river to Bangor on the morning of Saturday, September 7.
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According to Cipperly Good, collections manager at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, a daily steamship ran between Rockland and Bangor, with stops in Camden, Northport, Belfast, and Searsport. “That’s how you moved around the coast in those days, between the major ports,” she said. A 1905 schedule shows a 7:30 departure from Belfast and an 11 a.m. arrival in Bangor, and Good suggested that the schedule in 1878 was probably similar. A typical steamer such as the Katahdin or the Cambridge would hold about 100 passengers, and make one trip each day in each direction.

Congressman Garfield remained in Bangor until Monday morning, when he boarded a train for Augusta. He arrived home in Ohio on Thursday morning, the 12^th, having been away just short of two weeks.

What strikes me about my great-great grandfather’s journey is that the automobile giveth, and the automobile taketh away. One can drive from Cleveland to Bangor in one long day, and from Rockland to Bangor in under two hours. The Concord Coach bus covers the same route as the old steamships, though still only once or twice a day, depending on the season, and with far fewer passengers.

Still, wouldn’t it be grand to take a passenger ferry up the Penobscot, or to arrive home in Bangor by train? Even 138 years ago, travelers had more options than they do today. Bangor was a hub for rail and steamboat routes, according to Matt Bishop, curator and operations manager at the Bangor Historical Society. “Lots was going on back then,” he said.

Perhaps, as we move from the Late Automobile Age to whatever comes next, people will remember that there’s more than one way to get there from here.

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