Even so, minivan sales have been falling steadily since their peak in 2000, when about 1.3 million were sold in the United States. As of last year, that figure is down by about 80 percent.
What caused this decline? The same article suggests this:
However it evolves, the minivan will still be trammeled by its fundamental purpose. It is useful because it offers benefits for families, and it is uncool because family life is thought to be imprisoning. That logic cannot be overcome by mere design. In the end, the minivan dilemma has more to do with how Americans think than what we drive. Families, or at least vehicles expressly designed for them, turned out to be lamentable. We’d prefer to daydream about fording Yukon streams instead.
I am interested in some of the bigger connections that might be made around this same time (early 2000s). So family life in the suburbs – embodied by the minivan – became uncool? The 2000 Census was the first time 50% of Americans lived in suburbia. By this point, several generations of Americans had experienced or grew up in suburban settings. Is a choice of vehicles really pushing back against family life in the suburbs (even as plenty of Americans continue in these settings)?
Or another way to take the argument above is that individualism wins out over any symbols of family life. The iPhone and SUV somehow broadcast a consistent message of a cool or unique individual – regardless of how many people own the same model – while the minivan is saddled with family life. Did the long-term American yearning to be an individual doom the minivan (despite its peak in 2000)?
A third consideration: is this just a branding question? If so, other products have been revived so why not the minivan? Imagine a famous celebrity endorses the minivan and drives one around. Or a new brand emerges. Or problems arise with SUVs and the minivan is dependable. Or families become cool again. There may be limited interest in trying to revive the minivan but this could provide someone a marketing challenge.
Parking lots may appear to be safe and controlled traffic environments. Drivers are usually not traveling very fast. Drivers need to be attentive to carts, curbs, and people walking around. New drivers go to parking lots to build their skills.
Yet parking lots can be the Wild West of driving situations. This is particularly true of lots where there are few or no traffic signs and markings. You have rows and arteries through the parking lot that have no stop signs or signs of where to go.
Last year, we had an incident in such a lot. Driving around the outside of the lot on a roadway separated by curbs from the parking rows, someone pulled out and into the side of the front of our vehicle. There was no stop sign at the end of the row or marking on a pavement. Anyone could be turning in and out of the rows. Presumably they should look to see if vehicles are coming toward them? Presumably everyone is supposed to yield (though there are no yield signs)?
I feel this in parking garages as well where there may be signs and markings but they can be hard to see in the lighting and a cramped environment. Vehicles come quickly around turns. Drivers are looking to back out and pull in.
Since parking is essential in American places due to the heavy reliance on driving, are there better solutions to lots with few signs? Is the primary goal of a parking lot to move vehicles quickly through the space? Is it to help customers or residents or visitors to safely make it to their destination? Is it to fit as many vehicles as possible in/
Street grids have benefits, including offering multiple routes should congestion arise at one intersection or certain routes are off-limits. But what if a driver or pedestrian wants to move quickly through the grid at a diagonal?
Different communities may offer options for this. Perhaps there are alleys one can cut through. These back ways offer even more alternatives through the grid if the main streets are congested. Or there might be an occasional diagonal roadway that crosses at an angle to other roads. Depending on the way one is traveling, the diagonal route might be more direct.
Chicago is a good example of having both options in numerous neighborhoods. The flat Midwestern city primarily has a road grid that stretches for miles. East-west and north-south streets can go a long way from one end of the city to the other (and beyond). At the same time, alleys and diagonal streets provide other travel options. The diagonal roadways can create some interesting intersections – these present travelers with different visuals and traffic patterns than they might be used to – but offer more direct routes at an angle to the grid. Numerous alleys take some pressure off the roads for garages, garbage, and other uses.
I imagine other places might offer different options. Any city offer an underground grid at a 45 degree angle to the ground-level grid? Or pedestrian skyways or tunnels that offer paths that cross the grid in different ways?
And they didn’t help you get from one neighborhood to another or back home from a night out to the suburbs…
Many businesses rely on suburbanites coming downtown for the weekend to eat or watch an artistic offering as the fall season kicks off.
Chicago is a big city so there are plenty of trips taking place solely within the city. Additionally, many big cities and people within are used to the idea that people from the suburbs travel into the city.
But these two short passages highlight a back and forth between both city and suburb. There are some traveling from city to suburbs, perhaps even for a night out (some suburbs are cool?). Others are traveling into the city to take advantage of particular opportunities offered in the city (or for work).
These newer patterns complicate efforts to address traffic. The predictable rush hours into the city in the morning and out of the city in the afternoon and evening have morphed into more traffic headed in all directions at more times. Traffic can be present around the clock, even without special events or celebrations.
-Which conversations to count? Is this primarily about formal debate in the legislature or public hearings about the possibilities? Can media reports (whether TV, print, radio, others) count as time? Do digital conversations (texting, emails, in particular apps) count?
-How to count less formal conversations. If conversations take place behind the scenes as opposed to in public settings, can they be found or discovered? What kind of work is needed to track these down?
-Are people willing to talk about their talking? Some might be more willing, some less so. Or perhaps people would be more willing to talk after some major decision is made.
-Do we have some ballpark numbers of how many hours go into major decisions in governments or organizations? What is a “typical” range?
Given the scope of possible changes and the implications whether change occurs or not, the process and the time devoted to it could be worthy of study.
At least a few suburbs in the Chicago area and outside cities throughout the United States owe their founding to early railroad lines that provided quick access to the bi city and other points beyond. So when a large steam locomotive passed along the same suburban tracks in 2024, at least a few people took note:
With a shiny yellow-and-gray streamlined passenger train in tow, the Union Pacific “Big Boy” No. 4014 steam locomotive rolled through the western suburbs Monday morning to the delight of railroad enthusiasts and casual observers alike.
Roughly two hundred years ago, steam locomotives opened up all kinds of possibilities. One opportunity involved the possibility of larger and further-flung suburbs: a resident outside could travel quickly in and out of the big city. It no longer took a day or more to use horses or a carriage. No more need to travel a long distance over poor roads. Large amounts of freight could be shipped overland from the interior to big cities.
The early railroad lines tended to connect important cities and locations to each other. Along these lines, residents gathered near stations. Lots were developed. Businesses moved there. Churches opened. Houses were built. Communities grew. Regular train service emerged.
Eventually, these railroad lines were dwarfed in importance by cars, trucks, roads, and highways. Many of the lines still exist but more people drive. Much suburban development since World War Two has happened between railroad lines as cars offered access to more land.
Amid the regular clatter of passenger and freight trains through suburbia, an occasional steam locomotive with a loud whistle and billowing smoke provides a reminder of an older era. Yet, that older era helped give rise to the automobile dominated suburbia of today.
The traditional American 9-to-5 has shifted to 10-to-4, according to the 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard released in June by INRIX Inc., a traffic-data analysis firm.
“There is less of a morning commute, less of an evening commute and much more afternoon activity,” said Bob Pishue, a transportation analyst and author of the report. “This is more of the new normal.”
Now, there is a “midday rush hour,” the INRIX report found, with almost as many trips to and from the office being made at noon as there are at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Also, commuters have all but given up on public transportation. Ridership sank during the pandemic, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data shows, and never fully recovered.
The rush hour increasingly seems to be “traffic all the time!”
Since this has now been going on for a few years and also includes changes to truck use and ride sharing, what are cities and regions doing differently? What incentives do drivers and organizations have to choose other than drive by themselves when they want?
There does seem to be some possible good will to change traffic patterns when there are major issues, like significant highway repairs or the Olympics. When does regular traffic become a large enough issue that people start acting together?
“Right now, our transit system reflects an old design,” DuPage County Board Chair Deb Conroy testified in Naperville. “One that saw commuting as merely bedroom communities serving downtown workplaces.”
“All suburban residents deserve the same level and access to and from Naperville to Rosemont or from Oak Park to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.”
College of DuPage student Rowan Julian experienced that disconnect trying to get from Wheaton to Batavia to see a friend, a 20-minute car trip. She wanted to use public transit but found it could take up to one hour and 40 minutes.
“For me I felt like I had no choice … so I chose to take my car,” she said.
It’s easy to take the huge variety of foods available at the grocery store for granted. But it’s possible because of the technology—and huge amount of energy—that keeps dairy, meat, fruits, and vegetables cold, safe from rot, and free of bacteria growth. To find out how the heat is affecting the process of keeping things cool, I talked to Nicola Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity…
The estimate is that for every degree-Fahrenheit rise in ambient temperature, your refrigerator uses 2 to 2½ percent more energy. So it’s significant. It has to work significantly harder to cool things. So there is a real problem…
We can’t just store our food at a much warmer temperature. But there actually is a big push to raise the temperature that frozen food is stored at by a couple of degrees. Currently frozen food should be transported at minus 18 degrees Celsius, or zero degrees Fahrenheit. But for every degree that you go below minus 12 degrees Celsius, you’re using an extra 2 or 3 percent energy.
The company that owns Birds Eye [the frozen foods giant] has studied this and found that if their foods were stored at minus 15 degrees centigrade, rather than minus 18, it wouldn’t affect the food safety or the texture or taste or nutrition level. And it would likely reduce energy consumption by about 10 percent, which is a lot. All the big frozen-food warehouses and shipping companies are behind this right now.
It sounds like transporting frozen food at slightly warmer temperatures could work.
But there are bigger issues at play here. How much frozen food should there be and how far should it be shipped? How about refrigerated food? Americans are pretty used to all sorts of cold and frozen food options that come from who knows where.
Talk about needing more local food has been going on for a while. Some had concerns about oil use; what does it take to transport food thousands of miles to please consumers elsewhere in the globe? Or it might be about agriculture more broadly: do people eat what is available each season instead of depending on food grown elsewhere that makes certain food available all year round?
I would guess many American consumers still have little idea where their food – fresh or frozen – comes from. It is just available. I can go roughly two and a half miles from where I live and visit five different sizable grocery stores. Expand that radius to five miles and it adds numerous stores. What if I had fewer shopping options, whether in terms of locations or fewer food items when shopping in each store?
It is interesting to hear that companies might be willing to make changes as it could save money and be more sustainable. What other parts of the system, whether at the policy level or for those who transport goods or on the consumer side, would address the issue of energy use for frozen and cold food?
Even in deep-blue states, a bipartisan coalition keeps the highway funding spigot open, said Amy Lee, a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles who wrote her dissertation about California’s failure to constrain highway growth. “The construction-materials companies tend to be very big on the right, and organized labor tends to be very powerful on the left,” she said, and these forces form a pro-highway juggernaut. In January, a coalition of construction companies and labor groups sent a letter to California’s top elected leaders defending “funding for infrastructure projects that may potentially increase vehicle miles traveled”—i.e., highway expansions. (The Laborers’ International Union of North America did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.) As with electric vehicles, highway construction seems to be a topic in which environmental and union interests diverge.
Transportation departments don’t want to hear no on highways. In 2022 Oklahoma’s department of transportation preemptively bought 23 web domains, like oklahomansagainstturnpikes.com and stoptheeasternloop.com, that could theoretically be used to rally opposition to the state’s $5 billion highway plan. Speaking up against pavement within a department can be difficult and risky. Last year, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained engineer who served as the deputy director of planning and modal programs for California’s Caltrans, was demoted after questioning her agency’s plans to widen I-80 between Sacramento and Davis. In an editorial published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Ward-Waller wrote, “My concerns were repeatedly brushed off by my bosses, who seemed more concerned about getting the next widening project underway than following the law.”
At the federal level, even asking questions about the collective climate impact of highway building appears verboten. In 2022 Stephanie Pollack, the acting head of the Federal Highway Administration, called on state DOTs to measure the carbon emissions attributable to their highway systems. Republicans were incensed; 21 states filed a suit, and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell advised governors to simply ignore her.
Democrats have supported highway expansions too. The White House called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law “a critical step towards reaching President Biden’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050,” but subsequent analysis by Transportation for America found that state DOTs used nearly a quarter of the $270 billion they received through the law to expand highways, a move sure to increase emissions. (After the infrastructure bill was passed, the head of Louisiana’s transportation department said that “some of the winners I think from this project funding will be things like the Inter-City Connector,” referring to the Shreveport project.)
With so many forces pushing for roadway expansions, opposing them requires political bravery.
As noted above, this system requires resources. And both major political parties tend to support it. They might fight particular projects (also highlighted in the article) but they generally find the money needed for fixing roads and creating new ones.
To reverse course then requires a major political change. Resources could be funneled elsewhere. The topic could become a regular campaign issue. It could join with popular support. How might it be pitched? Here are two areas where I could guess these political appeals might work:
The individual costs of driving are high. Paying for gas, insurance, maintenance, storing a vehicle, and more add up. Are all people interested in paying this year after year after year?
A desire among some (not all) for denser living areas that can support less driving. Even American cities can be sprawling but it seems there is some interest for communities that are more walkable and accessible by other means.
There are other arguments to make, of course. The two I listed get at different opportunities people might want. Pivoting from a transportation method that tends to privilege individual choices to travel wherever they want whenever they want might require providing different opportunities.
Legally Sociable 