"The share of American workers who live in households with no vehicles yet nonetheless drive alone to work grew from 20.4 percent in 2014 to 20.9 percent in 2015, according to the latest American Community Survey. This growth came at the expense of slight declines in carpooling, transit, work-at-homes, and “other” (taxi, bicycle, motorcycle), while walking to work increased slightly. No one knows for certain how people with no cars drive alone to work . . . " Lack of imagination. I used to on occasion liberate a vehicle from its drudgeries owners grasp. Then drive to work, before heading back to drive the vehicle home to its unfortunate slavery. Ok, maybe I made some of that up. The car was my parents, I had a job but was too young (14) for a license, and I didn't want to ride my bike, so I liberated the spare car. Worked like a charm, until I was caught, then my dad "taught me how to drive" by sitting next to me as I drove down the freeway, and pronounced me fit to drive. I got a license two years later. And I really can't see stealing a car to commute to work. Joyriding, sure, work, no. "No one knows for certain how people with no cars drive alone to work, but most probably use employer-supplied vehicles." I probably should have included the fin de sentence. "Only 4.5 percent of American workers live in households with no vehicles, a share that remained stable from 2014 to 2015. Nearly a third of them are in the New York urban area. Outside of the New York area, the only places with double-digit vehicle-less households tend to be in the Boston, San Francisco-Oakland, and Washington, DC urban areas. In some urban areas, the share of workers in households with no vehicles who drive alone to work is higher than the share who use transit. To name a few, these include Albuquerque, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Nashville, Phoenix, Sacramento, and San Jose. This suggests that the money some of these areas have spent on transit hasn’t done much to help people who don’t have cars." Like the city, transit was a mistake. It is now fading faster, and faster. The self drive car will likely all but kill transit except for a few odd places, like the Roosevelt tram in New York, and the Tram in Portland. Perhaps a few circular streetcar like routes will remain but even these seem like odd anachronisms in the modern world, throwbacks to 19th century Europe. The next decade is likely to change America as fundamentally as the TV did in 1950. To see how much New York changed watch The Naked City. In the end, this thriller contains within it a time capsule of New York two years before TV burst onto the scene, quickly drying up the street life, and forever remaking the city, and America itself. Here is the into:
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