Owning a Car Is Less Important To Younger Generations

54 percent of Gen Z participants polled for Statista's Consumer Insights survey in the U.S. between July 2023 and June 2024 claim that owning a car is important to them, compared to 69 percent of baby boomers. This suggests that the perceived necessity of car ownership is not only influenced by the availability and quality of public transit but also by generation.

The survey also shows that the importance of having a car decreased from generation to generation. Two thirds of all respondents in the Gen X bracket, categorized as individuals born between 1965 and 1979, said it was important for them to own a car, while the share for the same group stood at 62 percent for millennials. Overall, 62 percent of the more than 10,000 surveyed U.S. residents thought car ownership was important to them.

One way to decrease reliance on individual car ownership is improving long-distance and regional transit networks, an area in which the federal government has increasingly invested in over the past years. A variety of planned railway expansion initiatives have at least in part been funded with federal money, with some of the upcoming projects detailed by Newsweek in June 2024. These include the Brightline West High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail System, a joint project by private railway company Brightline and the Nevada Department of Transportation connecting Greater Los Angeles with Las Vegas, and the Hudson Tunnel Project, which aims to improve connectivity between New Jersey and New York.

Following through on larger-scale public transport projects can be difficult in a country focused on motorized personal transportation, even in states with metro areas afflicted by daily traffic jams like Los Angeles. A mega project connecting all major cities in California which, according to media reports, will cost upwards of $150 billion has been in the planning stages since 2008 but has been mired by a variety of problems and delays.