Sitting alone in your car through the morning rush is commonplace these days. But not long ago, many of us were packing in together to get to work. In 1970, more than 1 in 5 workers drove to work with others as their main mode of transportation. That didn’t hold for long. Today, less than 1 in 10 workers rely on carpooling for their commutes.
What’s fascinating here isn’t just that carpooling fell, and fell fast; it’s that many of society’s biggest social and economic trends — the entry of women into the workforce, the growth of singlehood, suburban sprawl — came together to create the perfect conditions for the death of the carpool.
More singles + fewer kids + more car-buying = a car for everyone
“Car availability” — the degree to which a person has access to a car — has grown in recent decades as people get married later, have fewer kids, and buy more cars when they’re single and childless. In other words, households started getting more cars, but fewer people. The number of cars per household climbed from 1.55 in 1970 to 2.08 in 2013. Meanwhile, the number of people in each household fell, from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.54 today, according to the Census Bureau.
Having fewer people per household itself makes carpooling less common, as the majority of carpools are “fampools” — carpools consisting of family members. As of 2006, 77 percent of carpools had only two people in them, and the majority of those were family members driving together, according to the Transportation Research Board. Add to that more cars per household, and carpooling is even less likely; a family of three with one car is much likelier to share rides than a couple with two cars, for example.
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STORY: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/28/7070835/what-ever-happened-to-carpooling