The Seattle Times ($) is reporting that recently-released 2023 Census data indicates the percentage of households in Seattle which do not own or lease a car reached 20% in 2023, the highest proportion since the Census started tracking rates of vehicle ownership:
There were roughly 365,000 households in Seattle in 2023. Of those, around 74,000, or just over 20%, did not have a car. Just two years earlier, in 2021, the percentage was around 17% for no-car households in the city.
The column notes renters are more likely to live in walkable neighborhoods with better transit access, negating the need to own a personal vehicle. On the other hand, the Times also notes homeowners tend to be wealthier than renters, and car ownership is expensive.
Renters in Seattle are much more likely to live without a car than homeowners. Nearly 67,000 renter households did not have a car — that’s about 1 in 3 renter households. Among homeowners, only about 7,200 were no-car households, which pencils out to about 5%.
Unsurprisingly, the Times’ map census tract data shows no-car households are predominantly located in Downtown (including SLU, First Hill, and Capitol Hill) and the U-District (despite the data excluding “group living” such as dorms), with pockets of low-car areas around Northgate and Hillman City. Several other neighborhood around the city exhibit slightly below-average rates of car ownership; check out the maps in the article.
After Seattle become majority-renter in 2018, the Times speculated Seattle had reached Peak Car in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of cars registered in Seattle (~463,000) has stayed relatively flat since hitting ~461,000 in 2017. With the majority of new residents renting apartments in dense corridors, the Time’s prediction we’d be coming down from “peak car” seems to have come true.
Among the 50 largest cities in the nation, Seattle (20.3%) is now 9th place between Detroit (19.4%) and Cleveland (22.4%). In the lead, obviously, is NYC (56.2%), followed by D.C. (36.3%), Boston (33.3%), and San Francisco (30.9%).
I’d be interested in seeing some better numbers on the subject, but honestly that may not be possible without violating people’s privacy.
My take there are 3 groups of people here….
1. people just too poor to own a car and have to rely on public transit (guessing most are renters or long time home owners on a fixed income.)
2. People who live in areas where it’s possible, or even an advantage to, not own a car (Capitol Hill and U-District being the biggest)
3. People who see car ownership as freedom (the biggest group, far and away)
I think people with a high AMI are always going to lean towards car ownership no matter what… I think most people who car free in their twenties hope to get married, and buy a house (and car ownership certainly is part of that). Tacoma is full of young home owners who used to live in Seattle when they were single…. but growing up, marriage and kids kind of put a stop to the whole car free lifestyle…. So how many of Seattle’s car free 20’s people are moving out and buying a car in the next 10 years? And another crop of 20 year olds move in to take their place? I believe lots of people have a car free phase…. how could it possibly go on? The car ownership numbers were about the same as now as in the 1980s.
As far as lower income people…. I honestly think they’re even more likely to want a car than higher income people. First, poor people in the PNW rarely live in walkable neighborhoods and second, no matter what anybody on blog believes, car ownership is a sign of wealth, or at least middle class in America. If car free advocates went to a Tacoma Eastside community meeting and even suggested that all the lower income people (50% non White) should ditch their cars….. they’d be booed right out of the community center.
If East Tacoma had a say on it…. they’d take free car tabs and no emissions testing over increased bus service.
In fact, I think Seattle might be more car crazy than the rest of the USA. Seattle has sky high parking fees and the University of Washington to help repress car ownership…. yet 80% of the city is still driving? These numbers are terrible, right?
I thought you said only rich people live in apartments remember?
> In fact, I think Seattle might be more car crazy than the rest of the USA. Seattle has sky high parking fees and the University of Washington to help repress car ownership…. yet 80% of the city is still driving? These numbers are terrible, right?
Tacommee you cannot interpret every statistic no matter which way it hinges to support your argument. last time you said low parking fees meant a city was pro car, now you’re going to argue the opposite?
One needs to interpret the facts and the come to conclusion. Not first start out with a conclusion and then work backwards to reinterpret the facts to fit your assumption
Tacomee, why is car ownership flat in Seattle while population is increasing? How did Seattle get into the top 9 if it’s so uniquely car crazy? The article didn’t address the suburbs; it just noted a notable accomplishment in Seattle. But to your points…
“Tacoma is full of young home owners who used to live in Seattle when they were single…. but growing up, marriage and kids kind of put a stop to the whole car free lifestyle”
It should be possible to move to Tacoma and even have kids without needing a car, even if you don’t want it it don’t want to spend the money on it. Much if Europe manages to, and Japan, China, Taiwan, and Latin American countries. Do we really want to be on the opposite end with Saudi Arabia, India, and Bermuda? (Or one of the Caribbean countries there was a documentary on). Maybe you do, but I don’t.
That’s our whole point about Tacoma, Lynnwood. Everett, Auburn, Federal Way, Renton, etc. Either Seattle should be accessible to all incomes and much denser, or it should be possible to live in most if those other cities without a car without extraordinary hardship. There are two approaches: more buses only, or more buses and walkability. The latter is most effective. While the former can be a start.
” far as lower income people…. I honestly think they’re even more likely to want a car than higher income people.”
That’s true in voting patterns in South King County and Pierce County, which are the most resistant to transit taxes or density (both Metro. PT, and ST). The significant question is, why is that? It’s from the century-long propaganda that cars are freedom and the sign of success. That goes back to General Motors’ “Futurama” exhibit at the 1930s World’s Fair. It ignores the huge externalities and cost of universal driving, and the non-scalability of so many cars. Car-dependent suburbs were built for aspirating middle-class people, so it’s unconscionable to economically force lower-income people to live in areas that don’t meet their needs. They may tell their politicians they like it that way just fine, but politicians need to focus on what really makes a city functional, not people’s delusional ideas that car dependency for most people is just fine and superior to a fully-functioning city.
There is also an obvious fourth group: People without a driver’s license. The numbers vary depending on age group with almost 20% of those between 18-25 not having a license and over 7% of those between 50 to 69. https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2024/01/number-of-licensed-drivers-us/
Of course these groups overlap. Someone without a driver’s license is more likely to find themself in an area that is well suited for that. But not always. The only adult I know that doesn’t have a driver’s license lives in Kenmore. Go figure.
You can view this any number of ways. I think it is worth noting that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between transit ridership (or transit quality) and car ownership. Japan has excellent transit but a lot of people own cars. In Seattle — a city known for its outdoor recreation — it seems quite possible that someone would take transit during the week (to get to work, shop and otherwise function in the city) and then use the car on the weekends (to get out to the mountains or the sea).
This makes the numbers more impressive in my opinion. I think this is largely a reflection of increased urbanization in the city. More people live in an apartment. More people live in neighborhoods where they feel like the hassle of a car isn’t worth it. More people without a driver’s license move to Seattle. All of that.
As far as lower income people…. I honestly think they’re even more likely to want a car than higher income people.
As someone who has been both, this is exactly wrong in my case, and many others, for what I assume should be a pretty obvious reason. When asking oneself “Is the convenience of a car worth 90% of my disposable income?” it’s a lot harder to get to an honest yes than when asking oneself “Is the convenience of a car worth 25% of my disposable income?”
I think there are some interesting economics involved with car ownership. Extreme poverty precludes car ownership because cars are fundamentally expensive to own and use. Low- to moderate-income status enables car ownership but still precludes living in walkable neighborhoods since most have gentrified to absurd costs of living, leading to the suburbanization of poverty. The wealthy generally can afford a car but can also afford to live where they don’t need a car, so car ownership is still high but car use can be low.
This is closely related to the fact most Americans spend most of their income on their housing and their car. In regions like the Seattle metro area, low-to moderate-income households can choose between to owning a car and renting in the suburbs, or spending all their money on expensive housing in a walkable part of the city. This is how you end up with Seattle (a very expensive city) sandwiched between Detroit and Cleveland (relatively affordable cities) in terms of car ownership rates by household. Many people in Detroit and Cleveland simply can’t afford cars. Many people in Seattle are choosing to pay expensive rents to live where they don’t need a car.
We’ll hold the distinction of being the only Nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile.
Will Rogers.
It really depends on where you live. Urban poverty is famous in this country. It has altered politics in many ways. Reagan successfully ran against “welfare queens” playing the race card. Families were destroyed by drug laws aimed at containing the (urban) crack epidemic. But poverty was just as bad if not worse in rural areas. The meth epidemic was no picnic either. The biggest difference (aside from the stereotypes) is that low income urban people can get around without a car. That isn’t the case in rural neighborhoods. Nor is it the case in many suburban neighborhoods (where an increasing number of low-income people live). Even predominately low-income/black neighborhoods are often in the suburbs now. Places like Ferguson Missouri. The bus service in Ferguson is not good.
Meanwhile, many of the low-income areas in the city that used to be ghettos have gentrified. The bus service in those areas is good. Thus you have low-income people in the city who can live without a car and low-income people in the suburbs that can’t. That isn’t fundamentally different than it was fifty years ago although the ethnicity of the folks that are low-income in the suburbs has changed (and there are more low-income people in the suburbs).
I’d be curious to see if there’s been any change from multi-car households to single-car households. I’m not sure the best statistic to look at there to also compensate for the number of adults in a given household. Perhaps you could filter for households with exactly 2 adults, and show the histogram of 0 cars, 1 car, 2 cars, and >2 cars over time. The hypothesis is that for such households, the investments in transit and the rise of hybrid work would lead to more 1-car households.
Inner-city households hace have been reducing their number if cars, but I don’t know any statistics on it.
I had the exact same thought. I know a few people (myself included) who have avoided or replaced a second car with transit and/or a bike. If households is the population unit used by the Census, this would be tricky to track as the number of people in a household is not consistent. I’d bet there are more households in Seattle going from two cars to one car than going from one car to car free. As you said, hybrid/remote work can easily make a second car unnecessary in a 2+ person household.
Michael Smith,
I think a solid majority of households in Seattle are mixing car and transit use. It’s really the way forward. I do think there are some steps we could take to make this hybrid lifestyle easier.
1. Make riding transit cheaper and easier than it is now. Drop fares to $2 and get rid of ORCA cards completely. Sell a $60 one month unlimited ride pass and selection of day or weekly unlimited passes. Forget the whole “fare box recovery” thing going forward. Because car ownership is expensive and families splitting car and transit to get around shouldn’t have pay much for transit. Get rid of the whole “reduced fare” crap because it costs too much to administer. Let seniors and kids ride free.
2. Figure out some way to NOT fund transit with sales tax. Sales tax is just too volatile.
3. Understand that cars make life a whole lot easier some of the time. Taking a baby to daycare on transit…. then getting to work….on transit…. leaving work to get the baby from daycare….on transit….and finally home again…. on transit. Anybody who believes this a good way to live is simply high. Parents with young kids need a car….. plumbers with tools need a van…… a group of friends going hiking in Cascades need a car…… cars certainly have huge advantages in certain circumstances.
4. But there are also certain groups, like seniors and older kids, who are really served well by transit. Let ’em ride for free. And riding for free means scrapping that stupid ORCA card because issuing them to kids who ride for free takes money. No more ORCA, no data mining, fewer office workers and lots more drivers.
5. The idea of “Transit Now!” no one knows what Seattle is going to look like in 30 years. Most of transit should focus on great service right now. No transit project like light rail needs to take more than 7 years to plan and complete. Telling voters to wait 20 years for light rail is silly.
6. There is absolutely nothing bad or evil about cars. Or transit. We really need both.
I fail to see the argument for getting rid of Orca cards. So long as the fare isn’t zero, people have to pay somehow, and if not with Orca, how? Forcing all of the Orca payers to go back to inserting cash into the farebox would make transit harder to use, not easier. Of course, Google Pay and Apple Pay can and should also be supported, as TriMet, over in Portland, already does. But, that should be in an option in addition to Orca cards, not instead of them.
asdf2,
ORCA costs money that should go into actual transit. High school kids ride Metro for free and most of them don’t bother getting an ORCA card. If they all did… it would cost money. Let that sink in for a minute…. spending money to electronically track riders…. who don’t pay any fare to ride. Why?
Look, we had transit without ORCA for decades. Why make complicated systems. Buy train and bus tickets at the damn train station. Buy them with your phone. Transit doesn’t need their own financial system….
Having to mess with buying a ticket every time you ride is a nuisance. To avoid that, you have to have something you carry with you that stores either a pass or stored value. If not an Orca card, what, other than an Orca card with another name.
Yes, there is some financial overhead involved in administering Orca, but the amount of actual transit service that could be funded by eliminating it is negligible. And, other payment options incur administrative costs too. Restocking ticket machines costs money, as does fixing them when they break, as does paying people to empty fareboxes. I often refer to this as the second law of financial dynamics – at the scale of a large organization, it is impossible to do literally anything without spending some amount of money in overhead, just like in physics, it is impossible to transfer energy without some heat loss.
“ORCA costs money that should go into actual transit.”
It really doesn’t, ORCA cost less than 1% to administer based on STs own financial documents. Like its a very small line item in budget because the system generally runs itself and actually has little overhead compared to the previous system that was cash handling.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2023-financial-plan-proposed-budget-book.pdf
“Why make complicated systems. ”
It’s not that complicated, it’s no different than a Starbucks gift card, Safeway sells ORCA cards on the gift card racks. Going back to a cash system to “save money” wouldn’t save money, there’s associated costs with such a system. Having a manned ride store for passes and multi ride tickets for one. Which is why after ORCA debited, Metro got rid of its stores because they were generally uneeded and expensive to run and administer. You also have people who have to deal with the change, which is often expensive to do. It’s why most banks nowadays don’t take loose change anymore and needs to be rolled to be deposited. Cash is often more expensive than it is handle and process.
Like there’s a reason why most people don’t write checks or use fax machines much anymore. What may of worked in the past, doesn’t translate into the modern context of what people use to do their business because things have become more efficient to do business more digitally. That includes fares, while many still pay at the fare box with cash others just use their ORCA card to pay because it’s easier, simpler, and efficient to use.
“we had transit without ORCA for decades.”
That was before Link. Link doesn’t have a cash farebox,. paper transfers, or flash passes. If you want everybody to buy a Link ticket at a TVM, that would create a huge bottleneck line.
@Mike Orr,
“ That was before Link.”
Correct. Link represented not only a huge step forward in basic transportation locally, but also a huge step forward in transportation technology. If it wasn’t for Link we would still all be paying with cash and requesting paper transfers.
But you can still get paper transfers on Metro. It’s like a little slice of the 80’s right there at the farebox.
“Link doesn’t have a cash farebox,”
And that is one reason why Link is so much safer for operators. Not only can the operator be more completely separated from the passengers, but the lack of interaction over the farebox removes a point of potential conflict.
And of course cashless, all-door boarding is simply faster and more efficient operationally.
@tacomee You’re trying too hard to be contrarian – Orca is one of the best passenger-experience improvements our transportation system has implemented in the last several decades. It is so much easier to pay with an Orca card across multiple modes of travel that it makes zero sense to pine for the days of using cash and paper transfers.
“If it wasn’t for Link we would still all be paying with cash and requesting paper transfers.”
We could have gone to ORCA without Link. The New York subway doesn’t take tokens anymore. If ST1 and 2 had been voted down, Metro and the governments would have had to fall back to improving the bus network. That might have included switching to a tappable farecard, as agencies throughout the world had been doing at that time.
@Mike Orr,
“ We could have gone to ORCA without Link”
Yes, Metro “could” have gone to ORCA without Link, but would they have? Almost certainly not. Metro basically got pushed into it.
And Metro is still dragging its feet on getting rid of paper transfers. Good gawd people, this isn’t 1980. Get rid of paper transfers and cash payments.
Or at least incentivize their elimination by adding a cash surcharge to the fare. There are multiple ways to do it, but Metro really should just pick one and get on with it.
And maintaining a cash system with paper transfers and an ORCA system has to be more expensive for Metro than just going 100% ORCA. Metro should do it for no other reason than it will save them money.
“Orca is one of the best passenger-experience improvements our transportation system has implemented in the last several decades.”
There’s things to quibble about with ORCA 1.0 in hindsight, but ORCA 2.0 has more or less addressed said problems. I do wish ORCA had like tickets you could buy from the app and get contactless tap to pay and Apple Pay be implemented.
“Or at least incentivize their elimination by adding a cash surcharge to the fare.”
This is what Florence, Italy does when I lived there. €1.70 at a TVM or tobaccoist(Italian corner store for purchasing cigarettes, lotto tickets, bus tickets, etc), €2 + service charge via sms on your phone (you text a number and buy your ticket), or €3 on the actual bus. Means the driver is wasting less time with handling fares and more focused on driving the bus.
https://www.at-bus.it/en/ticket
That’s the story in my household too: from two cars and a motorcycle a few years ago, we’re down to one car and a cargo bike. It’d be difficult to do without a car entirely, but driving is no longer part of the daily routine; my wife works from home now, and I get around by transit, walking, and rental scooters.
I used to look forward to the day I could switch to an electric car, but at this point we’re burning so little gasoline that it hardly seems to matter.
I don’t think the ACS makes that level of cross-correlation possible. I posted the 2023 and 2022 data summarizing cars-per-household and people-per-household in another comment. Cars per person per household isn’t a statistic they develop from their survey sample.
I wonder how deep the State looks at vehicles registration data. It has its problems like vehicles registered at other addresses – work-provided vehicles and college students whose parents own the cars — but the database should be able to look at the number of vehicles at each address.
It appears that the City of Seattle or one of the transit agencies could make such a data request.
https://dol.wa.gov/about/data-services-requests/vehicle-and-boat-data-requests
I’m certain the City knows exactly how many vehicles are registered within it without requesting data from DOL because of the STBD.
My wife and I went from 2 cars to 1 almost 3 years ago. But I’m afraid to say we may need to go back to 2 cars with a baby on the way.
The issue is childcare. Ideally it would be walkable to home but the limited availability means we will have to take whatever spot we can get, wherever that may be. Drop off and pick up logistics are difficult with only one car. It sounds easy in theory; if both parents WFH 100% with staggered schedules it works great. But with 2/3 day hybrid schedules it gets complicated.
Would be cool to see childcare centers colocated with transit facilities. Northgate would be amazing.
I wasn’t going to wade back in on this ORCA debate but… we’re 10 comments in talking about how to make it easier to pay to ride the bus and no one has even mentioned making bus fare payable by debit/credit card? Is there some reason for this, besides none of the frequent commentators on here using them anymore (I presume)?? 99.9% of the businesses in the USA have found some way to accept them – what’s so different about a bus?
Also, as to the other topic: add my family to those using only one car (and we did so in Seattle, as well). I used the buses frequently back in the day, and nowadays, my husband bikes to his job. But alas, having two kids with schedules that don’t match up necessitates that damn car. I hope it’s the last one we ever own.
Spokane is intelligent enough to have 2 daycares right next to the main bus hub in downtown, and I send my littlest to one of them. If the car ever broke down I COULD still get him to daycare and get to work, which I am grateful for, though it would add 30 minutes to my commute. Does Seattle really not do this? Is there a zoning reason?
“ no one has even mentioned making bus fare payable by debit/credit card?”
So then you get a huge line at the door as everyone has to enter their PIN or signature, then wait for the machine to do a verification?
And how do you do proof of payment and transfers? Print a receipt for each payment?
Seems like it adds too much time and complexity.
@Glenn in Portland
Are you not aware that the TriMet’s Hop allows payment by contactless credit/debit card? Tap once for an adult fare. After 2.5 hours, assuming you use the same card, a second tap will buy a second fare AND automatically earn you a day pass. It’s crazy to me that Orca 2.0 doesn’t include functionality for credit/debit card payments or automatic day passes.
Spokaneresident, I did mention tap to pay in my comment above
” I do wish ORCA had like tickets you could buy from the app and get contactless tap to pay and Apple Pay be implemented.”
“It’s crazy to me that Orca 2.0 doesn’t include functionality for credit/debit card payments or automatic day passes.”
ORCA has mentioned that they said tap to pay feature alongside Apple Pay would get implemented soon to complete ORCA 2.0 integration. Why it hasn’t yet is probably complexity on the back end that needs to be addressed first for payment processing. I’m no IT expert, but creating a tap to pay system that has to interact with multiple different groups for payment processing is not exactly simple even if ORCA generally handles most of it.
They’ll probably add credit card payment eventually. But credit card companies take a significant commission out of every transaction, so part of your fare money is going to a third-party middleman. Last I heard it was a minimum of 50 cents and around 2-3% of the price. It’s better to just do one credit card transaction to fill up an e-purse or buy a monthly pass than to pay for each trip by credit card.
Vancouver allows payment by credit card – on a recent trip to YVR via Amtrak it was extremely simple to just use the card to tap on and enter the stations between the train station and the airport rather than going to the fare machines, figuring things out, and purchasing a pass/ticket.* If you’re a casual rider or visitor, why mess with ORCA? If we actually cared about farebox recovery, I’d say add a 25-cent surcharge or something to cover the credit card charge, but we don’t so why bother?
Re the Spokane daycares – are these publicly owned facilities? Because if they’re not, it’s the Invisible Hand of the Market that means Seattle (allegedly) has no day care facilities near any station – it’s not zoning or any other Big Gubment regulations. (Same goes for grocery stores, which would be great to have near stations but in practice rarely exist there.) Good on some day care folks in Spokane (a city I love and have deep family ties to) for placing their facilities near transit, but neither the city of Seattle nor any other city I’m aware of in Pugetopolis is forbidding the same thing here.
* – note: the transfer between Skytrain lines in downtown Vancouver (Granville to City Centre) is as bad as anything ST has stupidly proposed at CID station, which is saying something.
I don’t know of any daycare facilities located within the stations themselves but in general there isn’t much in the stations themselves (other than parking and the occasional bathroom) . There are usually daycare options nearby though. There is a lot of daycare downtown but that would mean commuting with the kids downtown (and that wouldn’t work if they are school age). Some of the stations have daycare nearby, but typically not right there. The closest one to Northgate is this one: https://www.northleafcoop.org/ but I think it still requires walking through campus and over the bridge (or taking the bus) to get from there to Link. Some of the other stations (Roosevelt, U-District, 148th) seem to have options that are closer to the station.
But the daycare has to work for you. They have to have room available as well as fit your budget and parenting style. It is quite common for folks to use an inconvenient daycare just because they like it more.
I don’t have access to the article.
Is this the one-year or the five-year ACS Census data? The one-year data is more volatile because it’s only about a 1% sample of households. That’s about a 1-3% error on the totals so it’s not statistically significant to reflect too much on variations under 1 percent.
If it’s five-year rolling average ACS data it’s still carrying some Covid era bias although it’s going to be more accurate because the sample size is more like 5%..
The one good thing is that the source picks up vehicles inside Seattle that are registered elsewhere. There are lots of cars registered outside of the ST District and the Seattle Benefit District to save money.
Regardless, reporting data like this from the Census ACS should always include whether it’s one-year or five-year sampling.
This appears to be the 5-year ACS data which was released mid-December last year,but the column doesn’t explicitly state it.EDIT: did some digging and figured out it’s the 1-year data for 2023: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S2504?g=160XX00US5363000
2023 1-YEAR ACS ESTIMATES:
Total Occupied housing units (2023): 364,627 +/- 5,095
… with no vehicle available: 74,121 +/- 5,227 (20.3 +/- 1.4%)
… with 1 vehicle available: 161,150 +/- 6,515 (44.2 +/- 1.6%)
… with 2 vehicles available: 98,636 +/- 4,184 (27.1 +/- 1.2%)
… with 3 or more vehicles available: 30,720 +/- 2,966 (8.4 +/- 0.8)
Total Occupied housing units (2023): 364,627 +/- 5,095
… with 1-person household: 156,757 +/- 6,120 (43.0 +/- 1.3%)
… with 2-person household: 125,673 +/- 5,864 (34.5 +/- 1.4%)
… with 3-person household: 39,194 +/- 3,134 (10.7 +/- 0.9%)
… with 4-or-more-person household: 43,003 +/- 2,936 (11.8 +/- 0.9%)
2022 1-YEAR ACS ESTIMATES:
Total Occupied housing units (2022): 367,119 +/- 5,573
… with No vehicle available 70,022 +/- 4,773 (19.1 +/- 1.2%)
… with 1 vehicle available 167,382 +/- 7,073 (45.6 +/- 1.6%)
… with 2 vehicles available 99,553 +/- 4,252 (27.1 +/- 1.2%)
… with 3 or more vehicles available 30,162 +/- 2,910 (8.2 +/- 0.8%)
Total Occupied housing units (2022): 367,119 +/- 5,573
… with 1-person household: 156,201 +/- 7,308 (42.5 +/- 1.5%)
… with 2-person household: 132,902 +/- 5,121 (36.2 +/- 1.3%)
… with 3-person household: 37,115 +/- 3,254 (10.1 +/- 0.9%)
… with 4-or-more-person household: 40,901 +/- 2,590 (11.1 +/- 0.8%)
Thanks for the clarification!
Many reporters don’t understand the difference or the implications.
Did some digging and realized I was wrong – it’s the 1-year survey.
Better than the Times Reporter!
Some more anecdata for the pile. I live on the back side of Capitol Hill in a townhouse with one garage (that we actually use to park a car — the only people in our six pack who do). For various reasons both my girlfriend and I want our cars parked indoors, so she has the garage and we rent a spot in a shared garage in an apartment building a couple of blocks away.
The apartment building is older (70s?) and nothing fancy. The building owner (who manages the leases directly) started leasing out spaces when he found that he consistently had vacant spaces in his garage. His tenants just didn’t own cars, they told him they couldn’t afford them, could get by without. But he does a good trade renting out spaces monthly to townhouse owners nearby, and maybe a third of his spots are rented out like this now, the trend is up.
In an economic and policy sense, this is all great, an underused asset is being put to use, my car isn’t clogging up the street parking. But I think it does reflect an emerging upstairs-downstairs economy where lower income households are making do without, and established professional workers have a car each.
If you’ve worked at a big tech company for a few years, your income will be high enough that the cost of owning a car just isn’t a big deal to you, and is easily worth it even if you could commute and get basic necessities without it. Certainly if you can afford a mortgage on a Seattle house at today’s prices you can afford a car.
One of the more bizarre progressive policies implemented recently is in Redmond, where affordable housing is required to provide the same parking as market rate housing (e.g. in a mixed income development). Not building parking is one of the easiest way to make housing more affordable, or at least unbundle the parking rent from the actual housing rent as the landlord does in Bruce’s example, but my understanding is Redmond has made this illegal.
There’s another factor that influences car ownership rates not mentioned in this article. Even if a person is able to get to work and do their routine shopping without a car, it can still be necessary to occasionally use a car for infrequent trips to places further away. For example, I walk to work and walk to the grocery store, but on weekends, I sometimes make trips deep into the mountains to places that are accessible only by car.
So, even if the walkability and transit quality is good enough to cover the routine trips, you still end up needing a personal vehicle unless access to rental vehicles is cheap enough and convenient enough to make renting a car for these occasional trips a better option than owning one. One thing I’ve learned having use rental cars for many years that having the car within walking distance is hugely convenient. When the car is further away, the cumulative time of riding the bus to the car, driving the car back home, on top of waiting in line at the rental office, plus having to repeat everything in reverse to return the car at the end of the trip, really adds up. This gets worse when the nearest rental office has limited operating hours. For example, if you need a car for a trip on Sunday, but the rental office isn’t open Sunday or Saturday, you might have to pick it up on Friday right before their 6 PM closing. That means, even if the ride *to* the rental car office is a straight shot down Link, you’re still stuck having to fight the full fury of rush hour traffic to drive the car back home, for a trip you’re not even taking that day.
Zipcar helps in this regard somewhat, but it has big limitations. It’s expensive to use. It is only economically profitable in areas where the number of affluent-but-car-free households is unusually high, hence nearly the entire Seattle fleet being in the blue/purple areas shown in the Seattle Times map. But, there’s also a more fundamental problem that the days when car-free people tend to need/want access to a car are not evenly distributed throughout the week, but are, instead, heavily skewed towards weekends, especially holiday weekends. This makes rentals expensive, as Zipcar essentially needs to make enough money off their fleet Saturday-Sunday to cover it being mostly idle Monday-Friday (absent a few people taking vacation days). And, it also means that you might not be able to find a car on a weekend at all unless you reserve it well in advance, or are willing to ride the bus to another neighborhood to get to it. And then, of course, there’s those pesky excise taxes to fund the sports stadiums.
Free-floating car share, when it existed, was better (at least, outside of the few census tracts where the Zipcars are concentrated). The fleet tended to be spread out, allowing more of the city to be able to find a car without having to travel far, plus, if you were willing to walk a few blocks, you could usually find a car spontaneously, and even if you had to travel a bit to pick up the car, you could still return it right in front of your house, which saves a lot of time at the end of the trip, when you’re most tired. The problem of course, is that the operating economics free-floating car share are not good, which is why it went out of business. Having cars congregate in Broadview is great if you’re one of the few car-free people in Broadview, not so great if you’re the owner of the carsharing company, having its cars sit there for long periods of time, generating no revenue. Paying people to move cars around is one solution, but a very expensive one, as labor in Seattle is not cheap, plus the need for additional people to carry the car movers to and from their cars.
My personal opinion is that what the urban rental car industry really needs is a car that just autonomous drives itself to wherever you want to be picked up and allows you to return the car anywhere, autonomously driving itself again from the return point to the car’s home base. We’re not there yet, but when we are, the case for renting cars for occasional trips, rather than owning them, will become viable for more people, particularly in neighborhoods that don’t have a large enough concentration of car-free drivers to support a traditional rental car business or Zipcar.
Yet another nuance is that, even among car owners who seldomly ride transit, there are different degrees of car dependency. Some may use their cars for their daily trips because it’s faster, but could get by with walking, biking, and transit for a few days or weeks if need be. Then, there’s the second group, where they can’t be without a personal vehicle for even one day.
Both groups show up as vehicle owners in the census, but the difference matters. The second group has to pay for an insurance policy that gives them a rental car while the primary car is under repair; the first group does not. The second group is also forced into a much more rushed and stressful car buying process should their car get totalled in an accident and need replacement. Members of the first group, if they don’t like the deals they’re getting, can just say “screw it, I’ll do without” for a couple weeks and try again. Members of the second group can’t.