[Reprinted from the September 21, 1997 New York Times. -Ed.]
By Matthew L. Wald
Washington They are bigger, stronger and faster than the last generation. They come to this country from all over the world, they live longer and healthier lives, and they fill the cities, suburbs and countryside, quicker than anyone had imagined.
No, not children-- cars.
The Department of Transportation said this week that since 1969, the vehicle population of the United States had grown six times faster than the human population. The number of cars increased two and a half times as fas as the number of households, and twice as fast as the number of drivers. They bid fair to become the dominant life form.
"Inundation is not too strong a term for it," said Alan E. Pisarski, a transportation expert.
A new version of an intermittent study, the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, will be released in a few days. The summary, released this week by the Federal Highway Administration, paints a startlingly changing picture of life on the road, from 1969, when the first survey was done, until 1995, when the latest was conducted. Since the time of the first study:
The number of vehicles has risen by 144 percent, to 176 million. The number of drivers has also risen, but only by 72 percent. Drivers used to outnumber cars by 30 percent; now the two are equal.
Mr. Pisarski said the growth spurt would not continue, because the rush of women into the work force and of baby boomers into the ranks of licensed drivers had ended. A spurt in formation of new households is probably over too, he said, because households cannot continue to get smaller forever. Average household size is now 2.6 people, he said, down from 3.3 in 1969.
"We're probably stabilizing at high levels, but the key point is it doesn't matter, once we have more vehicles than drivers," Mr. Pisarski said. "Unless you accept the notion that a driver can drive more than one at a time, it's kind of like television sets. You can only be staring at one at a time."
Robert E. Parry, of South Arlington, Va., also compares cars to television sets. When he was a boy, in Northborough, Mass., his family had one car, because only his father drove.
"We had one TV, a big, clunky black-and-white thing in the living room," Mr. Parry recalled, "and people would argue about which of the three channels we'd watch." Now, Mr. Parry said, he and his wife have televisions in various rooms of their house and have always had as many cars as drivers: five when there were three driving-age children at home. He and his wife both worked, two sons attended a nearby college as commuters, and the children also drove between the home of Mr. Parry and his first wife, their mother.
"If you have the money and can afford it, it's a convenience," he said. He is trying to sell a 1987 Plymouth Voyager van, because his daughter has gone off to college in North Caro lina, he said, leaving only one driving-age child at home. Having four cars for three drivers, he said, seemed "a little excessive."
But it may not seem that way for long, some experts think. "If you believe what the auto manufacturers are telling us, there'll be a car, in every household that can afford it, for every purpose," said Da- vid G. Van Sickle, a spokesman for the American Automobile Association. "There will be a family sedan for hauling the family around, a sport ute for climbing mountains, a sports car to go out and enjoy and fling around in every once in a while."
Cars, Mr. Van Sickle said, will be like shoes. "There are dress shoes, athletic shoes and hiking boots," he said, and people commonly own all kinds.
There are still some people who cannot afford a car or cannot afford to drive far. Charles Komanoff, a transportation consultant in New York, calculated from the 1990 survey that people reporting household incomes of over $40,000, which was 32.2 percent of the households, drove more than 24,000 miles a year; people who said their household incomes were under $10,000, which was 13.7 percent of households, drove about 6,000 miles a year.
The 1995 survey covered 95,000 people in 42,000 households. It also tended to confirm that the the so-called soccer mom really does exist. About 11 percent of trips by women are to pick up or drop off someone else. For men, the figure is 7 percent.
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