This guy doesn’t understand today’s youth. Surprise!

The fact that young people today are giving up cars in record numbers has become a fairly common meme lately. It’s a good story, being such a tremendous shift in the American Dream.

So I was not surprised to see today’s Express cover story on the issue, which also appeared in the full Washington Post. But I did laugh when I got to the end of the story. It’s a perfectly good piece, but it closes with some nay-saying from a professor Michael Marsden, of Saint Norbet College. He says:

“If you look at Main Street America on weekends, they’re still driving up and down Main Street… Are we really ever going to get over the love affair? I doubt it. Automotive culture, that love affair is a deep one. And we may have to compromise, we may have to shift, we may have to redefine it, but it’s a pull. It’s a deep, deep pull.”

I’d never heard of professor Marsden or Saint Norbet College, so I looked them up. I won’t speculate on his precise age, but it’s clear from the picture that he’s firmly a member of one of the generations that viewed cars as a symbol of freedom rather than a burden. Meanwhile, Saint Norbet is located in a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which can hardly be described as a major participant in America’s urban renaissance.

So let me get this straight: An old person in a suburb of a small, remote city isn’t impressed by the trends of today’s urban youth.

Surprise!

I don’t mean to pick on professor Marsden. I’m sure he’s a lovely man. And of course, it’s extremely unlikely that cars will ever disappear entirely. They’re wonderfully useful tools, after all. But I wonder if Marsden knows that his statements aren’t really a defense of car culture so much as they are further illustration of the generation gap. What better proof could the Post have shown than to end a story filled with quotes from young people with one from an old guy about how he thinks they’re all wrong?