One in nine bridges in The United States – about 70,000 of them — are structurally lacking, according to a 2012 report from the Building America’s Future Educational Fund. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives roads in this country a D grade. And the World Economic Forum ranks U.S. infrastructure 25th out of 144 countries.
A new report from Standard & Poor’s Rating Services links these startling facts to, you guessed it, Millennials.
No, S&P is not arguing that young adults destroyed America’s roads on their own. (If anything they point the finger at Congress, which has just nine Millennial members, two if you think the generation starts in 1982.) What the report explains is that Americans’ vehicle-miles-traveled peaked at 3 trillion in 2007 and have yet to retake that level. Plus, when people do drive it is in more fuel-efficient cars. Millennials are leading both trends.
So what? Less need for gas means the government is collecting less revenue from gas taxes, the primary funding source for transportation infrastructure, and thus has less money to spend on improvements. The federal gas tax has held at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993 (the year most current college freshmen were born).
S&P posits: “This drop in funds available to construct and repair the country’s infrastructure could weigh on growth prospects for U.S. GDP, as well as states’ economies, and, in some cases, where states and municipalities choose to replace the lost federal funds with locally derived revenues, could hurt credit quality.”
As with the debates surrounding Millennial marriage, Millennial home buying and Millennial parenting there are clear economic forces shaping the generational tendency to drive less.
Example: Young workers were hit hard by the recession and the unemployment rate for people 16 to 24 took longer to return to pre-recessions norms than did the rate for the general population. High unemployment cut down work related transportation and limited financial resources – also suffered by the underemployed and student-debt-strapped — led to less driving to recreational activities.
“The country’s freshly minted drivers simply don’t use their cars as often as previous generations did at the same age,” explains S&P in the report, which also notes young men are receiving drivers licenses at a slower rate. “Whether that’s a lifestyle choice or due to economic hardship is less important that the fact that it’s occurring–the result matters more than the reason. And with a federal gas tax that has effectively declined 40% in real terms in the past two decades, it’s clear that lawmakers must find a way to fund the country’s transportation infrastructure, or face harsh economic realities.”
Read more of the original article in Forbes.
