Cognitive dissonance

Driving on the freeway yesterday, I mused that hardly any of the vehicles whipping by looked much like Wowser, our very lime green 2011 Ford Escape. They seemed to all be various sorts of shiny aerodynamic semi-SUVs, Teslas (this is NorCal, after all), and undifferentiated white, gray, and black pill boxes. Wowser, which runs just fine, must be getting old.

Apparently not so; she's just average. Via Matt Yglesias, I discover that S&P Global Mobility calculates that the average car in the US is 12.2 years old!

This is the fifth straight year the average vehicle age in the US has risen. This year's average age marks another all-time high for the average age even as the vehicle fleet recovered, growing by 3.5 million units in the past year. ...

... The global microchip shortage, combined with associated supply chain and inventory challenges, are the primary factors pushing US average vehicle age higher, according to the analysis.... The ongoing effect of supply chain constraints has led to a decrease in vehicle scrappage, which measures the number of vehicles leaving the vehicle population and has been a catalyst for the rise in average age over time.

 ... Additionally, the pandemic drove consumers from public transport and shared mobility to personal mobility and since vehicle owners couldn't upgrade their existing vehicles due to bottlenecks in the supply of new vehicles, the demand for used cars accelerated - boosting vehicle average age further.

Where are all those other aging cars? I sure don't see them. We'll being keeping Wowser for the foreseeable future. I suspect we're different around here.

• • •

Something similar goes for the city of San Francisco these days. With downtown emptied out by the shift to remote work and tech downsizing, there's more than a bit of a pall over the city. The current configuration was built for different uses and the residue of the last boom is no longer serving us ... including the political leadership as well as the built environment. 

So we have people living on the streets, as well as bad drugs most everywhere. And seem unable to envision a better day. 

It's worth recalling, we've been here before. I am not at all convinced that this is not just another one of San Francisco's boom/bust cycles. A dramatic one. A deep one. But this place revives. 

Owen Thomas puts it well in another improbable city survivor, the San Francisco Examiner: 

The million-dollar views from The City’s hillside open spaces are free. And what they offer is perspective: This is a place worth fighting for — and fighting about. We don’t have to come to some complete concurrence about San Francisco’s future to agree that it has one.