Originally Posted by
gerv
There are also many people living in NYC who aren't in high poverty and who don't own a car
One of the high density urban areas I was referring to.
Originally Posted by
gerv
I assume that 9% of the estimated
776,000 households in the US would include quite a few people who once had cars and now don't. I don't know if this adds up to millions or zillions.
Once again your numbers are off and you draw conclusions based on assumptions. I don't know what that 776,000 households represents (there is way too much to sift through on the page you linked) but it's not the total number of households in the U.S.. Plus you're still using 9% which represents the total number of car free households, not converts.
According to the
U.S. Census Bureau there are 115,227,000 households in the U.S. with an average of 2.61 persons per household. As your earlier link stated 0.5% of households in the U.S. have converted to car free since 2007 which would represent 576,135 households or 1,503,712 people. So we're close to millions but not quite there for the U.S., since 2007 anyway.
However there are a couple of other factors that should be considered, namely that the further back you go the less households there were so that brings the number down and also I personally wouldn't count people under the legal driving age who have no say in how they get around. Roughly 21% of Americans are under the age of 16 which brings the original number down to 1,187,982.
Adding similar numbers to account for Canada and Mexico to get an overall picture for N.A. based on the percentage shift of the total population (1,187,982 is 0.37% of the U.S. population) gives us 132,000 for Canada (.37% of 35,675,834) and 438,062 for Mexico (.37% of 118,395,054) which added to the total for the U.S. equals 1,758,044 people who may have converted in N.A. based on a 2014 numbers.
Still not millions for the whole continent since 2007 though I'll admit you may get there by going back far enough but based on lower population numbers for previous years, a lower rate of conversion to LCF, likely lower numbers of conversion in Canada and Mexico, and beyond a certain year car usage increasing as opposed to decreasing, your assertion is very far from the absolute truth you seem to propose.
Originally Posted by
gerv
It is interesting the 58% of NYC households do not have cars. Hope for the future IMO.
I'd like to think so too but you have to balance out what happens in NY with all the Duck Dynasty wannabes of the world. Cities with that kind of density are few and far between so using them as a litmus test for what is possible anywhere else doesn't work.