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But once Knittel and Murphy control for economic and demographic variables that presumably influence car use and ownership — income, education, size of family, “urbanity” (which is not a measure of suaveness but of whether people live in a city or not) — that difference declines. And the difference disappears when, for comparison, they eliminate older boomers — for whom there are no equivalents among millennials, since the oldest a millennial can be in this study’s end-year is 37.

To be precise, millennials’ car ownership is three one-hundredths of a car less than boomers (which is what? A set of snow tires?). Plus, that difference isn’t statistically significant, i.e., it’s a result of the natural randomness that says it would be a fluke if the two numbers were exactly the same. As the authors conclude, “These results suggest that millennials’ preferences for vehicle ownership are not so different from prior generations.”

As for “vehicle miles travelled” per year, after controlling for the different possible influences on this variable, Knittel and Murphy conclude that millennials actually travel a little more than boomers do, which is not so surprising given millennials’ reputation for wanderlust. Because the researchers’ sample of millennials does top out at 37 years, while their oldest boomer could be 73, they also do some “nearest-neighbour” analysis. “Nearest-neighbour” picks out millennials and boomers who are very closely matched in their background economic and demographic data and then looks at their numbers for vehicles owned and vehicle-miles travelled. For many of us that gives more intuitively persuasive results: Find people who are more or less identical except for being in different generations and see how their behaviour differs. The answer is that it doesn’t. Or actually it does, but not in the way urban mythology says. To wit, millennials drive 2,234 more miles per year than boomers and own almost four one-hundredths of a car more. That’s obviously only a tiny difference in ownership but what’s noteworthy is that it’s in the opposite direction to what many people would assume.

In short, millennials like their cars just as much as boomers do. But why shouldn’t they? Has there ever been a greater freedom machine? In the time it took the CBC to run a couple of radio programs, I was able, on my own timetable, to get myself, a passenger and a pile of luggage from Montreal to Ottawa, a trip that in earlier times would have taken days, if not weeks.