
Nate Silver: The End of Car Culture - ph0rque
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/nate-silver-car-culture-stats-0609
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tjic
We're in the deepest recession in half a century, and people are cutting back,
and from ONE DATAPOINT, effectively, we're supposed to believe that it's the
"end of the car culture" ?

> To sort this out, I built a regression model that accounts for both gas
> prices and the unemployment rate in a given month and attempts to predict
> from this data how much the typical American will drive.

Note that this model is tuned using 15 years of data, and yet we're in a mini
Black Swan event that happens every 50 or 100 years.

OF COURSE there's divergence of reality and model.

I'm amazed that anyone can take this seriously.

~~~
rms
But this really is part of a trend seperate from the recession. People are
leaving the exurbs and moving back to cities.

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oldgregg
I moved to Boulder, CO on Saturday. In good part because I hate driving. It's
hard to really grasp how much more enjoyable it makes life until you
experience it. It's not just being car-free though, but the community that
follows.

I lived in NYC for awhile and while it's car-free it's still pretty awful. You
still have the same 30 minute commute -- there is no sense of geographic
community. Unless you just refuse to make friends with people outside your
neighborhood, every time you go out you're gonna end up on the train for who
knows how long and-- oh wait, the cross-town is out of service and the train
doesn't stop after 2am at blah blah blah. The stress level is easily on par
with rush hour gridlock.

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gustavo_duarte
Welcome to CO.

I've always found it amazing how people put up with rush hour traffic
commutes. To waste a solid hour (or more), 5 days a week, doing something
thoroughly unpleasant seems insane to me. I'd be willing to trade off a lot in
life to avoid doing that.

Commuting on public transport is OK as long as I can read. Bikes are OK since
they're fun.

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pg
"If there have been two seemingly immutable trends for the American consumer,
they're that he's eaten more every year and driven more every year."

Ouch.

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jms18
I know 3d charts are nifty, but a 2d chart would have been more legible --
[http://graphjam.com/2008/11/13/song-chart-memes-
perception-o...](http://graphjam.com/2008/11/13/song-chart-memes-perception-
of-3d-pie-charts/).

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rms
Nate Silver's rise to intellectual prominence is my favorite consequence of
the 2008 election so far.

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snewe
Predictions via regressions should always have confidence bounds. I am
skeptical of the conclusions given that he has prediction for 1980. In order
to estimate predictions he probably ran his model on 1970 - 1979 data. The
confidence in that prediction is a lot worse that the 1999 prediction and
should impact all future predictions. I know it is an Esquire article, but I
rarely see his posts go into these important details.

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sachmanb
more interesting: what software did they use to make that chart?

~~~
smhinsey
illustrator or equivalent, most likely. most infographics are custom in
publications of that size.

