japanese have geishas,America has...

[Rev9Volts]

CARS! Yes, lots of them... and we love them...



Perhaps if N-A-Z-I Germany had actually been as smart as they thought they were Adolf Hitler et al would have invaded iraq instead of Belgium and Poland.







The Rise of the Multi-Car Family

Homes With 3-Plus Vehicles Not Unusual in Region



Matt Dolinger, left, and brother Mark outside the house they share in Clifton. Between them, they own five vehicles. (John Mcdonnell -- The Washington Post)



By Lisa Rein and Robin Shulman

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, July 19, 2003; Page A01





The Saneis are used to traffic jams around their Clifton home. But none reaches the level of gridlock in their own driveway.



The family's guests are so worried they'll get stuck there that they park in a lot across busy Braddock Road. Abdul Sanei has installed white posts at small intervals along the sides of the blacktop to keep the kids from motoring onto the lawn. Everyone tries to remember who needs to pull in or back out first, and key chains with keys for each vehicle hang in a handy spot so that anyone can quickly liberate a blocked car.



Dents happen, routinely. But that's to be expected when you have seven drivers, five cars and a driveway built for two.



The Saneis -- Abdul, a carpenter; his wife, Mehry Nadjmabadi, a nanny; and the couple's 21-year-old twins, their two teenagers and a grandmother, all of whom drive -- are hardly alone. As residents of Zip code 20124 in western Fairfax County, they're at the epicenter of suburban cardom, the spot that is home to more multi-vehicle households than any other in the region's most affluent county: 52 percent of homes have three or more vehicles, according to 2000 Census data.



Cars and the suburbs have always gone together. It was the affordability of the American automobile, in fact, that allowed an earlier generation of city dwellers to dream of a picket-fenced lawn and house of their own.



Nearly one in five suburban households in the Washington area has three or more cars, trucks or sport-utility vehicles parked outside, a number fed by the region's growth in disposable income, population and migration away from the city. As more people have moved to the area in the past decade, the number of vehicles has climbed steadily.



The farther from downtown Washington, the more packed the driveway. About one in four homes in Prince William, Loudoun and Frederick counties has three or more cars, while close to one in three in Fauquier, Calvert and Charles counties are multi-vehicle homes.



The District, meanwhile, lost almost 2,000 multi-vehicle households from 1990 to 2000.



The region now has 861,700 more registered vehicles than licensed drivers, or 1.2 vehicles to every driver. That's higher than the national average of 1.07 cars per driver, according to data compiled by transportation planners.



People don't have a car just to get them to work anymore. They need three or four -- perhaps a sporty one for fun, a big one to lug the soccer team around, a safe one for their teenager and a dependable one for the babysitter.



In many neighborhoods, the one-car garage is history.



The trend has confounded transportation planners looking to solve the region's biggest quality-of-life problem: gridlock. Governments are trying to induce drivers to carpool or use mass transit to reduce congestion and erase Washington from the list of federal air-quality violators, but many people are heading in the opposite direction.



"The automobile has gotten like TV sets: There are more of them in the house than eyes to look at them," said Alan Pisarski, a transportation consultant who lives in Falls Church. "It makes it a much tougher sell for the transit folks to get people onto transit. People start to think, once we've gone to the automobile, we might as well use it."



The Washington region's population grew 16 percent from 1990 to 2000, while the number of vehicles jumped 24 percent, to 4.7 million, according to census data. But not everyone felt the need, or had the ability, to put the pedal to the metal: Some areas recorded gains in households with no vehicles, a reflection of their growing immigrant communities, planners said.



Mehry Nadjmabadi and Abdul Sanei say they grew car crazy out of necessity and peer pressure, feeling they could not deny cars to their 21-year-old daughters and 18-year-old son in part because all their friends had them. The twins, Mona and Hana, commute to separate summer jobs, and Mark delivers pizza and needed his own car.



Nadjmabadi drives to her job in Vienna, although her employer provides a car for her to transport the children in her charge. Lana, 16, is eyeing a Mitsubishi Eclipse.



Hana Sanei, who has a summer job at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston examining sediment in lakes, said she feels bad that her family has so many vehicles adding to the region's pollution.



"It's really not good for the environment," she said, "but there's nothing that we can do. We're just kind of stumped. We can't come up with a solution. My dad works in Washington, D.C., and leaves at 4 in the morning. My mom leaves at 7. My brother has to take his courses at [the] university.



"Most kids move out, and we didn't. So we have a lot of cars."



While the Saneis are scuttling back and forth to work and school in their fleet, others keep a wardrobe of cars for the sheer fun of it.



Matt Dolinger, for example, saves his silver 1998 Honda Accord for special occasions, and it stays spotless sitting in his gravel driveway. He drives his black 1989 Accord to his job in Manassas as an estimator for an asphalt company. The red Plymouth Laser is on the road a lot, too, and the Dodge pickup gets out from time to time. And then there's brother Mark, 22, who lives with Matt on Pope's Head Road in Zip code 20124 and drives his green Chevy pickup to his job at a tree-cutting company.



The Dolingers grew up in their home and saw suburbia spring up around them. All the growth was great for Matt's business and helped him feed his passion for cars.



"I was here long before the developers built this place up," said Matt Dolinger, 28. "I put up with the traffic. They can put up with my cars."



To the west in Ashburn, Celeste Lipford and her husband, Terry, park a Volkswagen Jetta, a Ford Explorer, a Porsche and a VW Beetle on their property, whose three-car garage was a big draw.



Celeste Lipford commutes to her computer systems job in Reston in the Jetta. The Explorer pulls their boat. The Porsche is Terry's "toy," his wife said, and he drag-raced in the Beetle until they had a second child and got too busy for racing.



"I would prefer not to have this many cars," she said, partly because they cost the couple a few thousand dollars in state taxes. What's more, they share a ride to work about half the time, another incentive to cut back. But Terry Lipford loves his cars. "It's more of a guy thing to have more cars," his wife said. "He doesn't want to drive the same one each day because that's boring."







i guess you all were right about why we invaded iraq afterall. by the way if you can afford lots of cars why not? har har

Edited by: Rev9Volts at: 7/19/03 9:45 pm