Berkeley: Hybrid capital of California
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A decade after the first hybrids hit America’s streets, a pretty tired stereotype about typical hybrid drivers has emerged: they are young, educated, upper-middle class, live in cities on the coast, vote Democrat and adorn their Toyota Prius with Wiccan and Earth Mother bumper stickers.
Turns out that stereotype is pretty much dead-on.
A new study by UCLA’s Institute of the Environment, set to be published tomorrow in the office’s Southern California Environmental Report Card, took at look at hybrid ownership in California on a demographic basis. The findings discovered that the rate of hybrid ownership is much higher in areas with pro-environment voting records and areas with higher incomes.
The study’s author, UCLA professor Matthew E. Kahn, correlated 2007 hybrid registration data with voting data, by ZIP Code. He also did the same with median household income data. He noticed that the area around UC Berkeley, which has both high incomes and extremely high rates of environmentally-friendly voting, happened to have the highest hybrid ownership rate in the state: 5.24% of all cars registered there were hybrids.
That’s an impressive number when put into the proper perspective...
Although hybrid sales represented about 2.3% of all new-car sales last year, according to AutoData Corp., the UCLA data reflects all registrations, a holistic measure that incorporates cars already on the road, a far larger number than just new sales. For example, as of the year 2000, there were some 211 million cars and light trucks registered nationwide.
Factoring for a bit of growth, last year’s total sales of 13.2 million new light vehicles accounted for perhaps 6% of total registrations; within that group, 2.3% were hybrids. Thus, only about 0.14% of cars registered in America were a new hybrid sold last year.
When put up against the statewide data, the city of Berkeley more than lives up to its eco-friendly reputation. Hybrid ownership in Berkeley is more than seven times the Golden State average of 0.77%, and triple the rate for the Bay Area. And, for its part, the Bay Area whupped Los Angeles County, which matched the average hybrid ownership rate of the whole state.
Within L.A. County, however, there were some notable spikes: Santa Monica, Malibu and Manhattan Beach all had 2.75% hybrid ownership or better. They also happen to be wealthy and left-leaning. And in the wealthy but righty O.C., Laguna Beach led the way with 2.33% hybrid penetration, but overall hybrid registrations, at 0.74%, were slightly lower than in L.A. County.
UCLA itself acknowledged that the results were ‘unsurprising.’ But perhaps the point here is to emphasize how important it is to keep track of such things. After all, if regulators are of the opinion that hybrid cars are important to public policy, then it’s worth noting that even in bra-burning Berkeley, only one out of 20 cars is a hybrid.
‘There’s a lot of talk about environmental sensitivity and going green, but what we really need is much more data to provide benchmarks and start evaluating how communities are really performing,’ Kahn said.
For example: What region in the nation has the fewest hybrid owners? Is there any place on earth more hybrid-centric than Berkeley’s 94707 ZIP Code? And what kind of bumper stickers do they use there, anyway?
-- Ken Bensinger
Photo: A California driver’s Toyota Prius, adorned with bumper stickers galore. Credit: Telstar Logistics via Flickr.