Study shows young people more likely to consider biking, transit

Its data comes from "Monitoring the Future," an annual survey of young people that began in the mid-1970s. The authors of the study compared responses of high school seniors from three time periods - 1976-1978 and 2004-2006, as well as 2008-2010, the first years of the Great Recession.

They found that at the beginning of this latest recession, more of the 12th-graders were willing to use a bicycle or mass transit instead of driving - 36 percent in 2008-2010, compared with 28 percent in the mid-2000s. However, that was still markedly lower than the 49 percent of respondents in the 1970s group who said the same.