[rpearl]

> backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car.

The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

This has been true for at least a decade. The trend, even ignoring COVID, is that a decreasing proportion do so.

[inferiorhuman]

  The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car

A plurality do (35% in 2022 vs 17% via transit). Remote work knocked down the percentage that commute by car a bit, but took a bigger chunk out of the other modes (e.g. 34% used transit in 2018 but 17% in 2022).

I've used a messenger bag for decades and never felt marginalized in the least. Plenty of other folks seem to rock employer swag backpacks. vOv

[rpearl]

Sure, it's just ...pretty odd? for OP to say "backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car" when it's 65% of people who do not use a car in this context at all.

(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)

[kragen]

This was 20-25 years ago. No Uber Cab, no Google shuttles, no e-bikes, no rental scooters, Caltrain was diesel and hadn't been renovated, and there was no real-time tracking of Muni buses' positions, so unless you were taking an express bus, you had no idea when the bus would arrive at the stop. And a large part of San Francisco's population was still poor.

There were a lot of people who didn't use a car in that context at all, but people who could mostly did.