'Peak car,' like peak oil, may have arrived

A combination of aging populations and a new zeitgeist among the young "seems to be breaking our 20th-century car addiction," asserts Fred Pearce, environmental consultant to the British magazine New Scientist. "Somewhere along the road, we reached 'peak car' and are now cruising down the other side."

Americans have been hearing for some time about a declining interest in driving among young people in the US. Pearce combines trends in the US with those in other countries to argue that the Western world as a whole has started to shift away from automobiles (even while newly modernizing countries such as China experience an explosive growth of auto use).

Pearce writes:

The phenomenon was first recognised in The Road... Less Traveled, a 2008 report by the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, but had been going on largely unnoticed for years.

Japan peaked in the 1990s. They talk there of "demotorisation". The west had its tipping point in 2004. That year the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia and Sweden all saw the start of a decline in the number of kilometres the average person travelled in a car that continues today. In Australia, car travel peaked in every city in 2004 and has been falling since (World Transport Policy and Practice, vol 17, p 31). It is a similar picture in the UK, where per-capita car travel is down 5 per cent since 2004.

Use of other forms of transportation, from bikes and buses to trains and trams, continues to grow, Pearce says. But "even that trend may reverse," he says, noting that Lee Schipper of the Global Metropolitan Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, theorizes that "we may be approaching a point of 'peak travel' of all sorts. People just won't see the need to move around so much." Pearce speculates on a number of reasons for the change in behavior.