Car use may have plateaued

Could signal lower emissions

Alex Wukman, Jan 09, 11.

It seems that the unthinkable might be happening - the growth of automobile may be leveling off. A recent study of travel patterns in eight industrialized countries published in the journal Transport Reviews found that after the year 2000 passenger travel in the US and seven other industrialized nations plateaued.

The survey’s authors, Lee Schipper, who shares his time between Global Metro Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University, and Adam Millard-Ball, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, “looked at the gross domestic product per capita of the United States, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia from 1970 through 2008 and plotted it against the distance traveled per capita per year in each country by car, pickup truck, bus, train, light rail, streetcar, subway and plane,” reports Miller-McCune.

Schipper and Millard-Ball’s work suggests that the “cross-national passenger transport trends” in the eight industrialized countries they studied “may have halted.” They also found that automobile ownership has also stagnated at the rate of 700 cars per 1,000 people in the U.S. , which as Miller and McCune pointed out is more cars than licensed drivers. In Japan and Europe car ownership has peaked at approximately 500 cars per 1,000 people. The study suggests that if the observed trends continue it is possible that the levels of carbon emissions in 2020 or 2030 could be lower than they are today, which runs counter to government predictions that show emissions and travel are expected to increase until at least 2050.

One of the things that Schipper and Millard-Ball found that frustrates automobile travel is traffic.“Traffic is paralyzed everywhere, and that will be an obstacle to motorization in the developing world in the end,” Schipper told Miller and McCune.

“My basic thesis is, ‘There ain’t room on the road,’” said Schipper.