In the rich world, people seem to be driving less than they used to

“I’LL love and protect this car until death do us part,” says Toad, a 17-year-old loser whose life is briefly transformed by a “super fine” 1958 Chevy Impala in “American Graffiti”. The film follows him, his friends and their vehicles through a late summer night in early 1960s California: cruising the main drag, racing on the back streets and necking in back seats of machines which embody not just speed, prosperity and freedom but also adulthood, status and sex.

The movie was set in an age when owning wheels was a norm deeply desired and newly achievable. Since then car ownership has grown apace. There are now more than 1 billion cars in the world, and the number is likely to roughly double by 2020. They are cheaper, faster, safer and more comfortable than ever before.

Cars are integral to modern life. They account for 70% of all journeys not made on foot in the OECD, which includes most developed countries. In the European Union more than 12m people work in manufacturing and services related to cars and other vehicles, around 6% of the total employed population; the equivalent figure for America is 4.5% of private-sector employment, or 8m jobs. They dominate household economies too: aside from rent or mortgage payments, transport costs are the single biggest weekly outlay, and most of those costs normally come from cars.

Nearly 60m new cars were added to the world’s stock in 2011. People in Asia, Latin America and Africa are buying cars pretty much as fast as they can afford to, and as more can afford to, more will buy.

Til her daddy takes her T-Bird away

But in the rich world the car’s previously inexorable rise is stalling. A growing body of academics cite the possibility that both car ownership and vehicle-kilometres driven may be reaching saturation in developed countries—or even be on the wane, a notion known as “peak car”.

Recession and high fuel prices have markedly cut distances driven in many countries since 2008, including America, Britain, France and Sweden. But more profound and longer-run changes underlie recent trends. Most forecasts still predict that when the recovery comes, people will drive as much and in the same way as they ever have. But that may not be true.

As a general trend, car ownership and kilometres travelled have been increasing throughout the rich world since the 1950s. Short-term factors like the 1970s oil-price shock caused temporary dips, but vehicle use soon recovered.

The current fall in car use has doubtless been exacerbated by recession. But it seems to have started before the crisis. A March 2012 study for the Australian government—which has been at the forefront of international efforts to tease out peak-car issues—suggested that 20 countries in the rich world show a “saturating trend” to vehicle-kilometres travelled. After decades when each individual was on average travelling farther every year, growth per person has slowed distinctly, and in many cases stopped altogether.

There are different measures of saturation: total distance driven, distance per driver and total trips made. The statistics are striking on each of these counts even in America, still the most car-mad country in the world. There, total vehicle-kilometres travelled began to plateau in 2004 and fall from 2007; measured per person, growth flatlined sooner, after 2000, and dropped after 2004 before recovering somewhat (see chart). The number of trips has fallen, mostly because of a decline in commuting and shopping (of the non-virtual variety). Britain, another nation that measures such things obsessively, has a similar arc. Kilometres travelled per person were stable or falling through most of the 2000s. Total traffic has not increased for a decade, despite a growing population. For the past 15 years Britons have been making fewer journeys; they now go out in cars only slightly more often than in the 1970s. Pre-recession declines in per-person travel were also recorded in France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium. Drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac Saturation of car ownership over time is one explanation. The current cohort of retirees—Toad from “American Graffiti”, having faked his death in Vietnam, is now 67—is the first in which most people drove. So more retired people drive now than ever before. In Britain 79% of people in their 60s hold licences, which is higher than the figure for the driving-age population as a whole; in America more than 90% of people aged 60-64 can drive, a larger share than for any other cohort. New generations of drivers will replace old ones rather than add to the total number.

Then there is a second trend. All over the rich world, young people are getting their licences later than they used to—in America (see chart) and also in Britain, Canada, France, Norway, South Korea and Sweden. Even in Germany, car-culture-vulture of Europe, the share of young households without cars increased from 20% to 28% between 1998 and 2008. Unsurprisingly, this goes along with driving less. American youngsters with jobs drive less far and less often than before the recession. 16- to 34-year-olds in American households with incomes over $70,000 increased their public-transport use by 100% from 2001 to 2009, according to the Frontier Group, a think-tank. Cost is one factor: fuel prices have risen for all; insurance premiums for the young have soared. Youth unemployment has not helped. But there is also the influence of a new kid on the block: the internet. A University of Michigan survey of 15 countries found that in areas where a lot of young people use the internet, fewer than normal have driving licences. A global survey of teen attitudes by TNS, a consultancy, found that young people increasingly view cars as appliances not aspirations, and say that social media give them the access to their world that would once have been associated with cars. KCR, a research firm, has found that in America far more 18- to 34-year-olds than any other age group say socialising online is a substitute for some car trips. Young people move around more and settle down later; they would rather travel to far-off lands than cruise the strip downtown. Fleura Bardhi of Northeastern University in Boston interviewed users of car-sharing schemes, much more popular among the young than their elders, and likened the youngsters’ attitudes to cars to their attitude to dating: “People get to try out different cars, different lifestyles, different identities.” By contrast owning a car, they said, felt like being tied down—like a marriage. In Arthur Miller’s 1949 play “Death of a Salesman”, Happy’s dream was a simple one: “My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women.” Subsequent generations of young men and, perhaps to a lesser extent, young women agreed. But things seem to be changing. The buzz, status and implicit sexuality of car ownership has been taken up, even displaced, by other products and lifestyles, and not just among the young. Tom Worsley, formerly of Britain’s Department for Transport, says that, even for oldies, “It has become a bit passé to polish your car on a Sunday morning.”

Another technological change means that the car not polished on Sunday may not have been to the shops on Saturday, either. A sixth of Britain’s retail spending now takes place online, according to IMRG, a consultancy, and around a twentieth of America’s, according to the Department of Commerce; everywhere the trend is rising. In Britain trips to the shops have been the category of car use that has dropped off most steeply since 1995.

Shut down strangers and hot-rod angels

Older people retaining their licences may swell the ranks of drivers for a while yet, but eventually young people postponing the use or purchase of cars could reduce them. The total number of people with cars may thus drop. And more people owning cars—rather than longer journeys—has been the prime driver of traffic growth in the past. If ownership stabilises or declines, traffic may do so too.

Even without changing absolute numbers, however, age can still play a role in patterns of use. Though more older people drive than used to, per person they also tend to drive less. And so, if people keep getting their licences later, may everyone else. The later people pass their test, the less far they drive even once they can, according to Gordon Stokes of Oxford University. He says people in Britain who learn in their late 20s drive 30% less than those who learn a decade earlier.

Geography matters too. In most rich countries car use has been stable or increasing in rural areas, where driving still offers freedom and convenience. It is in cities, especially their centres, that car ownership and use is declining. And city living is on the rise: the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, expects that by 2050, 86% of the rich world’s population will live in urban areas, up from 77% in 2010.

In America the share of metropolitan residents without a car has grown since the mid-1990s: 13% of people in cities of more than 3m people have no car while only 6% in rural areas live without one. In London car ownership has been falling since 1990, with a plateau from 1995 to 2005; the percentage of households without cars has been growing since 1992. In other British cities the proportion of carless households has been growing since 2005. Car use has fallen in many European cities.

There are various reasons for this. Public mass-transit systems are, in the main, faster and more reliable than they used to be, with increased capacity in many cities. This partly reflects increased investment, particularly in rail. For the past 15 years road and rail investment has been about 1% of GDP for OECD countries, but rail’s share of that has increased from 15% to 23%, says the International Transport Forum.

More recently, private alternatives to car ownership, notably car clubs, have been spreading across North America and northern Europe. By some estimates one rental car can take the place of 15 owned vehicles. Zipcar, which is the biggest international car-share scheme, has 700,000 members and over 9,000 vehicles. Buzzcar, a French company set up by the Zipcar founder, has 605,000 members sharing 9,000 cars.

Where to from here? Perhaps most basic, though, is that in terms of urban living the car has become a victim of its own success. In 1994 the physicist Cesare Marchetti argued that people budget an average travel time of around one hour getting to work; they are unwilling to spend more. For decades cars allowed this budget to go farther. But as suburbs grow and congestion increases most cities eventually hit a “sprawl wall” of too-long commutes beyond which they will not spread far. After that, it appears, a significant number of people start to move back towards the city centre. In America, where over 50% of the population lives in suburbs, more than half the nation’s 51 largest cities are seeing more growth in the core than outside it, according to William Frey at the Brookings Institution. If car use has peaked, what are the implications? One is that vehicle-makers, which are already having a tough time, will not easily find new markets in the rich world. In America available cars already outnumber licensed drivers. “We are looking at replacement rather than growth in these countries,” says Yves van der Straaten of the OICA, an international trade body of car manufacturers. Some niche and luxury brands are thriving and are likely to keep doing so. But manufacturers know that the developing world is the future—sales in China overtook those in America between 2010 and 2011 and rose by 2.6%; those in Indonesia, a younger market, jumped by 17%. A more radical response from carmakers could be to say that if buyers are less interested in driving, then cars will require less driving from them. Driverless cars—robot-guided vehicles that leave their occupants free to text, work or sleep—could go on sale within the next decade, and might meet the mood of the moment. They could be safer and a lot less hassle. Flocking together through clever algorithms, they could cut congestion dramatically. They might further strain the already weakening link between driving and identity and the sense of driving as an expression of self and skill. But they could still be a highly profitable innovation.

Take the highway that’s the best

Even if they are not faced by an invasion of robo-taxis, governments may find that changes in driving habits force them to rethink infrastructure. Most forecasting models that governments employ assume that driving will continue to increase indefinitely. Urban planning, in particular, has for half a century focused on cars.

America built 64,000 kilometres (40,000 miles) of interstate highway to get the country moving after the second world war; since 1980 it has built more than 35,000 new lane-kilometres a year. If policymakers are confident that car use is waning they can focus on improving lives and infrastructure in areas already blighted by traffic rather than catering for future growth. That is already happening in London, where cars pay to enter the centre and ever more space is dedicated to buses and cycles. At Canary Wharf, a business district in east London, 100,000 jobs are supported by only 3,000 parking spaces.

By improving alternatives to driving, city authorities can try to lock in the benefits of declining car use. Cars take up more space per person than any other form of transport—one lane of a freeway can transport 2,500 people per hour by car, versus 5,000 in a bus and 50,000 in a train, reckon Peter Newman and Rob Salter of Curtin University in Australia.

Other assumptions may also need revising. Governments throughout the rich world rely on tax from fuel; across the EU, transport fuel taxes account for 1.4% of GDP, and the figure is a good bit higher in some countries. Revenues are already falling because of efficient cars. They could plummet further if car use keeps dropping.

Cities that bank on parking fees, fines and road tolls may have to find other ways to balance the books. Plans for attracting private investment in roads may need reconsidering. In March 2012 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, called for private investment in the road network to increase capacity. Such schemes may be viable—but not if based on a payment model that assumes ever-increasing use.

Environmentalists, though, should be cheering all the way to the scrapyard. The International Energy Agency in 2009 projected an average annual increase in global transport-energy demand of 1.6% between 2007 and 2030, though this represents a slowing from earlier growth. Past improvements in vehicle efficiency in America have often been negated by increases in the power and weight of cars, leaving fuel economy constant. Road transport accounts for around 23% of polluting carbon emissions in the OECD; an absolute decline in driving could help change that.

The possibility of reaching “peak car” is most evident in the rich world. But emerging-world cities may reach a similar state earlier in their development, reckons David Metz of University College London.

Where the streets have no name

Non-OECD countries have higher levels of vehicle ownership now than OECD countries did at similar income levels. This is because their transport infrastructure has developed faster than it did in richer countries, cars are cheaper in real terms and urbanisation is happening faster.

Since car use is growing so fast—and urban planning lags behind—cities in poorer countries could hit the “sprawl wall” sooner than those in the rich world did, reckons Mr Newman. Space is already at a premium in dense centres such as Jakarta, where the number of cars is growing ten times faster than the roads available for them to roll on.

Some municipalities in the developing world are already planning for less car use, notably by deploying urban rail systems. The Shanghai metro, mostly built since 2000, ferries 8m people a day and covers 80% of the city. Eighteen Indian cities and several Middle Eastern ones are designing urban rail networks.

Roads are far from empty. In many countries traffic levels have continued rising because population growth has compensated for declining distances driven per person. On many roads peak-time congestion will be a problem demography cannot defuse.

But after 50 years of car culture, culture may finally be changing the car. Gone is the nostalgia of “American Graffiti”. “Cosmopolis”, released in 2012, also features a cocky young man deeply involved with his car; but it is a near stationary limousine that constrains and isolates him far more than it enhances his possibilities. “I’m looking for more,” he protests during his endless journey across Manhattan. The world’s once and future car-owners are increasingly inclined to agree.