The Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring has issued a report on ‘The Car in British Society’, authored by Karen Lucas (Oxford University) and Peter Jones (my colleague at University College London).  This is an update of the Foundation's 1995 report on ‘Car Dependence’.

The interesting finding is that while the car is the dominant mode of travel in most people’s daily lives, and while car use per person has grown for half a century, this trend now seems to have come to a halt.   This cessation in growth of distance travelled by car per person parallels the flattening of the trend in distance travelled by all modes, as measured in the National Travel Survey, that I discuss in ‘The Limits to Travel’.  My interpretation is that the demand for daily travel has saturated – see my paper at Documents – although the RAC Foundation report considers other interpretations. 

Regardless of the explanation, the observed trend is inconsistent with the Department for Transport’s forecasts of road traffic growth which show car traffic as growing by 30% by 2025.  About half of this is attributable to expected population growth.  Most of the rest arises because the Department assumes that car use will continue to rise as incomes grow, as in the past, whereas I argue that this relationship has changed now that we have sufficient access and choice of destinations to meet our daily needs.   This is a substantial difference of view, which is very relevant to the level of future carbon emissions from the transport sector.