Peak car

Peak car or peak car use or peak travel ^[1][2][3][4] is the theory that car usage rates, or overall travel rates, are dropping in at least eight major developed countries including the UK, Australia, United States, and Japan. Similar to peak oil, peak car theory holds that travel usage per capita reaches a peak and then declines over time. Japan peaked in the 1990s and the Western countries peaked in 2004.

The phenomenon was first recognized in the United States in a December 2008 report by the Brookings Institute called The Road.. Less Travelled by Puentes and Tomer.^[5] The idea of "peak travel" was first published in a November 2010 paper Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries by Stanford researchers Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper.^[6][7][8] Further data supporting the theory was published by Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy in ‘Peak Car Use’: Understanding the Demise of Automobile Dependence (2011).^[9]

It is not known why it's happening but multiple interrelated reasons are being theorized:^[9]

1. Hitting the Marchetti Wall (see Thomas Marchetti the researcher who noticed that people appear to hit a psychological wall when it takes more than an hour to get to work. Thus, when cities become more than "one hour wide," they stop growing or they become dysfunctional, or both.)^[4]
2. The growth of public transport
3. The reversal of urban sprawl
4. The aging of cities
5. The growth of a culture of urbanism
6. The rise in fuel prices

References