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Africa
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Cities alive: Towards a walking world
Published in Michèle Pezzagno, Maurizio Tira, Town and Infrastructure Planning for Safety and Urban Quality, 2018
Today, studies indicate that in North America, Japan, Australia and European countries we may have reached ‘peak car’ – the apex at which car ownership, licence ownership and the distance driven per vehicle level off, and then turn down.3 Cities around the world are beginning to realise that by getting more people on foot, in tandem with reducing the number of cars, they will have healthier, happier citizens and thriving streets and public spaces.
Zombie automobility
Published in Mobilities, 2022
Scholars attribute the phenomenon of ‘peak car’ to several factors, particularly a revaluation of the vitality of centralized urban environments and urban density, as well as an increasing emphasis on developing multi-modal transportation technologies. People are changing their mobility practices as the increasing density of urban environments and severe problems of traffic congestion render automotive transportation increasingly inconvenient (Metz 2013). Enhanced information and communication technologies have enabled practices of virtual mobility to displace physical mobility and help facilitate the rise of ridesharing apps, both thereby reducing reliance upon individual car ownership (Dowling, Maalsen, and Kent 2018; Lee-Gosselin 2017, McDonald 2015). Moreover, with a policy shift towards environmental sustainability and decreased government fiscal capacity after decades of austerity, governments have begun to refocus transportation spending from roads to more efficient and less costly transportation infrastructure (Metz 2013; Newman and Kenworth 2011; Kuhnimhof et al. 2012).
Transit justice as spatial justice: learning from activists
Published in Mobilities, 2019
We are currently undergoing a radical global transition in the technologies and social systems of urban mobility and transportation. After its unquestionable dominance throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the system of urban automobility has reached its functional and ideological limits. Cultural trends and policy shifts indicate automobile use may be in decline in cities of global north and the global south (Sheller 2011). In the North Atlantic, for example, commentators have celebrated the ‘end of car culture’ (Rosenthal 2013) and triumphantly proclaimed that Americans are buying few cars, driving less, getting fewer licenses, and that a counter culture of public transit is forming in the wake of this shift (Corley 2014; Hurdle 2014). A report released in 2014 from the American Public Transportation Association indicated that more Americans are using public transportation than in any year since 1956, leading the Association president to declare ‘a fundamental shift going on in the way we move about our communities.’ Having reached ‘peak car’ (Moss 2015), a key challenge for cities in 21st century is that of post-automobile planning and growth.
Fuel price changes and their impacts on urban transport – a literature review using bibliometric and content analysis techniques, 1972–2017
Published in Transport Reviews, 2019
Abraham Leung, Matthew Burke, Jianqiang Cui, Anthony Perl
Cluster 6 (Automobility and Peak Car) tends not to focus on cities, but on national or worldwide statistics of automobile use. Carbon emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency themes feature strongly in Cluster 6. Many studies here focus on the determinants of automobile ownership or usage, using national comparisons (Buehler, 2011; Giuliano & Narayan, 2003). The notion of “peak car” (or more accurately, a peak in a community’s vehicle distance travelled per capita) has been observed in a few highly developed western countries or cities (Bastian, Börjesson, & Eliasson, 2016; Metz, 2010, 2013; Millard-Ball & Schipper, 2011; Stokes, 2013), possibly due to economic recession (Klein & Smart, 2017), oil prices (Stapleton, Sorrell, & Schwanen, 2017; Wadud & Baierl, 2017) or other factors. Car restraint policy and public transport investments may explain the slower motorisation rates now being seen in cities such as Beijing (Gao & Newman, 2018). However, most developing countries are still motorising due to economic growth and a growing aspiration to drive (Pojani, 2016).