Peak Car?

Are you interested in ‘Peak Car’? It’s the hypothesis that car travel has peaked and will now fall in a sustained manner. The theory was proposed following reducing mileage covered in private cars, which has now been observed in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

If you aren’t interested, you ought to be. Particularly if you are in any of the following categories: oil company, train company, bus company, car hire firm, car club, transport planner, town planner, architect, traffic engineer, urbanist, geographer, policy maker, shopper, cyclist, pedestrian, citizen, maybe even a car owner. If Peak Car turns out to be happening, it will have massive consequences for all of the above.

There’s more in this fascinating article by Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic “Are We Approaching the Fourth Era of Travel? Peak Car hits the advanced nations” and this by Brad Tuttle in Time magazine last year. If you prefer a more scholarly take on things, here’s a special edition of Transport Reviews, with links to several free articles.And the wikipaedia entry also has a good set of references.