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Almost everyone gets a car when they have children, in the UK it is considered a necessity. However not so many people are starting families when compared to fo
by Theodores 12y ago
Almost everyone gets a car when they have children, in the UK it is considered a necessity. However not so many people are starting families when compared to former times, they are starting later too. What this means is fewer purchases of family cars and all those journeys to shops and schools.
We are also creatures of habit so we stick to the transport we know. What happens when previous generations literally clog up all the roads with their cars so there is no room for the cars that a new generation would potentially own? I think that this has happened, owning a car would be impossible in many parts of most city or town centres. If not actually impossible, just very expensive or a lot of hassle when it comes to parking. Why go through all of that when you can just hop on buses and trains, to catch up with games/reading/emails on the phone/tablet?
Once you have a generation that have settled in to using public transport or cycling the barrier to entry for motoring is quite high and there is no peer pressure or real benefit to having a car - unless a family comes along.
Whilst pockets of 'peak car' may exist in cities realising that the car is totally impracticable, there will be growth in more pointless journeys between pointless places beyond the realms of suburbia. Outside the cities there is universal belief that you have to learn to drive as soon as possible, getting a job would be impossible without an ability to drive there. Hence inexorable growth, a long way to 'peak car'.
- arethuza 12y agoHowever, this is about car use rather than car ownership - I agree that owning a car is still regarded as normal for parents but I see a lot of people, including my own family, behaving in ways that reduces the amount we drive. There are a lot of factors in this including improving public transport (e.g. I rather like the trams here in Edinburgh even though the project to install them was a fiasco), greater use of cycles - including people taking young kids on bikes, very strict new drink driving laws here in Scotland, reduction of parking spaces in city centers, park and ride schemes round cities etc.
- baking 12y agoThis is based on old data, but when I was working in energy consulting the number of miles driven per registered vehicle did not change much from year to year except when there were supply disruptions. Also, miles driven was an estimate based on hard numbers like the number of registered vehicles so not a great indicator. Here is some recent info on US vehicle registration: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/06/21/has-america-already-hit-peak-car/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/06/21/has-america-already-hi...
- learnstats2 12y ago> However not so many people are starting families when compared to former times, This has not been the case for quite a while, and I would claim the opposite: there are more newborns in 2015 than in any year since 1971.
- hueving 12y agoIs that adjusted per capita? Of course the raw number is higher because of the population growth.
- learnstats2 12y agoI understood peak car to mean total number of cars, not cars per capita. (wikipedia seems inconsistent on this point but does indicate per capita, so I apologise) Obviously this doesn't apply as far back, then, but it still applies. I'll leave the calculation as an exercise.
- baking 12y agoThis is really long-term trend. First they thought at would plateau at 1 car per household, then 2 cars per household, then 1 car per licensed driver, and as it blew through all those "round numbers" (in the US) no one really knew where it was going to stop. Cars per capita (or per household or per driver) peaking is a big deal even if population doesn't peak for another few decades.