The End of Automobile Dependence

In the early twentieth century, automobiles began to be used in cities as a convenient replacement for horse-drawn carriages. Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, the most influential automobile in history, was sold between 1908 and 1927. With the assistance of a rapidly growing and ever more powerful consortium of automobile interests such as General Motors and Firestone Tires, American cities as early as the 1920s began to tear out their streetcar (tram) systems, thus sowing the seeds for the automobile’s usurping of local transportation. Through this process, New York had lost most of its extensive surface streetcar system by 1926 (Klein & Olson 1996). However, car usage was never really central to city shaping in any urban area until after the 1940s, when major freeway and parking infrastructure began to be built entirely for the automobile. In American cities this process accelerated after 1956 with the establishment of the Highway Trust Fund, which used a dedicated gasoline tax to accumulate prodigious sums of money for freeway building in order to facilitate their vast car-dependent suburbs. A similar process occurred in those Australian cities that, in our data, have developed most closely to the American model.

We have been tracking automobile dependence in metropolitan areas since the late 1970s, beginning with data collection back to 1960. This places us in the unique position to provide a 45-year perspective on the development of automobile dependence, from 1960 to 2005. Chapter 1 provides this historical perspective for 26 cities using a set of more limited data that were consistently available back through all decades from 1960 to 2000. The present chapter focuses on a detailed examination of a much more comprehensive set of data variables for a sample of 44 cities in order to demonstrate clearly what has been happening in land use and transportation over the decade between 1995–96 and 2005–06, when car use peaked in many industrialized nations.

We have shown that we are seeing the end of automobile dependence in the developed world as cities decline in car use, even as they grow in wealth. But what is happening in global cities in the developing or emerging economies of the world, such as China, India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe? Authors such as Schafer and Victor (2000), who have been linking mobility and wealth for many years, predict that the emerging nations of the world will increase their motorized mobility more than four times by 2050.

Cities are shaped by many historical and geographical features, but at any stage in a city’s history the patterns of land use can be changed by altering its transportation priorities. An understanding of how cities work, based on walking, transit, and automobile fabrics, will therefore enable a more fundamental understanding of the rise and fall of automobile dependence. In this chapter we show how different urban fabrics have developed from different transport types and how they should be recognized, respected, and regenerated as the basis of town planning. In doing so we will find a way to understand automobile dependence and how it can be shaped into a more sustainable and regenerative approach to cities. In particular, the theory will help us to explain why it appears that walking and transit fabrics are now valued more highly—economically, socially, and environmentally—than automobile fabric, and how to manage each fabric more appropriately.

Transportation planning methods and practices have helped the automobile-dependent city to evolve. They have been based on what has been derogatorily termed a “predict and provide” computer-modeling approach, which treats traffic analogously to a liquid, something that retains its original volume regardless of the container into which it is placed—in this case, the capacity of the road infrastructure that accommodates it. This chapter will show how traffic is more like a gas that can be either compressed or allowed to expand, depending on the capacity provided for it. Historically, technical and computer-model-based approaches to transportation have fallen far short in providing the policy direction and vision required in developing well-functioning transportation systems in cities. As the age of the automobile diminishes, a more human-focused, holistic approach is needed. The global knowledge economy is focused in cities, and the jobs that now increasingly underpin urban economies are not dependent on the further extension of the automobile city fabric that traffic models are so adept at providing. These new jobs, as well as the many other benefits from reduced automobile dependence, will require the protection and extension of walking city and transit city fabric. This means an entirely new focus for the transportation planning profession and how computer models are used for future urban and transportation planning.

Although the end of automobile dependence is well underway, the trends toward urban living, human-focused planning, and investment in transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure will need to continue for several decades in order to deliver the quality of urban fabric we need. Any significant change involving technology, culture, legal systems, governance, business models... will require time to settle into becoming a substantial social transformation (Diamond 2009; Beilharz & Hogan 2006; Geels 2011). One important result of the turn in fortunes is that planners in government, community, and industry have begun to see a very different future emerging. Instead of serving business as usual, the approaches to urban land development and transportation policy have shifted. Market leaders, progressive governments, and strong communities can now sense that by implementing policies that reduce automobile dependence they will be on the right side of history. This chapter outlines these major directions forward and shows how they can be built on to enable the end of automobile dependence.

This book has presented a case that automobile dependence is ending. It rose, it peaked, and it is now in decline. This represents the fall of one of the most transformative urban planning paradigms the world has ever seen, certainly of the twentieth century. It suggests that this is happening because of a combination of limits due to space and time as well as resources like oil, but most importantly because of economic and cultural change that is favoring more-intensive modes of transportation (rail, cycling, and walking) that thrive, along with the rapidly growing people-intensive economy, in areas with more intensive land use. In other words, these cultural and economic changes are happening in walking and transit city fabrics, but not in automobile city fabrics.

The need to imagine a better future is a defining element of all good public policy. The trends to end automobile dependence are being caused by a range of factors detailed in this book. The interventions suggested are largely social and economic, with a major role to be played by physical planning in addressing them. Looming over this decline in automobile dependence is the need to respond to the major global issue of climate change. This issue is continuing to grow in importance and will affect global and local politics with increasing impact on transportation and urban policy (IPCC 2014). The upshot of achieving a low-carbon city is that this is also a way of achieving a more productive city, a healthier city, a more resilient city, and a more community-oriented city. Increasingly people are seeing that low-carbon houses are high-performance houses, and low-carbon commercial buildings are high-performance buildings that must be built if businesses are to compete in the market. Thus, achieving a low-carbon city is to achieve a high-performance city, and so the goals around achieving a low-carbon future will help frame this chapter. In this closing piece we will now look at how we can begin to see a world of cities that no longer use fossil fuels and also at the very important role that ending automobile dependence must play.