Transport Reviews, 2013

Vol. 33, No. 3, 243 254, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2013.804133

Peak Car Themes and Issues

PHIL GOODWIN , AND KURT VAN DENDER

Centre for Transport Studies, University College London, London, UK; Centre for Transport and
Society, The University of the West of England, London, UK; Joint Transport Research Centre,
ITF-OECD, International Transport Forum, Paris, France
(Received 6 May 2013; accepted 7 May 2013)

ABSTRACT

This editorial overview of the Special Issue on Peak Car previews the seven papers,
drawing out common themes and differences. It starts with a brief overview of the emergence and
characteristics of the peak car idea, including recent research and discussions. It draws out the
key themes from each of the seven papers in turn and discusses implications for research and
policy. It concludes that there is now little doubt that young peoples car use has reduced, but
there is still doubt about how younger people will travel as they age, or how the next generation
will travel; that location and settlement density effects are very important, meaning that future population distributions will be significant; and that while economic factors are still seen to be important, elasticities with respect to price and income are falling, with signs of differential responses
by population categories and location. In policy terms, it concludes that with the current level of
uncertainty about future car use levels, rather than developing policy based on one forecast, we
should be developing policy for a range of plausible scenarios.
Keywords: transport and society; peak car; econometric; modelling; peak travel

Introduction
In recent years, there has been much interest in the observation of slower rates of
growth, levelling off, or reduction, in various measures of car use, which have
been seen in many though not all developed countries. The phrase1 peak car
has been used as a convenient short-hand label for this phenomenon, though
the phrase is not very precisely defined, and some researchers prefer to avoid it.
Here, we have taken the view that as long as authors define what they mean
reasonably precisely, it is too early to insist on a common standard set of
definitions.
A number of quite influential papers were published on the subject in 2010 12,
which were taken up in academic, industry, policy, and media discussions. These
included Metz (2010, 2012), ITF (2011), and also Schipper (2011), Newman and
Kenworthy (2011), and Goodwin (2011), each of whom had been involved with
various collaborators in a long series of related empirical studies dating back

Corresponding author. Email: philinelh@yahoo.com

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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some decades. Transport Reviews has also published a previous paper by

Kuhnimhof et al. (2012) on peak car.
Some of the researchers were involved in preparations in the summer of 2012 for
a Round Table conference on longer term trends in mobility organised by the
International Transport Forum, whose international comparisons showing signs
of a levelling off of car use were widely cited in the discussions. This conference
took place in November 2012, in Paris. Some of the authors in this issue presented
discussion papers there, which are available on the ITF website,2 including one by
Van Dender and Clever (2013) which summarised the discussion and conclusions,
as well as reporting some additional econometric analysis of their own. Our paper
here, therefore, refers to that earlier discussion as part of the context to the papers
included here. A number of other papers were submitted for the special issue: it is
planned to publish some of them in subsequent issues. Further submissions or
comments will be welcome.
This paper sets the scene with three main sections: a discussion of the longer
term precursors to peak car in research and forecasts on saturation; a
summary of the Paris conference; and a more detailed overview summary of
each of the papers in the current issue. This is followed by a brief discussion of
some wider implications, though this is simply a marker for a much closer attention in future papers.
Precursors to the Current Debate: Saturation Since the 1970s
In the UK, the concept that there would be an upper limit or saturation level to car
ownership and use developed in the 1950s and 1960s, following seminal work at
the UK Road Research Laboratory. A saturation level was estimated mainly by
extrapolating cross-section data, and then imposed as a parameter which gave a
strong constraint or upper bound on future traffic levels. The rate at which car
ownership and traffic approached the eventual saturation was thought to be influenced by incomes and (less so, at that stage) by prices. Empirical research
suggested that the quality and price of public transport would have an influence
but this was not incorporated directly in official forecasts, being subsumed in
rather generic external trends.
The high point of this form of forecasting was in the 1970s. Traffic forecasts by
Tulpule (1973), from 1973 to 2010, have enabled the rare opportunity of testing the
complete period of a long-term forecast against the observed outcome, for car
ownership and car use. The 1973 forecasts, considering that they are made over
such a long period with no retrospective reinterpretation, are quite remarkably
accurate (and much more so than forecasts made later with more elaborate
tools), though in part this is due to compensating errors. The saturation approach
was abandoned in the late 1980s.
Thus, the official forecasters some 40 years ago thought it likely that an ultimate
saturation level of around 400 450 cars per 1000 population would occur in the
first decade of the twenty-first century. At about the same time in the early
1970s, the first attempts were made to build into forecasting an observed regularity that the amount of time spent travelling was remarkably stable (on
average, for populations), which some authors suggested was a fundamental
aspect of human behaviour. Zahavi (1974) built such a constraint into his proposed
forecasting model, initially in relation to the time spent travelling by car, and later
by all modes taken together. Among later applications, two have applied the idea

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of stable travel time budgets to the issue of saturation in mobility, namely Schafer
and Victor (2000), and Metz (2010). Both led (via radically different chains) to an
expectation of stable or reducing car use. The two arguments may be summarised
as follows:
According to Schafer and Victor (2000), there is a very strong elasticity of total
distance travelled, by all modes, with respect to income, but the total amount of
time spent on travel is stable. Therefore, as income increases, this drives a transfer
from slower to faster modes, first from slow modes to car, and then from car to air.
They suggested a resulting peak in per-capita car use in North America by about
2010, and absolute decline in OECD countries as a whole. This prescient prediction, though controversial, and focussed more on predicting a very large increase
in air travel, was made using data up to about 1996, before the stabilisation and
reduction of car use was discussed, and in spite of the limited scope for transfer
of most travel from car to plane.
According to Metz (2010), the number of destinations that can be reached within
a given distance increases, on average, with the square of distance, but the
additional utility to be gained from a more distant destination decreases the
more nearer destinations are passed. Since total travel time is stable, there is
increasing resistance to travelling further, and the positive income influence
declines in importance compared with the travel time constraint. So total distance
travelled tends to saturate, and total distance travelled by car (influenced by cost
and land-use constraints) will saturate also. Having reached this level, mobility
will remain level rather than declining in principle. Metz discounted air travel
as irrelevant to the issue of daily travel, but noted that car use can decline in
cities due to increasing attractiveness of other modes.
Although the description of both approaches emphasises the stability of
average travel time as a key part of their different mechanisms, similar results
can be obtained even if average travel time is somewhat more variable. Apart
from the obvious difference in treatment of air travel, Schafer and Victor proposed
that income elasticity will continue to be high and a powerful driver, and Metz
proposed that income effects would decline in power and importance. The proposition of a declining effect of income growth on car travel over time has been a
common thread in recent discussion and empirical analyses.
A more recent Australian study, by Gargett (BITRE, 2012) used time series
data for 25 countries separately, choosing a mathematical function in which a
saturation level for total volume of road traffic per head was not derived from
an external argument or source, but statistically estimated from the series
itself. This is very problematic unless the series already show signs of levelling
off towards a saturation level, which for 24 out of the 25 countries they did,
suggesting that saturation was higher than current levels, but not much, for
most.
The studies by Tulpule, Zahavi, Schafer and Victor, Metz, and Gargett and
their colleagues represent substantially different approaches, incompatible with
each other in many respects, but all converged on the feature of a natural
upper limit on car use, as a concept which has re-entered analysis repeatedly.
In this respect, current discussions on peak car do not represent a radically
new or unprecedented concept, but one with an intellectual pedigree of many
decades, including official forecasts. There were intermittent discussions of the
possibility of approaching saturation in car use (including by some of the
present authors) in research reported in the 1990s and 2000s, but at the time

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this was generally treated as speculative and not particularly salient, rather than
prescient or important, an intriguing example of how research findings have to
have their time.
Discussion at the ITF Paris Round Table
The summary and conclusions of the ITF Round Table by Van Dender and Clever
(2013) include some of the themes which are discussed here, and salient highlights
are as follows:
.

New econometric work suggests that an aggregate model focusing on GDP

effects and fuel prices is too crude to capture the diversity and various dynamics
underlying aggregate car travel demand and how it changes.
Several studies reporting on similarities (but not simultaneity) in aggregate
trends in car use in a number of high-income economies, notably Millard-Ball
and Schipper (2011), ITF (2011) have been undertaken, but systematic comparisons on a disaggregated level, especially Newman and Kenworthy (2011) are
less common. Disaggregation is of great importance as aggregate outcomes
are the net result of change in opposing directions, and not of one overriding
common factor.
Kuhnimhof et al. (2012) provide a systematic comparison of six countries
(France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Norway, and the USA) on the basis of
travel survey data from around 1995 to 2005. This work was particularly influential in discussing the reduced propensity to car use among younger adults.
Important work in the USA, especially by Davis, Dutzik, and Baxandall (2012)
and Puentes (2012), finds sufficient evidence to hypothesise that there is an
enduring trend to lower car use.
There are strong disparities that occur within countries, notably between the
largest cities, other cities, and rural regions. Urbanisation has a negative effect
on car use in several countries, and contrasts in mobility patterns between
large metropolitan areas and less dense cities and rural areas appear to be
sharpening.
Higher incomes are associated with more car use, although at high incomes the
effect appears to be weaker and may even be negative. However, the causes of
this declining income effect are unclear: rising opportunity costs of spending
time in transport may matter, there can be substitution to other (faster and
more expensive) modes, but there can also be confounding effects with highdensity location choices and reduced appeal of company cars.
The impact of IT applications on car and other travel remains unclear. Several
effects, in different directions, are plausible: a shift away from cars as other
modes allow online activity more easily, lower travel demand following the
emergence of IT-enabled alternatives to traditional vehicle ownership (e.g.
car-sharing), a reduction in travel demand as some activities no longer necessarily require physical travel, increased availability of cars for other purposes as
telecommuting rises, rising average trip distances as location farther away
from physical travel destinations now is less costly, etc. The net effect on
travel is unclear in principle, and available evidence is inconclusive. It was
pointed out that much of the evidence appears outdated, and updating it is
of considerable interest, not least because newer IT-induced innovations
likely have qualitatively different effects from earlier ones. The earlier

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247

generation of research focused on home-based personal computing, whereas

the dominant recent trend is for multi-instrumental portable mobile Internet
access, which changes usage patterns and potentially interactions with
mode-choice.
The urban experience must be considered in the light of transport policy.
Increasing numbers of cities are adopting less car-oriented transport policies,
and this discourages car use. Independently of the merits of such policies, the
evidence is that car-use choices are contingent on policies, not just on drivers
characteristics and preferences.
Although strong disaggregated evidence is lacking, there are indications of
rising heterogeneity in aspired and feasible car use patterns. The reduced car
use appears to be the result of choice for some and of tighter financial constraints for others.

Many of the above themes recur in the papers in this special issue, and some of
them have acted as hypotheses to guide further research.
Themes in This Issue
The main task of this introduction is to give, as accurately as possible, a succinct
statement of what hypotheses, approaches, and conclusions the authors have
suggested, drawing particular attention to age, location, policy, and lifestyle
issues which are emerging as the most important recurrent themes.
Metz (2013) proposes that we have now entered a new era of travel the fourth
in which average per-capita growth of daily travel (i.e. more or less routine
travel, as distinct from infrequent very long distance travel) has ceased. Previous
growth has mainly been of the form of using faster travel modes to achieve a wider
choice of destinations by travelling further within a roughly stable total amount of
travel time. However, the benefits of doing so are subject to diminishing returns
the extra benefit of a fourth supermarket within reach is less than the third so
there will be a tendency towards saturation of travel demand. This is seen most
strongly in urban areas where there is a high density of destinations, reinforced
by the fact that in those areas alternatives to the car are better, and traffic conditions, parking restrictions, etc. likely to be worse. So a slower growth and levelling off of the total amount of movement would be translated into a levelling off
and possible reduction of car use in cities. The phenomenon referred to as peak
car is a manifestation of the transition from the third to the fourth era of travel.
In the future, Metz therefore sees that demographic considerations population growth, ageing and urbanisation will be important for the overall
amount and mode shares of travel, and technological developments will be influential. Population growth would still be important but
The implications for travel demand and the transport system of this substantial growth depend crucially on how the extra numbers are housed.
The strategic issue is greenfield or brownfield. This is not simply a
matter of planning policy but also depends on where employment
growth is located.
Delbosc and Currie (2013) provide a substantial literature review on the recurrent theme of changes in the propensity of young people to acquire driving

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P. Goodwin and K. Van Dender

licenses, making the interesting observation that although this had been recognised in Sweden and Norway in the late 1990s, where licensing of young adults
dropped by over 10% between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, and in one
study in the UK in 2005, the research did not gain wider traction. This
changed by around 2010 when researchers began to recognise a drop in licensing
in Australia, North America, Japan, and much of Europe. They review research in
14 countries, in 9 of which youth licensing rates are in decline, by between 0.1% a
year and 1% a year; these 9 showing an unweighted mean fall of 0.6% a year. Their
review found five countries in which youth licensing was still increasing, at least
up to 2008: Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, and Latvia. It is not
obvious that these countries are very similar as a group, but this would repay
further investigation.
The extensive literature base enabled some level of exploration of several of the
possible causes which had been suggested for the phenomenon, i.e. affordability,
location and transport, graduated licensing, attitudes, and e-communication. Generally, it is clear that strong evidence of the impact of these causal factors is weaker
than evidence on the trend itself. It is of interest that there is at least preliminary
suggestion that alternative transport and household location have some impact on
this trend, which is more strongly supported by the findings of other studies in
this issue.
Grimal, Collet, and Madre (2013) carry out a form of econometric analysis in
which a form of saturation is presumed, but at different levels to be determined
empirically according to income, fuel price, and population density. The saturation level is found to be an increasing function of income, and a decreasing function of fuel price and population density. The estimation results show that
individual car use was still increasing for low-income households in 2010 but
was ending for high-income households. In low-density areas, car use per adult
stagnated, with a slight recovery after 2004, while in built-up areas, it actually
declined.
The resulting differences in estimated saturation levels, reached in the early
2000s, are large: 6800 km/year in core cities, 8000 in the suburbs, 10 500 km
in low-density areas. They also occurred at slightly different moments in
time: first in core cities, then in suburbs and eventually in low-density areas.
They speculate that car use is more likely to saturate first in the areas where
it developed first, namely in high-density areas. Levels of saturation should
also depend on the level of car dependency which is higher in low-density
areas.
Those different dynamics of car use suggest the hypothesis that the effect in core
cities, though first caused by monetary factors, could have been accelerated by
investments in public transport and measures of restrictions in traffic and
parking space, and a gradual adjustment of behaviours in suburbs that started
during the 1990s with slowly increasing fuel prices and stagnating motorisation
rates, but accelerated in the 2000s with more severe economic conditions. Thus
changes which have been stimulated by economic forces then seem to have
been accelerated by other factors in built-up areas and high-income households,
among which are: a closer proximity to saturation; changing attitudes to car,
and consumer tastes; some effects of virtual interaction on physical mobility in
relation with information technologies; changing lifestyles; strategies to control
travel budgets and times in a context of increasing fuel prices and pressure on
available time.

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Within built-up areas, average car use per adult has not come back to
growth though average real incomes have been increasing again in the
late 2000s. Therefore, we can assume that, though first triggered by
harder economic conditions, changing behaviours could be more
durable, as citizens would have adopted new travel habits including
greater multimodality and also as new generations either cant afford a
car or have moved their preferences towards alternative transportation
means or virtual mobility.
Headicar (2013) focuses on the role of location in England, noting that the move
away from high rates of car use growth has roughly coincided with a reversal of a
long-term trend of population movement from urban to suburban locations. His
hypothesis is that these are directly linked:
Historically the growth in car use has been associated with trends of suburbanisation and counter-urbanisation. More recently in England there
has been a slowing and even a reversal of these trends. These coincide
with a similar pattern in car use itself. The most recent decade has been
distinguished by rapid growth in total population due to an increase in
births and net international immigration. These increases are shown to
be concentrated in London and certain other cities and have accelerated
the changed trend in population distribution.
He draws on a long-established finding that per-capita car use is lower in larger,
or more dense, settlements than in smaller and less dense ones, and notes that this
gap is widening over time. This effect is quantitatively quite large within
England annual car driver distance currently varies more than fourfold between
the most and least urbanised areas (Inner London and mainly rural districts),
due to a combination of differences in average trip length and car driver mode
share. Thus, the levelling off in car use which has occurred during the last two
decades has coincided with quite dramatic changes in the scale of population
increase and its spatial distribution.
The effect of these two tendencies a reversal of earlier trends in the spatial
pattern of the population and a differential level of car use in different places
meant that previously spatial redistribution had the effect of increasing car use,
whereas more recently it has the effect of decreasing it.
In terms of overall traffic volumes it is demonstrated that spatial distribution
had a relatively minor impact in earlier decades when per-capita car use was
growing strongly and population growth was limited. In the current era,
however, when per-capita use is flat or declining and population increasing
rapidly the issue of spatial distribution assumes much greater significance. Demographic projections indicate a broadly stable spatial distribution over the next 20
years, and by implication a neutral impact on per-capita car use, if the car use in
each type of area remains stable. However, it is questionable whether the socioeconomic and cultural changes that underlie recent growth in London and other
large cities will continue at the rate necessary for this stability to be maintained.
Kuhnimhof, Zumkeller, and Chlond (2013) extend the important earlier work
on young adults lower propensity to acquire driving licenses ageing by carrying
out a new empirical analysis to decompose the overall trend into a number of
different sources. Taking four countries, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA,

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they suggest that beneath some apparent similarities, there are important differences among the countries. In particular, they suggest that there are two different
patterns of development:
(1) in France and the USA, the reversal in the trend in car travel per capita after
the 1990s was due mainly to trend changes in total travel demand by drivers;
(2) in Germany and Great Britain, the levelling off of motorisation, and the shift to
other modes, played a much larger role.
In general, they report that the effect of ageing has in recent years had a greater
weight in shaping per-capita car travel trends, especially in Europe, where the
continued increase of car availability for seniors had had an upward effect on
car use. In spite of that, however, the peak car effect was not solely due to the
young, but that all age classes have contributed to it though young adults
deserve special attention, because in three of the four study countries they
made the strongest negative contribution to the recent development of car travel.
One significant change in methodology is worth reporting, namely to extend
their study period to the two decades which preceded the levelling off observed
in car travel. In their paper, they therefore studied car travel trends among different
age groups since the 1970s/80s that is to say, compare travel trends before and
after the observed trend reversal in per-capita car travel development. This may
turn out to be crucial to further work, since as they argue, the identification of a
precise turning point at which the historic growth of car use slowed down,
or came to a halt, is almost impossible for various reasons. They suggest that this
may be a reason why the peak car phenomenon is becoming acknowledged only
now probably around a decade after it actually occurred. A transition can
only be recognised in retrospect. The decision on the time period of study can influence the results found, and they conclude that with the longer period;
the role of the young adults in shaping peak car is not as outstanding as it
appears to be when looking at trends in the last decade only. Nevertheless,
this group deserves special attention (a) because it is the age group which
made the largest negative contribution to the recent development of car
travel (except in France); (b) because the question as to how the newly
established behavioural patterns among young adults will persist as
this group ages is key for the future development.
Van der Waard, Jorritsma, and Immers (2013) carry out a detailed review of
hypotheses triggered by the wider literature to see whether they are applicable
in the Netherlands, and in some respects find that the Netherlands is an exception.
Their conclusions are that
(1) Unlike other Western countries, in the Netherlands there has been little effect
through changes in direct influencing factors such as car ownership, drivers
license holding, or income. These factors appear to play only a minor role in
the explanation of the levelling off in car use. An exception is the development
in labour participation by women. Following a strong increase, this has stabilised since 2008. From this year, a slight decrease in the labour participation by
men can be seen. All in all, the contribution of possible saturation phenomena
appears to be limited.

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(2) Like many other countries, the Netherlands do show a significant change in
the car use of young adults which has decreased sharply since 1995, both in
terms of the number of trips and the number of kilometres travelled.
However, they do not find evidence that this is associated with changes in
drivers licenses and car ownership, though the employment rate among
young women may have had some influence. The number of working
young adults has declined, while at the same time a lot more participated
in higher education. It was notable that there was a substantial shift
towards living in high-density urban areas. Combined with the lower car
ownership levels in this group this has led to fewer work-related car trips.
They found insufficient evidence to establish effects of a contribution of Internet
access to changing different types of physical activities into virtual activities, and
in spite of the growth in international travel by the Dutch, this did not seem to
have contributed significantly to the slowdown in domestic car use.
Stokes (2013) provides an analysis of some of the implications of the findings
and hypotheses in the issue. His device is a new exploratory tool, which gives
transparent future scenarios, at the aggregate national level. The model is based
on age cohorts, with some degree of behavioural inertia, as the means of incorporating the most frequently noted age-related feature of the new trends. This is
modified by different readings of the differential effects of urban/rural location,
immigration, and policy effects. Account is also taken of different assessments
of the future track of Western Economies, and of the impacts that economic
factors have on travel behaviour, although (unlike some traditional models)
there is not a presumption that economic factors are necessarily the most important. Using UK data, the suggestion is of a base projection for overall car use per
person which is broadly stable for the next 20 years or so, falling slightly by 2036.
The conclusion is that the combined effects of findings reported in this Issue are
big enough to affect future transport conditions to a very substantial extent: traditional forecasting methods have created scenarios of future car traffic some
30 50% higher than the current levels, or even more.
It is worth noting that his analysis has needed to include some new empirical
results simply in order to make it work, and one of these in particular may have
important implications in itself: this is the finding that the age at which a person
gained driving experience has an effect on the distance they drive, i.e. the older a
person is when they learn to drive, the lower distance recorded. For example, for
people aged 30 39 when surveyed between 2002 and 2010, if they learnt to drive
when 17 they will, on average, drive 10 000 miles per year, while if they learnt
when they were 30 they are likely to drive around 6500 miles per year. For each
age group, this pattern of lower mileage being associated with later learning holds.
Research Conclusions
Each paper has drawn its own conclusions, which have some common themes and
some differences: it would not be necessary to attempt to over-ride these independent assessments. But we can say that there is a very strong commonality in three
themes in particular. These are
(a) There is now little doubt that the changing propensity of young people to
drive is a very widespread phenomenon of great potential importance.

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There is not yet a common view on the reasons for this, but there continues to
be great attention to lifestyle and attitudinal factors, as important factors in
their own right or as modifiers of economic influences such as the cost of
driving and youth employment opportunities. The most important unresolved question of all is whether changes to travel habits formed in youth
persist as people grow older, or revert to the patterns of their elders a few
years later. There are already signs at least of a partial persistence, and if
this is sustained it would have increasing cumulative impacts. A salient
example is whether young women will also show the same reversing trend
that young men have done.
(b) A new emphasis in virtually all the recent studies is of an important locational
effect, above all related to differences according to settlement size, density, or
degree of urban development. Although the empirical studies in many cases
were triggered by observation of average trends at the national level, understanding them has proceeded best by the regional or local analysis: in the
course of doing so, the size of the effects is also measured more accurately,
and is found that they can be much bigger than previously thought: by the
nature of national averages, there will always be some locations which
show bigger and others smaller impacts. Since the biggest changes are at
the city level, there is an indication that specifically urban factors are at
work. The most obvious explanatory factors are then the density of destinations, the availability of modes other than the car, and traffic-reducing policies. The implication of this is that having calculated a car use per head, this
cannot be converted into a national or local total simply by multiplying by
population: one has to consider where that population is located.
(c) Although the classic economic factors are still seen to be important, without
doubt, the nature of their importance seems to have changed, with a reduction
over time of the size of some elasticities with respect to price and income, and
more important through the medium of differential responses by population
category and location, as above. The driving factors for car use interact in a
complex way.
A Policy Implication
Changes in the structural relationships affecting car use, if they are prolonged,
have a bearing on virtually all major strategic questions of transport policy and
commercial operations. That would include transport sector carbon emissions,
accommodating population growth, investment in both road and rail infrastructure (and the risk structures of financing of that investment) and the methods
and applications of demand management. Policy implications are complex and
need careful thought, not least because they are not always in expected directions.
They are not to be discussed seriously in the last few lines of a paper, but will be
the subject of further study in their own right.
But it is worth making one point very strongly. As Stokes argues, the aggregate
trends discussed do not allow us to forecast with any certainty the levels of car use
that we can expect in the future. In fact they make it clear that a number of different future possibilities are plausible, which could lead to a rise, a fall, or stability in
levels of car travel.
If forecasts of future mobility can be reasonably reliably related to reasonably
accurately forecasts of future economic variables, there will be an envelope of

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253

uncertainty of travel forecasts, but it is quite likely to be a rather narrow envelope.

However, the situation now seems rather different, as the relationships themselves
are contested and it cannot be assumed that there is only one viable forecast of
travel corresponding with any particular assumption of, say, economic growth
or fuel prices. In that case, it is logically necessary to consider the robustness of
future policies and projects in terms of scenarios about the future, not forecasts of
it. This will remain true until the big research issues about future mobility are
resolved to the point of a reasonable degree of consensus, which does not yet
exist. The policy issue is of appraisal under conditions of contested futures, not
just statistical uncertainty. Meanwhile, one can say that there is an area of
choice to be made by human agency, and that choice may be rather wider than
has previously been assumed.
Notes
1. The term may have been first used in a series of articles in the magazine Local Transport Today by
Goodwin, starting in June 2010, and at about the same time in a preprint of a paper by MillardBall and Schipper (2011) though it is quite likely that there was earlier use since it sat comfortably
with the phrase peak oil which was in common use since 2006.
2. http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/jtrc/DiscussionPapers/jtrcpapers.html.

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