Among my TV viewing guilty pleasures is ITV4’s The Car Years, in which Vicki Butler-Henderson and Alex Riley select a classic model of car in each edition, and wax lyrical about it. The show does a good job of explaining the development of each car in the context of the changing technology of its day, and also wider changes in society and particularly in consumer behaviour. But it’s unabashedly for car enthusiasts, with Butler-Henderson having a monologue at the start of each programme about how the invention of the motor car changed things forever, with a saucy grin to the camera sharing confidence with the viewer that this has been an excellent development all-round.
The thing is, the Car Years might just be coming to a gradual end. Rishi Sunak’s cut to petrol duty prompted me to select this as the topic for this week’s newsletter: motorists are a powerful electoral group, and surely no future Chancellor, Conservative of Labour, will dare reverse Sunak’s cut any time soon. (And as an aside, it’s interesting that Sunak felt the need to make his pitch as a low tax leadership candidate now, rather than leaving it for, say, the Budget later this year: clearly he’s not confident that there won’t be a leadership contest between now and then. But that’s another story.)
This article looks at whether a big change might be coming, and will draw on evidence from before the pandemic: the current situation with travel patterns still seems to be somewhat fluid, although we can probably venture that the pandemic will have accelerated some trends and possibly slowed others.
Even with that lingering uncertainty, I have been wondering if we can, and if so whether we will, de-car our society. By this I mean move away at scale – though not comprehensively, necessarily – from the current model of widespread individual private car ownership, the car being the first resort travel option for many people, and lots of solo trips being made by car. This would be a major challenge: it’s a good number of years now since I was struck by Glen O’Hara’s description of, “those huge car-dependent swathes of common-or-garden Englishness,” but it’s a reality that cars dominate outside our big cities, and in some of them still. That being the case, the first question is: would we want to de-car our society and, if so, why?
There is of course a strong case for breaking the current model of car use. Cars are an extraordinarily inefficient method of transport: with 62% of car journeys made by lone drivers, they take up massive amounts of road space per person, put huge amounts of wear and tear on road infrastructure per person, and use enormous amounts of resource in terms of both fuel and the materials needed to manufacture the cars, which themselves sit idle for the vast majority of their existence. While electric cars may in future address some problems such as pollution from tail-pipe emissions, and carbon emissions in particular, other blights could remain: congestion, the health impact of taking cars for millions of short, walkable journeys, and the dominance by cars of our urban infrastructure. Everyone will be familiar with places where there is no convenient or safe route for pedestrians because planners simply did not consider it; and they have a rich legacy, the pinnacle of this being either the post-war trend for insensitively driving duel carriageways through our town and city centres, or the madcap scheme to abandon ground level in the City of London to cars, and relegate human beings to first floor ‘pedways’.
However, it is not a slam-dunk case. For one thing, it can only really be made in urban areas: outside towns and cities, alternatives including both public transport and other schemes we will consider later in this article cannot be made into a comprehensive alternative that facilitates ready travel from point to point. But the case for the car does extend further than this: the RAC Foundation’s The Car in British Society is a pro-car report from a pro-car organisation, and certainly overstates its case in places. But it is right to identify that there is a case to be made (though it is a 2009 sequel to an original 1995 report; if there is to be a further successor report, presumably it is due in the next few years, and I will be interested to see how it comes out).
Firstly, there are people and circumstances for whom and for which the car is the most appropriate solution: if you have to convey children around regularly, for instance (although public transport could offer more than it currently does in many areas, it definitely has its limitations in this regard), or if you have to take a stock of items with you for your work, or simply have to travel between people’s homes or a variety of other locations in order to do your job (many health and care professionals working in the community would struggle to provide their services without cars, for instance).
But the case for the car does go a bit deeper: the RAC Foundation report is perfectly correct to say that cars are an integral part of the way we live, even if we might want to question whether they should be. They certainly do offer convenience, flexibility and security, and status for those who attach importance to it. They have been central to the economic and spatial development of the country over the second half of the twentieth century in particular. The flexibility and opportunities they can open up apply to leisure activities as well as to work. The report also argues that cars have been important for widening opportunities for women (do any readers know more about, or want to challenge, that one?). Even people who don’t have cars report making use of them, although this can mean feeling a burden to relatives or friends.
However, the report goes on to observe that growing car use, “has been accompanied by changes in land use – increasingly dispersed patterns of settlement and employment, the spread of out-of-town shopping centres, and the concentration of public services such as hospitals. These changes have made owning a car a necessity for many because such scattered development is hard for public transport to serve.” This part of the argument can indeed be turned on its head as a case against the car: disconnected suburban neighbourhoods where people feel less connected to their neighbours because they drive everywhere and don’t meet each other; sprawling malls that leave local high streets hollowed out; and vital services that are hard to access without a car – these are all things that can be and are regularly bemoaned, for good reason.
Nor does the argument that these places cannot be well served by public transport really stand up (unless you’ve genuinely never heard of buses, anyway). Let’s try a thought experiment: suppose that when cars were invented they had simply been banned from public highways, or prohibited for sale to private individuals. How, then, would our urban areas have developed? What would our towns and cities look like today? They would certainly be different, but would they have been truly held back? They might certainly be better planned for walking and have much better public transport services. If anyone has ever seriously looked into this counter-factual, I’d be fascinated to hear about it.
But still, we can only start from where we are, which does indeed seem to be a place where many factors are driving changes in car use, and the patterns appear to be heavily generational. There are strong and well documented trends for younger adults to be more likely to live in cities, face stagnating or even falling real wages, work in less secure jobs, and spend greater shares of their income on housing costs, leaving reduced disposable incomes. They are generally moving around less: the National Travel Survey shows men aged 17-29 spending 80 minutes per day more at home in 2014 than 1995, and women 40 minutes per day more; over the same period, young men reported making 28% fewer trips overall, and young women 24%. Digital technology may be partly responsible, making face-to-face meetings less essential for maintaining social contact; greater urban living also reduces commuting. There have been even deeper changes to patterns in life stages, with people entering stable employment, buying property, forming life partnerships and having children later in life, trends that have grown from Generation X onwards.
Unsurprisingly, these and other factors have caused substantial changes in patterns of driving, more pronounced in each successive generation (taking the vague but useful groupings of Generations X, Y – aka millennials – and Z). The reduction in driving first emerged with Gen Xers, whose Baby Boom parents had previously made up the great wave of increases in driving licence holding. Licence holding peaked among young people in 1992-4, with 48% of 17-20 year olds and 75% of 21-29 year olds holding a driving licence. By 2014, driving licence holding had fallen to 29% of 17- 20 year olds and 63% of 21-29 year olds. By 2010-14, only 37% of people aged 17 to 29 reported driving a car in a typical week, the equivalent figure in the second half of the 90s having been 46%.
The latter pattern of life stages matters because stable employment, a stable partnership and having children are all positively associated with car ownership. Accordingly, among cohorts who drove less when they were younger, there is a pattern of licence holding and car ownership ticking upwards as people enter their thirties… but not enough to offset the overall drop: each generation to drive less in its twenties also drives less in its forties, both in terms of licence-holding and in terms of distances driven by those who do hold licences. Not driving appears to be becoming increasingly socially accepted.
However, these trends are only part of the overall picture. Falls in mileage by younger people in the 90s and 2000s were offset to a large extent by growing mileage by older drivers (I can’t immediately find figures giving the trend for the 2010s, but possibly just can’t see for looking – comment if you have them!). The average citizen still makes two-thirds of trips by car and three-quarters of their weekly mileage the same way (albeit these are slightly old figures from the RAC Foundation report). Car ownership per capita has stopped growing, although it seems to track the adult population in size. Overall, the dominance of the car does seem to be dropping back, but not as quickly as you might think from looking only at Generations Y and Z in particular.
It should also not be assumed that the changes are arising for reasons entirely external to transport. Rising costs of motoring are cited by younger people as reasons for not taking it up, while the shift to public transport use has been most pronounced in London particularly, and some other areas of high population density where good public transport is available. There can also be a ‘ratchet effect’: once someone starts driving, they increasingly use the car for journeys they would otherwise have made by another method, and as they find it harder to return to non-car modes, they are less likely to be put off by higher fuel or other costs. The lesson should be drawn here that a shift away from the car requires good alternatives to be put in place first.
So it may be that change is coming: it could be slow, or could be quick. Its interaction with the pandemic and its consequences will be complex. The security of driving alone in respect of COVID-19, compared to public transport, may have been a factor in car travel bouncing back much more quickly than public transport. Then again, grocery shopping is a key activity that many people traditionally reported they would find hard without a car: the growth of grocery deliveries during the pandemic has surely put a dent in that motivation for at least some.
There’s another article to be written about policy levers to accelerate such a change, should we choose to: emissions charging, changes to road tax, fuel duty and so on probably need an article to themselves. But the first question might be: if a future government were to pull those levers, how might driving change? What would it look like in a new world? Some indications of this are already emerging.
The biggest change could be to car ownership. A variety of alternatives is emerging. One is leasing schemes, covering all costs bar fuel – although, as the ‘owner’ doesn’t actually acquire the asset, it’s debatable whether this offers better value (particularly with used car prices currently spiking, and the traditional pattern of rapid depreciation going into abeyance, at least for now). But there are also car clubs or car sharing services, which can be accessed via a mobile phone app: you can hire a car from a nearby location, either from a hire company or from a private car owner renting their vehicle out when it’s not in use. As we saw above, this won’t work for everyone: it will only really work in an urban area where you will be in easy walking distance of the car you intend to drive, and can leave it somewhere near home when you’re finished; and it’s no good for people who need to take a lot of stuff with them for work, and might therefore store it in the car. And for people who still have a regular commute, it’s unlikely to be cheaper or more convenient than car ownership. But even so, it can clearly be a way to use cars more efficiently, with each car spending less time wastefully standing idle.
And these schemes have some momentum: it’s quite something when a Conservative minister talks publicly about the need to move away from, “twentieth century thinking centred around private vehicle ownership.” Predictions that these models could be as disruptive to car ownership as Netflix has been to TV might not be far wrong – that is, the traditional broadcasters are all still there, but the streaming services appear well established, have attracted a substantial audience, and have prompted the incumbents to do at least some things differently.
These approaches and others are getting bundled under the slightly nebulous heading “mobility as a service”; probably this is a bit of jargon that will be forgotten in a few years, but it does make a certain sort of sense. Things like e-scooter rental schemes crop up under the same banner, as do new models of bus provision that let you call a bus to your stop on demand, but allow the bus to continue on a direct route to other passengers if there’s nobody waiting. One might equally point out that mobility is the service that public transport has always offered, but then again the people running the railway in particular appear to see it as an engineering endeavour first and foremost: there is little or no culture of thinking of the railway in terms of the service it offers. One wonders if a nimble, consumer-focused road mobility service sector might catch the railway flat-footed at exactly the time when it should be coming into its own, but that’s another article.
Either way, the Commons Transport Committee has warned that the Government risks being behind the curve with mobility as a service (MaaS), and that without a helpful regulatory framework it might not deliver all its possible benefits: “If MaaS develops in an uncontrolled way, it could have unintended, negative consequences. For example, a poorly implemented MaaS scheme could increase road congestion and worsen air quality, or exacerbate digital and social exclusion… We are concerned that the Government does not yet seem to have recognised the full extent of the role MaaS could play in transforming mobility, delivering truly integrated transport solutions.” The Government responded that it is funding trials to understand various new schemes and systems and how the public responds to them. This certainly seems to be a record that is still playing.
Finally, the question of how we reap the benefits of changing approaches to car use is also becoming a live one. In particular, the pandemic rather turbocharged low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) initiatives. Often these come to prominence through local opposition from inconvenienced residents, business owners, and (often somewhat prayed in aid) emergency services. While the point about obstructing access to blue light services seems a bit hard to answer, otherwise LTN initiatives tend to attract more support than opposition, and deliver undoubted benefits in terms of local pollution levels and people’s experience of the urban environment.
As this interesting piece of work by NatCen shows, the success of an LTN scheme relies on the usual policy basics: ensuring the policy is developed with the people who will be affected by it. While schemes overall attract support, it quickly became apparent in the research that communication about what was happening could often be better, and that some residents might change their favourable view of the changes if they have a more thorough understanding of the problems they pose for some local businesses. LTNs aren’t quite such a no-brainer that they can be implemented with disregard for basic good practice in policy change.
In conclusion, change is underway to how we use cars and how we accommodate them in our lives and working environments. But it will not be a sudden revolution: it is driven by a large range of factors, many of them not directly to do with transport policy but more to do with how we live our lives. Nor will it be all-consuming: we need to recognise that in certain contexts the case for the private car remains strong, even if we expect that it may be an electric one in future. But it will be a substantial change nonetheless: in 20 years’ time, we should expect to see an appreciably different world in terms of car ownership and use: what’s less clear is whether policy choices will enable this shift and make it a smooth one, or hinder it and prevent the full realisation of the benefits.