More Peak Car News

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

– by Peter Sinclair
Graph of the Day: Mapping a Post-Auto Economy

It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination. Look at the American cities that are considered the most dynamic, exciting, and alluring, especially to the talented young professionals that every region seeks to attract. They all have been working hard to create alternatives to auto-based transport, to grow pedestrian friendly, human scale neighborhoods, and downtowns that offer something of a refuge from the traffic-choked aggravation that we’ve associated with city centers for generations now.

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MPG of a Human

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

– by Tom Murphy
Do The Math

On Do the Math, three previous posts have focused on transportation efficiency of gasoline cars, electric cars, and on the practicalities of solar-powered cars. What about personal-powered transport—namely, walking and biking? After stuffing myself over Thanksgiving, I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation?

Okay, the “miles” part is straightforward. And we can handle the “per.” But what’s up with the gallon? A gallon of what? Here we have all kinds of options, as humans are flex-fuel machines. But food energy is not much different from fossil fuel energy in terms of energy density.

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Are We Reaching ‘Peak Car’?

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– by Anita Elash
The Globe and Mail

Anyone who has been stuck in big-city gridlock lately may find this hard to believe, but millions of Westerners are giving up their cars.  Experts say our love affair with the automobile is ending, and that could change much more than how we get around – it presents both an opportunity and an imperative to rethink how we build cities, how governments budget and even the contours of the political landscape.

The most detailed picture of the trend comes from the United States, where the distance driven by Americans per capita each year flatlined at the turn of the century and has been dropping for six years. By last spring, Americans were driving the same distance as they had in 1998.

The data are similar in Europe, Australia and Japan. And, although Canada doesn’t keep national statistics on individual driving habits, Australian researcher Jeff Kenworthy has found that driving in the nation’s five largest cities, combined, declined by 1.7 per cent per capita from 1995 to 2006.

If developed countries are reaching “peak car,” as some transportation experts are calling it, it’s not just a product of high unemployment or skyrocketing fuel prices, as the pattern began to show up years before the 2008 financial crisis.

Nor is it primarily a matter of people feeling guilted into reducing their car use for the sake of the climate and the environment – the threat of separating people from their wheels (or taxing their fuel use) has long been one of the green movement’s biggest stumbling blocks.

Indeed, the shift is so gradual and widespread that it’s clearly not a product of any “war on the car” or other ideological campaign. Rather, it’s a byproduct of a stage of development that cities were probably destined to reach ever since the dawn of the automobile age: Finding themselves caught in an uncomfortable tangle of urban sprawl, population growth and plain individual inconvenience, people, one by one, are just quietly opting out.

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Rite of Passage vs. Right of Passage

Monday, November 7th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

by Andrew Hitchcock

If we want to change driving habits in the United States, we have to start young. A large part of the high school experience and a child’s rite of passage involves the automobile. Once a person has this notion of driving everywhere planted in them, it is hard to remove.

Being a recent high school graduate from a suburban high school, I think it is sad how true this is. Younger high school students look forward to turning 16 so they can finally learn to drive and increase their mobility. Getting a driver’s license or car is probably the biggest event in most teenagers’ high school careers. My suburb was fairly affluent, so most kids had cars, but they got angry because there were not enough places around the school to park. The farthest house in the school district from the high school was only five miles away, yet very few got to school under their own power. Most opted for school bus, car, or carpool…

Read the full article at The New Colonist

Best Route to Youth Road Safety

Monday, November 7th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

Professor Hank Weiss, director of the Injury Prevention Research Unit at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has a startlingly straightforward suggestion for reducing the number of young people killed and injured in cars.

Get them out of cars.

In Brisbane last week for the National Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion, Professor Weiss gave a talk, An Urgent Call for the Demise of Teen Driver Education Programmes, about scrapping teen drivers’ education in favour of lessons in safer, healthier and cleaner ways to get around.

Read the full article at The Conversation