– by Matthew DeBord
Huffington Post

“Young People Are Losing Interest in Cars, But That Doesn’t Mean the End of the Road for Automakers”

Increasingly, young people don’t care about cars, according to surveys and forward-looking market analysis. Roland Berger Strategy Consultants recently published a study of the 2025 auto market that documented the car’s decline.

For example, among current Japanese students and graduates in their 20s and 30s, cars rank well below fashion, music, and video games in terms of interest. Young Germans are expressing a declining enthusiasm for driving, but an increasing desire to ride a bike or take public transportation. Even In China, where car sales are surging, youths are expected to begin losing their interest in automobiles by 2015.

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– by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy
Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute
Perth, Western Australia
Journal of World Transport Policy and Practice

Abstract

The first signs of declining car use in cities are being observed. The data on this are summarized before six interdependent factors are examined that could help to explain this unexpected phenomenon.

Introduction
In 2009 the Brookings Institution were the first to recognize a new phenomenon in the world’s developed cities – declines in car use (Puentes and Tomer, 2009). This paper summarizes the recent data covering this new phenomenon of ‘peak car use’ and seeks to understand why it is happening. It first presents the data which are confirming this trend in cities in the US, Australia and eight other nations together with some of the data from our Global Cities Database that were suggesting the possibility of this trend.

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