Car Ownership Puts Teens at High Crash Risk

Friday, December 9th, 2011 | Editor | No Comments

From CARRS-Q Safety Visions

A recent CARRS-Q survey suggests that three out of four young Queensland drivers own a vehicle within the first six months of receiving a Provisional licence, increasing their risk of being involved in a crash.

The survey findings, published in the international journal Traffic Injury Prevention, indicated that nearly 80% of inexperienced, new drivers aged 17 to 19 responding to the survey had primary access to a vehicle.

PhD Scholar Bridie Scott-Parker said research showed car ownership and high mileage led to increased rates of crashes, traffic offences and risky driving for newly independent drivers.

“We found 78.4% of young drivers with less than six months of independent driving experience had their own car despite being our newest drivers on the road,” she said.

“The first six months is the most dangerous time for new drivers. We would prefer they get experience driving in shared vehicles with parents monitoring their driving as much as possible.”

Continued at original site

Why Are US Teenagers Driving Less?

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

– by Brian Wheeler
BBC News Magazine

American teenagers are taking to the road in fewer numbers than ever before. What’s behind this trend and does it mean the end of the car as adolescent status symbol and rite of passage?

If Ferris Bueller had a day off now, would he spend it on Facebook?

Recent research suggests many young Americans prefer to spend their money and time chatting to their friends online, as opposed to the more traditional pastime of cruising around in cars.

For the high school students in films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and American Graffiti, cars were the ultimate expression of individuality and personal freedom – just as they have been for generations of Americans.

Continued at original site

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.

Continued at original site

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.

Continued at original site

Are We Reaching ‘Peak Car’?

Link

– 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.

Continued at original site