Peak car

I'm part of it, not because I don't own a car, but rather because I drive it very little.

I work from home and I'm a bit of a recluse--but even those places I do travel with any frequency are all within probably 3 miles.

I think I probably average about 20 miles per week.

I live in Europe and have never even considered getting a car. In cities the bike is the fastest mode of transport anyway, and for longer distances it's quite convenient to take the train.

I used to be part of this phenomenon. First, I lived in the city center where owning/using a car is just a drag. Then I moved to the suburbs and still resisted buying one as a matter of principle. But a little less than two years ago, I made the transition and now I happily own a car.

The reason?

1) Public transport in my city sucks.

2) The shopping infrastructure has moved out of the center of my community to the edges.

And it's not like I didn't try. As I said above, for quite a number of years I refused to use a car even after I moved out of the city center because I was convinced that individual car usage just isn't sustainable. But as I get older, I feel my spare time becoming more and more valuable. And in my particular case, going to and from work takes >1h each way, while with the car it's a good 20 minutes drive, saving me about 1h20 per day. This is because my work is in another suburb which by public transport you can only get to by first going into the city center and then out again. With the car, you can circumvent the city completely. (Unfortunately, the part of town where my work is is not a very nice place to live, or else I could probably bike.)

The second part is shopping. When I was younger, I would just walk to the next store and buy the few items I would need that day. But I was single back then. Now, there aren't any stores in walking distance any more, but my partner and I also require more stuff than when I lived alone.

I still believe it's a bad idea that every household owns more than one car on average. And I've always wondered: of all of the privately owned cars in this country, how many are actually moving at any given point in versus how many are parked?

But I have kind of given up hope that broad acceptance of public transport would become the norm "automatically", simply because people should realize that individual traffic is unsustainable. Now I think the only way this will ever become a reality is through force -- namely, governmental regulation. Of course, this is not on anybody's agenda at this point (anybody in power, I mean) and will not be in any foreseeable time. I don't believe individual car use will experience a measurable reduction in my life time, sadly.

I fear we are part of a small self-selecting group that has chosen the convenience to living in densely populated, well connected cities and are relatively well-off. I doubt you'll hear a lot about "peak car" outside these small groups or areas.

For many, I suspect the car represents a great deal of freedom in exactly the same way that not owning a car means to this self-selecting group: making a decent living, access and comfort, etc.

The real aim to force the decline of car use is sustainability, efficiency and equality. It's not going to happen without huge investments and will affect the whole economy negatively for decades, which is why Governments shy away from doing anything very serious about it.

In the meantime, I'm also happy to not own a car, cycle to work, etc. But if I lived outside central London I would get one immediately.

I am soon going to be out of this - I have more money now and while a car isn't required for daily transportation I have family outside the city that I want to be able to visit more often and moving larger purchases in a bus is a real pita.

Me too. 1972 to 2014: 1 million miles driven. 2015: 0.

Separately, my bicycle & public transport are poor alternatives. But combined, they are incredible. With my bike & a metro pass, I can get anywhere, sometimes more quickly than with a private car.

And now I never worry about: going to the gym, car payments, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, and most of all, other drivers on their cell phones.

However, this is about car use rather than car ownership - I agree that owning a car is still regarded as normal for parents but I see a lot of people, including my own family, behaving in ways that reduces the amount we drive. There are a lot of factors in this including improving public transport (e.g. I rather like the trams here in Edinburgh even though the project to install them was a fiasco), greater use of cycles - including people taking young kids on bikes, very strict new drink driving laws here in Scotland, reduction of parking spaces in city centers, park and ride schemes round cities etc.

> However not so many people are starting families when compared to former times,

This has not been the case for quite a while, and I would claim the opposite: there are more newborns in 2015 than in any year since 1971.

> Cars are so old school. And the explosion engine is just... Well it feels like steam punk to me. I just don't get the fascination.

A lot of people don't "get" my fascination with programming. Others don't "get" my fascination with American football. Others don't "get" my fascination for living in population sparse areas.

There's nothing to "get" other than the fact that all have different likes and dislikes. Some people like cars for their freedom, for their solitude and/or for their speed. Maybe there are other reasons too!

Also, driving just sucks. Absolutely nobody I know looks forward to getting in their car and driving somewhere. Why? Because they all live in reasonably dense urban locations where traffic ranges from "absolute nightmare" (weekdays, 7-10am and 3-7pm) and "pretty awful" (all other times).It's surprisingly emotionally and physically draining. I'm much happier sitting in the back of a bus with my book, even if it takes twice as long. Add a nice bicycle to the mix for around town stuff, and the huge amount of money you save by not owning a car, and I can easily see why nobody in our generation desires one.

(Of course this is all about the U.S.; my experience driving around Sweden was mile after mile of forest and open road!).

We are definitely way past peak employment in agriculture.

Cars aren't comparable to literacy or agriculture. The equivalent there would be transportation in general. Cars as a specific form of transportation certainly could peak. Horses and sailing ships did.

Some of the confusion is primary and secondary effects.

All finite resources in a growing economy have a similar shaped (plus or minus technology) peak. So that's phosphate rock fertilizer, oil, various grades of coal (anthracite is basically gone already). You can also peak infinite / renewable resources like northern atlantic cod which are basically extinct now. Or buffalo, etc. Its interestingly fractal in that the smaller graphs of small producers look the same as graphs for other small producers and the overall system-wide graph. So the graph of Texas oil which peaked in the early 70s looks about like Mexico's graph looks like the world graph, all peaking at different dates, which is interesting.

As a secondary effect once you peak fertilizer and oil production, the secondary industries will peak. Refineries obviously follow oil production. But, modern industrial ag is heavily dependent on chemical fertilizer (which will peak) and oil (fuel, sprays, simple transport...)

Colloquially "peak" seems to be confused (intentionally, by some?) with short term downward market fluctuations. So obviously they'll never, ever be a peak in oil production because the market cost fluctuated downward recently for a short period of time, LOL.

For cars you need oil and iron, both of which you can eventually use up, so aside from all other arguments its possible. But a cultural or economic shift can mask that. So the wikipedia article is full of weird assertions that increasing the average GDP per capita must result in increased miles traveled because income inequality doesn't exist (LOL). Locally decreasing the number of "can afford a car" jobs from 2 million to 1.5 million will dramatically decrease road traffic, even if the average income for the area explodes because the 1% are richer than ever because its not like they're going to drive extra miles to celebrate.

For literacy there doesn't seem to be an inherent finite resource we can use up to eliminate literacy. So traditional logistical peak doesn't seem possible. In the colloquial sense of peak meaning "a short term downturn" that is pretty trivial.

So you've listed all three possibilities, a finite resource that can peak, a secondary industry that depends on peakable finite resources, and something that can't possibly have a logistical peak because there is no finite resource to exhaust.

> 2. the bus I was connecting from arrived 2 minutes after my connection had left.

This was basically 100% of the buses in San Diego. Most of the [quite large] county is theoretically transit accessible but they appeared to have used some sort of de-optimization program which ensured that every connection incurred the maximum wait.

If your work is within walking/running/cycling distance I think those options essentially always win over anything else in densely populated areas.

I recently spent half a year in central London, 6 km from home to work. I would run or longboard it in < 40 minutes one way, taking the tube or bus took > 60 minutes door-to-door, so even including a quick shower running was faster. If you count in the money saved on not taking the tube, not needing a gym membership, and the time saved by not having to do any workouts after you come home from work, it's a big win.

I did have to limit myself to 3 days running a week (2 days longboarding), or my knees started complaining. Also, London: fix your goddamned pavements, they are un-bloody-skateboardable. We have invented concrete and asphalt, you don't need to use cobblestones everywhere.

It is only mildly interesting to note that cars are declining in the single most bike/walk-friendly climate in America. The rest of the nation has weather to contend with.

When I was travelling with my SO we ended up in Manchester and needed to get to London. I can't remember the exact fare but it was something like 150 pounds each for the one way train ride ($580 AUD total) vs a similar length trip in Australia which would have been about $110 AUD total.

A complete rip-off IMO.

Because their budget is dependent on their own forecast of road traffic?

Well, having worked in travel demand forecasting--a combination of bad statistical models, bad assumptions about travel, and the inherent problems with extrapolating to produce forecasts. Travel modeling is very useful, but long term forecasts can't really account for fundamental market shifts.

In my region, Central Puget Sound, long term forecasts have been thrown some pretty big monkey wrenches since people started trying to use numbers with cars. Women entering the workforce, later Microsoft becoming a thing, etc. Oddly, some historic forecasts actually turned out reasonably well... probably by accident.

Yes: the main driver in car usage decline is better software and networking.

You already named remote work, but it does not end there.

There are remote games, remote movies (Netflix, YouTube), remote shopping (Amazon), remote communities (HN), etc.

I was thinking this as well. Car use seems to grow with industrialization and spread, then apparently shrinks with automation and urbanization. And if you look at the population that is entering into more general industrialization you see growing market for cars.

Not necessarily - in America yes that is the way things work at the moment, but not all over the world. There are may suburbs with good public transport where having a car is less necessary.

I think this is really about the decline of miles driven in cars, not the decline in cars made or owned (although that connection surely exists). I live in a suburb and have a car, because having a house almost requires a car; hauling paint and wood and plants and things doesn't really work in public transport. That said I commute by public transport simply because it is faster (bus lanes and subway instead of traffic jams) and parking in the city would be over $100/day. So I'll likely never get rid of the car as long as I have a house, but commuting with it is just not an option.

Apart from their energy intensiveness, what is wrong with the suburbs?

I grew up in suburbia, and I remember fresh air, open spaces and low crime. I get that suburbs can be boring for some people, but a lot of people I knew growing up chose to return to the suburbs after living in bigger cities, or never left.

Those are bizarre definitions of "totalitarinism" and "capitalism".

You can listen to audiobooks/news etc. while you drive. I do it all the time.

If you own a car today it spends most of it's life sat there waiting for you. Not so the self drive car which can be off doing errands - picking up those Amazon deliveries for instance - or working as a taxi for someone like Uber and making you some money by providing the individual, door to door, on demand public transport we want. This is gong to have a significant impact on how many of us own a vehicle I would imagine.

We still have geometric problems with everyone driving. Namely, cars take up space in two or three useful dimensions on roadways that are fixed in length, and have limited capacity to grow wider or higher. In short, self-driving cars won't handle peak demand and the accompanying congestion.

Where I am more excited about self driving cars is in their potential to change vehicle ownership economics in slightly denser areas. A car2go that delivers itself makes it pretty hard to justify buying an expensive capital asset that sits idle an average of 95% of the time. In other words, a rental service that is able to utilize its vehicle fleet more fully, should be able to make a handy profit while reducing travel costs for many people. The opportunity frontier is enormous here.

Once more people switch to user-fee based travel as opposed to all-you-can-eat-buffet travel, people all of a sudden start choosing how to travel rather than automatically hitting the default option. That opens the door to better public transit, which can handle peak demand, as well as more walking and bicycling.

And, we should have room for more and better bicycle/pedestrian facilities, since we won't need so much land to store all our mostly-unused boxes of steel and plastic.

I think self driving cars will be transformative for cities, but it won't be some Jetsons vision of the future where we simply upgrade suburbia with tech. That will probably happen too, but those changes will be rather less profound.

In Brasil, the nascent middle class consumes cares. It's a status symbol and a dream for many. It's a different culture. In the big cities (São Paulo, Rio, etc) the public transportation is miserable. Buses and Metro are overcrowded and Metro doesn't have a good penetration. So, no, in Brasil at least, no Peak-Car for quite some time.

Who knows, they might enable much better service levels in public transit too.