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'm not so sure about infrastructure improvements, at least here in Germany. I have been cycling for more than 20 years, and the infrastructure has not changed that much. Some places have improved a bit (especially in the last 5 years), but some are worse too. I feel that the experience is largely the same here. It may be different in places like Paris or London, though.
I'm not sure how much change is happing on the continent, but based on some stories I've seen, there are many cities pushing the envelope, I think even within Germany (probably depends on the city?).
On the contrary, I think the prosperity evident in rural areas that can afford high ratios of car ownership is itself a small, self-selecting group of very well-off countries. If you broaden your view to the rest of the world, peak car doesn't look so silly after all.
A car is a much bigger investment in the developing world than it is in developed nations. Technology will enable more and more people in these nations to get more and more of their life done without the need to own an automobile.
We may see a saturation profile in the small part of the world where cars are both small investments and big conveniences, and a peak profile everywhere else. Which is, on the whole, a peak profile.
I think one area over looked in their study of people streaming into and out of cities is the less need for the city itself to provide for the needs of the people. Combine that with all the congestion style pricing and it drives development outside of the city where those who cannot afford the entry costs.
Urbanization is steadily increasing worldwide.
> and are relatively well-off.
If you live in a city, owning a car is more expensive than not.
I think there's also the issue of differing definitions of "convenience." I used to live in a city where I walked or used public transit to get everywhere. Now I live in a suburb and drive everywhere, and I find most of the things I like to do MORE convenient. Yeah, in the city it was easy to walk to bars and restaurants, but I don't eat out that much, and I'm beyond the age where I want to hang out in bars.
As just one example, I like to cook at home, and grocery shopping when I have to carry everything in my arms is a pain in the butt. I know people like to talk about how much fresher your food is when you buy just what you need every day, and that sounds great, but I have a lot of other things going on in my life. Having to plan time to go to the grocery store every day after work is a hassle. Being able to drive five minutes to the store, park easily, and carry my stuff home in my trunk, is vastly more convenient than what I did when I lived in the city.
Having lived both ways for several years, I will never willingly go back to living in a densely populated city.
But like you said, different people have different definitions of "convenience".
My car is essentially a portable home I get to take with me wherever I am: it has first aid equipment, it has water and snacks, and secure storage. If you are optimizing for convenience, the correct choice is to separate things by networks of roads and use cars: that's why they exploded in popularity. You do want to live near where you work, but most of the people commuting long enough distances to make that matter are doing that due to economic issues (cost of living), not due to fundamental requirements for car deployment.
The issue is just that it isn't sustainable: it uses too much energy at too high an externality cost for us all to have this amazing level of convenience. It requires too much land to be paved and too much oil to be burned. But people should not confuse sustainability with convenience: dense urban areas that are not conducive to cars are not "convenient". To the extent to which people who live in them think they are convenient, it is because they don't understand most of the downsides they know about to cars are caused by dense urban environments.
I'm carless here in the city, and my very heavy groceries from two different stores are about to be delivered by Instacart. I'm lounging around in my PJ's. If this isn't convenient I don't know what is.
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.
Doesn't most (like >80% in normal usage) of the depreciation cost incur while the car is moving, as opposed to being parked?
If you're talking about individual traffic being environmentally unsustainable, I'd argue that we should focus as much on improving car/energy technology as we should on developing public transit. People do not want to commit or be forced into lifestyle changes. Rather than trying to make them drive less, it makes sense to reduce the impact of driving.
You can only build so much road. After that, you start increasing the cost of using shared infrastructure to drive down demand (congestion tolling).
Someone once said to me that he feels amputated without a bike, which really hits the nail on the head.
IMO a scooter is the best city transportation. I can pretty much get anywhere from anywhere in London in under 30 minutes. My commute from Victoria Park to Clerkenwell is 13 minutes. Google suggests 20 minutes to cycle; I reckon an athlete who ignored red lights could just about keep up, but they'd be sprinting in between the places they'd have to give way.
Electric bikes remove one major barrier people have, namely the arrive sweaty after a hill climb factor. I hear other bicyclists claim that this is less karmic because of exercise, but I view it differently. We know that, controlling for type of infrastructure, the prevalence of bicycling is strongly correlated with improved safety. The plausible explanation I subscribe to is that, with increased numbers, drivers are more accustomed to looking for bicyclists, and that bicyclists are better able to establish good group norms about how to ride safely. And of course increased numbers also mean that there is more political will to add more bicycling infrastructure, which in turn generates more bicycling. Electric assist bikes help with all aspects of this, with the exception of getting the maximum amount of exercise on every trip.
I'd love to see a business model that figures out how to 1. create a desirable electric bike brand 2. Have a low-barrier-to-entry rental or lease mode 3. Handles maintenance in a frictionless, reassuring way--perhaps with roadside emergency support 4. Has great on boarding for how to ride safely and confidently, perhaps coordinating with local bike clubs for instruction and personalized route planning.
I probably made a mistake here, but using "google", distance from Victoria Park to Clerkenwell is 3.2 miles, 5.14km. If it takes 13 minutes, the average speed is about ~24km/h. To make the same distance in 20 minutes, you can drop your average speed down to ~15.5km/h. And that is not so "high speed" for cycling.
Funny fact, I put "average biking speed" to "google" and it told me that: For cyclists in Copenhagen, the average cycling speed is 15.5 km/h.
So I guess google uses 15.5km/h to calculate the time used to move the distance by bike.
I've seen a similar trend where my brother-in-law lives outside Munich as well as some other towns where friends are.
For things like commuting, the train can make some sense, but for short trips to a market that is no longer walkable? A car may be more desirable.
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.
I'm fortunate enough to be able to walk to work, and never drive, but also stopped biking because it is so dangerous. Not only do you need to be doubly wary of other drivers, you need to watch for people getting out of parked cars, other cyclists, and pedestrians only paying attention to their phones.
Traffic injuries/fatalities are more likely if you bike, cariovascular disease is less likely if you bike. I suspect my overall annual risk of mortality drops when I make the trade-off, as my bike commute isn't along any particularly dangerous roads.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
(I don't think biking without a helmet is better than biking with, as the title suggests, but I wouldn't be surprised if helmet laws/media campaigns are harmful.)
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.