Peak Travel Indicators from All Over
More observations from that Guardian article: The End of Motoring. This time on the idea of ‘Peak Travel’:
David Metz’s (visiting professor in UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies) account of underlying transport trends is simple: ultimately, we don’t want to travel more.
“Look at the [Department for Transport's] National Travel Survey, an annual poll of 20,000 people, dating back to the early 70s. The average travel time has not changed over that period. The number of journeys that people make in a year hasn’t altered. It’s about 1,000 journeys a year, and about an hour’s travel per day.”
This figure for daily travel is remarkably consistent. Look at Tanzanian villagers in 1986 or Britons today, and we all seem to travel, on average, for about 66 minutes a day. What did rise, in Britain at least from the 70s through to the 90s, was the distance people covered. “In the early 70s, it’s about 4,500 miles per person per year, which includes all modes of travel except international travel by air, which is a different story,” says Metz. “It rose to about 7,000 miles per year by the mid 1990s, and it stayed steady at about that level since.”
Metz also thinks a general satisfaction with the number of places people can go has lead to this levelling-off; he calls this the saturation of demand.
“What is the benefit of travel?” he asks. “It’s about getting more choices of places to go – the choice we have of jobs, doctors, hospitals, schools for our kids. My hypothesis is that the growth of daily travel has come to an end because now we have quite good choice.”
Similar report from Seattle:
Peak driving? National study shows Seattle traffic leveling off
Posted by Mike Lindblom
What’s striking about the 2010 Urban Mobility Report, released to much fanfare by the Texas Transportation Institute and the Kirkland-based INRIX traffic data firm this week, is what didn’t change.
People in the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett region drove 56 million miles, identical to 2009 and similar to levels throughout the ’00s. …
Gasoline use in Washington and Oregon has been flat, as heralded in this chart by the environmentalist Sightline Institute. And recent gas-tax predictions by the state Department of Transportation have downshifted to show a gradual decline. …
