Make 2020 the year of peak car

Car sales are declining globally and the real “peak car” moment (when the number of vehicles in operation stops increasing and starts a permanent decline) could also be near. This is a crucial opportunity for the movement for climate sanity and livable cities. And it’s bad news for the rogue corporations betting everything on increased oil consumption. Peak car has been reached in some cities, but the global picture is less clear.

The Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, recently reported, “Car sales in China are set to slump for a third year running, indicating that the industry may already have hit ‘peak car’ in an alarming development for motor manufacturers.” Business Insider notes that wealthy countries are saturated with cars and automobile sales in both India and China dropped sharply in 2018 and 2019. These dips could become permanent declines, first in sales and then in the number of vehicles in operation, if cities around the world prioritize clean air and climate action. (Or national and city governments could work together to boost auto sales and the number of cars by pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into expanded roads and parking structures.)

A rapid transition to electric vehicles and renewable electricity is essential to bring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions down, but the number of cars needs to shrink to make the rapid transition to electric cars practical and just.

Electric cars, and renewable power to run them, are a crucial and effective climate action step. However, we simply cannot electrify over 1.3 billion cars fast enough. GHG pollution must be reduced by over 7% a year from now until 2030 to avoid disastrous consequences, according to the latest UN climate report.

With the “demand for batteries soaring” already, Amnesty International is also ringing the alarm bells about the human rights and environmental impact of mining rare minerals for batteries.

Disturbingly, the United Nations climate agency tasked with helping countries develop “effective and appropriate responses to climate change” (UNFCCC) does not seem to be putting much effort into tracking the population of cars in operation, despite warning that GHG “emissions from the transport sector have more than doubled since 1970, and have increased at a faster rate than any other energy enduse sector.” UNFCCC puts the number of passenger vehicles at about 1 billion. The last publicly available estimate from the auto industry, Wards Intelligence, is 1.32 billion vehicles in 2016, before sales really started to slump. The UNFCCC has the mandate to track the number of vehicles in operation and their climate impact, but isn’t providing the world with the information needed to understand what direction we are going.

The climate footprint of automobile dependency

Electric car and battery manufacturing is still mainly powered with climate disrupting fossil fuels. And the concrete and steel used to build parking structures and urban highways has a massive greenhouse gas footprint. As George Monbiot recently wrote, “Transport, mostly because of our obsession with the private car, is now the major factor driving us towards climate breakdown.”

Vast quantities of natural resources are consumed and enormous amounts of greenhouse gases are emitted in order to manufacture vehicles that sit idle 95 per cent of the time, often in precious public space or very expensive parking garages. Good analysis of the GHG footprint of transportation is rare, but a 2006 Hydro Quebec study found that transportation accounts for about one third of Canadian emissions if only tailpipe emissions are counted, but about half if lifecycle emissions including road building and the extraction and refining of fuel are counted. This study, Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation Options, did not include the GHG emissions from building parking facilities.

The number of vehicles in operation on our planet almost doubled in the twenty years from 1996 to 2016, and if that rapid increase were to continue (as UNFCCC seems to expect) the climate impact would be catastrophic.

Need for fewer cars becoming obvious

The dominant approach to climate action in transportation has been to deny the need to actually reduce travel by private automobile, while giving lip service to the idea of modest shifts to public transit, walking and cycling (to limit increases in traffic). The success and popularity of policies that have reduced car ownership and use in some cities have often been downplayed as interesting anomalies, unlikely to be adopted outside the centers of a few older cities. But now attitudes are shifting.

More and more agencies are admitting the obvious. For example, a 2018 California Air Resources Board climate report found California needs to reduce per capita car travel by 25 per cent over 11 years to meet their (inadequate) climate targets, even with a 10-fold increase in electric car sales. Then, in the spring of 2019, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) urged the European Union to stop assuming increased automobile use is inevitable and act to “discourage use of passenger cars in urban areas.”

In December, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) International Transport Forum hosted the Zero Car Growth? Roundtable. Professor Phil Goodwin, who advised the UK Labour Party under both Tony Blair and Jermy Corbyn, asserted that given the climate emergency “even on most optimistic assumptions about transition to electric vehicles, there needs to be overall reductions of traffic” on the order of 5 or 6 per cent per year.

Goodwin also asserted that reducing traffic volumes and car ownership is easier than peak car stabilization given that the road space re-allocation needed for transit lanes, protected bicycle lanes and pleasant pedestrian spaces.

Tipping points

We don’t know enough about social tipping points to know with any certainty how to trigger big positive changes. As David Roberts writes in Vox, tipping points can be “strived toward, but they cannot be planned, scheduled, or relied on.”

However, my educated guess based on the experiences of individual cities, and the spread of ideas between cities globally, is that striving to trigger the a sharp turn towards fewer cars a good use of time and energy. The idea of a tipping point is that a fairly small intervention at the right time and place can lead to large and difficult to reverse changes in society. And the successful and popular efforts to control the population of cars in some cities suggest that triggering a massive shift may be easier than many expect.

Roberts asserts that the probabilities for avoiding the catastrophic collapse of human society due to global heating are not great, but what rational hope still exists “lies in the fact that social change is often nonlinear” and sometimes shockingly quick.

Disappearing Traffic, Disappearing Cars

Car traffic quickly expands to fill expanded road space in urban areas. As Joe Cortright reports in City Observatory, in 2019 California officially recognized “that adding road capacity in urban areas leads to more miles of travel and greater greenhouse gas emissions.” And it’s also well understood that traffic contracts just as quickly when road space is no longer available. When you make a car lane into a bus lane, a protected bike lane or more space for pedestrians, people drive less, traffic disappears. And traffic speeds don’t usually change much.

The 2004 European Commission report Reclaiming city streets for people notes that “it is typically assumed that reducing the capacity available for cars will result in increased traffic congestion in the surrounding streets. However... the experience in a number of European cities is that... some of the traffic that was previously found in the vicinity of the scheme disappears’ or ‘evaporates’.”

Cities, much more than national governments, are leading efforts to reduce the number of cars, and the resulting greenhouse gas pollution by reallocating space away from the private automobile. A recent Fast Company article lists eight examples: Cairo, Oslo, Buenos Aires, London, Seoul, Madrid, Beijing and Chennai, India. One spectacular example is Amsterdam’s popular plan to find better uses for 10,000 parking spaces.

Paris is a particularly inspiring example. Car ownership has plunged from 60 percent of households in 2001, to 35 percent in 2019. The present mayor, Anne Hidalgo, turned a national highway into a world renowned linear park along the river, over the objections of the national government. Her administration is also working to convert the Boulevard Périphérique, the congested innermost highway around the centre of Paris, into an actual urban boulevard with fewer car lanes, a bus lane, and a 50 km/h speed limit. Hidalgo’s re-election platform includes removing about 72% of on-street parking spaces (about 10% of total parking spaces) in the city to make room for protected bike lanes, bus lanes, trees and public spaces.

Increasingly, city governments are looking to their global peers for inspiration and expertise rather than being constrained by national borders. The financial and material investment needed to create bus lanes, protected bike lanes, or pedestrian dominated streets is so small it is often done temporarily to test concepts. A progressive city council can do a lot in four years, even in the face of hostility from higher levels of government.

The City of Vancouver’s Climate Emergency Response plan aims to make a lot of traffic disappear very quickly. The plan aims for an “allocation of public space [that] supports walking, cycling and transit [to] greatly reduce dependence on fossil fuels through a reduction in vehicle ownership and kilometres travelled by vehicle.” The goal is for two-thirds of trips in Vancouver to be by active transportation and transit by 2030, up from about half now.

Increasing death rate for cars would kill fossil fuel investment

Rapidly reducing the population of cars gets easier as demand for brand-new cars declines, since many of the vehicles in operation are worth almost nothing on the resale market and cost a lot to maintain. For example, in the United States the average age of a car is now over 12 years old. A vehicle built 17 years ago, when Greta Thunberg was born, can often be bought by a government “scrap-it” program for less than the cost of an electric bicycle. By such means, the “death rate” for cars can be increased as the “birth rate” is decreased.

Rather than owning cars, many younger people are already choosing public transit, cycling and walking for routine trips. Car share services like the Modo car co-op allow city dwellers to access cars and trucks when needed.

The importance of peak car goes upstream, well beyond the direct climate and social benefits. Investors in fossil fuels are betting on an increasing population of private automobiles to keep oil consumption growing for a few more years. If it becomes apparent that the peak auto is past, and the population of cars is declining, there will be a sudden rush to the exits. High-cost fossil fuel projects around the world will be quickly abandoned. Investors’ fear of peak car, and resulting lower oil prices, may have already been a decisive factor in the recent cancellation of Teck’s proposed Frontier oil sands mine in Alberta.

Environmental Groups following cities

Some established environmental organizations have only recently woken up to the potential of peak car. For example, Greenpeace International’s website includes the excellent 2019 blog post “We don’t just need electric cars, we need fewer cars.” The related Greenpeace International report Freedom to Breath: Rethinking Urban Transport advocates for “prioritizing public space for use by people and public services [and] re-allocating existing space away from cars.” However, Greenpeace in Canada and the USA still have nothing equivalent about re-allocating space on their websites. Some environmental groups don’t even mention opposing urban highway expansion in their climate action materials.

Transportation is the first and second largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.A. and Canada respectively​​​​​​​​​​​​. It is time for organizations that care about the climate emergency in North America to join the push for fewer cars and more livable cities.

But perhaps more important than mainstream advocacy groups is the rapidly growing non-violent direct action network Extinction Rebellion, which has targeted urban highways and airport expansion projects. The prospect of thousands of citizens prepared to risk arrest to stop planet-cooking highway projects should make politicians think twice when choosing between transit improvements and highway expansion.

Federal and Provincial governments ignoring commitments

Transportation-related greenhouse emissions increased in Canada by 43 per cent between 1990 and 2017, and a major factor was government spending on road and highway expansion in and near urban areas.

The 2016 Pan Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change (the federal-provincial climate agreement) already commits the federal and provincial governments to shift spending away from urban highways and airport expansion, which increase emissions, to low-carbon transportation including public transit, walking and cycling. But, so far, federal and provincial governments are largely ignoring this commitment, which is not surprising given that North American environmental groups are just waking up to the issue. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's upcoming budget will most likely continue the pattern of spending billions on urban highways while ignoring their climate agreement with the provinces.

Green New Deal must ensure auto worker not left behind

Spending public funds on urban highway expansion makes peoples’ lives less satisfying and shorter. Long commutes driving alone leads to lack of exercise, exposure to high levels of air pollution and social isolation. Fewer cars will make room for more pleasure in our cities.

But we cannot forget that the transition to less car-intensive cities could leave some workers in the lurch. The Green New Deals must ensure no auto industry workers or community is left behind, as with fossil fuel industry workers. All Green New Deal proposals must aim for fewer cars and more livable cities, and ensure that small towns and rural areas have quality public transportation service.

Ever increasing numbers of cars, along with an ever increasing number of parking garages and ever wider urban freeways, is a dead end for humanity. The choice is between cities of delightful neighbourhoods with far fewer cars, and the collapse of human society with all the suffering and misery that implies.

If you want a brighter future with far fewer cars, there are two obvious places to start. The first is to pressure environmental groups, particularly any you support financially, to join Greenpeace International in calling for “re-allocating existing space away from cars.” The second is to push your city council to emulate leading cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Vancouver.

On the other hand, joining Extinction Rebellion and blocking an urban highway expansion project might be even more effective in pushing society past the peak car tipping point.