Could we end the era of mass car ownership without a huge fight ("they're coming to take our cars!") and without draconian policies?
That's the focus of this article and podcast episode (Reinventing Transport #11).
It is based on an essay I wrote in 2011 (but unfortunately never published). I speculated about a future dominated by "shared" modes of transport and with much less personal possession of motor vehicles. I was overly optimistic in places and likely wrong on various points. But I hope I was wrong in thought-provoking ways. I think this is still relevant 8 years later to ideas like Mobility as a Service and initiatives such as the "Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities" and the New Urban Mobility (NUMO) alliance. But you be the judge.
The title of Chris' introductory essay gives you an idea of the focus: "Making do with fewer cars using Metered Access to Shared Cars (MASC) to avoid the coming global car population explosion". It also hints at his independent mindedness.
Knowing his flair for interesting transport policy ideas, I actually emailed him in August 2018 to ask him on to this podcast! Chris replied promptly but he said that he was extremely unwell. It was a rare kind of cancer. He was hopeful surgery would help and said that being on the podcast would be a good thing to do as he recovered. So I wished him well and made a note to get back to him later. I followed up later in the year, but I got no answer.
Sadly, when I searched I found that Chris died on 3 November 2018 at the age of 74.
Chris was a Community Relations Officer in the planning department at the regional municipality of Ottawa Carleton in Canada.
But I knew him for his wider policy engagements. He was co-founder of Ottawalk, an example of that rare beast - an active pedestrian advocacy group - as well as co-founder of Pednet, North America's first pedestrian rights coalition. He was also a co-founder of Ottawa's first car-sharing business and had a long-time interest in car-lite urban transport alternatives. Chris was also an active and generous participant in various online discussions on urban transport throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
I always found Chris a great inspiration. For a taste of his idea-filled writings, see his blog. Here is a 2014 video of Chris talking about his activities in Ottawa.
In the introductory essay in this volume, Chris Bradshaw suggests that his vision of mass uptake of "metered access to shared cars" should arrive organically, since the heavy hand of government would provoke public resentment and resistance.
Is such an organic transition realistic? Could a mass shift away from private motor vehicle ownership happen without draconian and unpopular impositions by policymakers?
Although the scenario discussed in this volume may seem at first far fetched, I will argue that it is much more than mere wild speculation.
Plausible social, economic, and business trends may indeed provide a significant push in the right direction. A policy push is almost certainly also necessary but it may not need to be heavy handed or involve the trampling of individual choice.
Some of this push can come from other policy agendas pursued for reasons that have nothing to do with car ownership or metered access to shared cars. But some impetus will come from explicitly aiming to escape automobile dependence and promoting the rise of alternatives. I will argue that these do not need to be unacceptably interventionist. A policy push to help us escape the trap of car dependence would also arguably be enhancing of personal choice rather than restricting freedom.
It is broadly in line with the vision explained by Chris Bradshaw in the introductory essay of this volume [and sadly never published]. It involves the emergence of an attractive alternative to the car-owning lifestyle. This alternative would be centered on an integrated package of mobility options. This package includes transit but goes far beyond it to include ubiquitous metered access to shared cars (MASC) among others.
It is a shift in lifestyles and not merely a change in day-to-day mobility choices. It involves a gradual but significant shift in how excellent mobility is obtained and framed so that, eventually, most people see excellent mobility as best achieved via access to a rich integrated tapestry of services, including cars, mostly accessed on a shared and or fee for service basis rather than via mass individual ownership.
[Back to 2019 and clearly lots of people have been thinking along these lines since 2011 such as Robin Chase and the founders of MaaS Global (mobility as a service) among others. I was by no means the first. See below.]
For highly motorized societies, this will mean a reduction in the number of private motor vehicles. For newly motorizing societies, it means a shift in trend lines, but may still involve some increasing car and motorcycle numbers.
Privately owned cars will probably still play a role for certain groups of people and for rural dwellers. However, such cars would no longer be the majority method for achieving excellent ability. This vision will make our relationships with cars more "provisional" and less "compulsory".
[The word "provisional" appeals to me as a way to capture the goal of making cars seem less compulsory for people.]
It is not a completely new vision, and a number of other authors have discussed something like it for more than a decade. Most of them inspired by the notion of ambitious, scaled up car sharing. Examples include OECD (1997), Adams (1997), Monheim (2003), Topp (2006) and Bradshaw (2007). [There is a list of references at the end of this article.]
The next few sections focus on the central question of the essay: is an organic shift away from mass car ownership plausible without draconian government action?
[Keep reading below]
Mass private ownership of cars involves self reinforcing processes that tend to make car dependence become ever more entrenched. The process of accommodating large numbers of cars and facilitating their use has a path dependent character involving profound changes to transport infrastructure, the built form at several scales, streetscapes, urban regulations, the organization of relevant professions and various social norms and expectations. High use and ownership of cars can often be said to be "locked in", so that no easy reversal of these changes is possible. This situation has been labeled automobile dependence.
Even in countries that don't yet have high levels of car ownership, many of the trends all seem in the wrong direction. There have been many efforts to stand up against the trend, but successes have been few.
Car dependence also has a grip at the household and individual level. For many people around the world, who have voluntarily locked themselves into car oriented lifestyles, their past choices such as home location have undermined their subsequent ability to use alternatives to cars. This contributes to the political difficulty of reducing automobile dependence. Car owners often come to see their car use as almost compulsory.
So, many readers may therefore be skeptical of the potential for 'metered access to shared cars' becoming a central part of an attractive alternative to car ownership for the masses. After all, car sharing now seems to serve a rather small niche. There are also formidable obstacles to having taxis play a stronger role in many cities, too many of which are trapped in a broken regulatory framework that caps taxi numbers and turns taxi licenses into a tradeable asset.
[Of course, this was before the rise of ride hailing (or ride sourcing) services such as Uber, Grab, Ola, Didi, Lyft, etc, etc. And of course, 2011 was long before people were thinking about scenarios around automated vehicles such as Robin Chase's, 'heaven' or 'hell' scenarios; the hell scenario being the privately-owned AV scenario and the heaven scenario being a scenario in which autonomous cars and autonomous transit vehicles are predominantly public or shared vehicles. This actually dovetails with some other scenarios in this essay, even though I hadn't dreamed of that possibility at that point.]
Transit systems in many cities are also structured and regulated in ways that inhibit innovation and the ability to rise to the occasion even if car ownership were somehow to decline. Clearly, there is nothing inevitable about Bradshaw's scenario. Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss the possibility.
The rest of this essay offers perspectives that make change seem more plausible, perhaps even likely.
Wider forces beyond the urban transport arena, which do not involve policy activism include disruptive changes in technology, in business and in the economy. For example, a decade or more of deleveraging and deflation in the rich economies might make car ownership less affordable. [Well, that hasn't happened! There has been deflation and deleveraging, but there's been a boom in loans for car ownership.] A period with sustained high fuel and commodity prices is another possibility. [And again, that hasn't happened.]
Simultaneously, a number of technological changes in business innovations may be poised to disrupt mobility systems and to enhance the capacity to respond to the pressures just mentioned. Continuing innovation in mobile communications and computing devices, smartphones, telematics and in social media are already threatening to disrupt numerous areas of business in inherently unpredictable directions. [So this was just before the huge rise in apps and services via those apps.]
One such wave of innovation is especially relevant. This is the trend towards collaborative consumption and the closely related idea of a shift from products to services (Prettenthaler and Steininger,1999).
Numerous new and transformed urban mobility services are prominent examples of this shift. They are beginning to weaken the perceived link between car use and car possession.
[I tend to use the word 'possession' rather than ownership to take account of things like people who have a company car at home. They don't own it, but they possess it. And it for all intents and purposes, all of the behavioral issues are just like having your own car.]
And these trends are enhancing the prospects for developing an attractive and comprehensive alternative to having one's own car. Examples include car sharing, bicycle sharing, ride sharing, integration of public transport and its marketing, and integrated mobility packages, car free housing, parking unbundling, new pricing technologies, advances in vehicle telematics and the emergence of transport information services delivered via apps on mobile devices. These latter initiatives may multiply the power of these various services by integrating them and unleashing network economies and complementarities for both users and providers.
[So you can see that there was a bit of excitement at that time. Many of us could see change coming, but we couldn't see exactly what changes were coming.]
The theme of this volume taps into this zeitgeist by proposing the mass uptake of metered access to shared cars, which would represent a dramatic scaling up of collaborative consumption in the urban transport arena. The buzz around this collaborative consumption shift suggests to many that it may be possible to make alternatives to ownership sufficiently convenient and compelling that a massive shift away from car ownership could indeed occur organically, without government compulsion. It certainly seems possible that further innovation may make alternative mobility packages [in other words, mobility-as-a-service kind of packages] more and more attractive. Possible examples include the peer-to-peer, one-way and floating car-share innovations. Such improvements might further expand the range of contexts in which the car owning lifestyle faces as a serious competitor. I'll return to this topic later when I consider possible explicit government efforts to accelerate the process.
[As it turned out, the car sharing scene has been growing, but it hasn't been explosive. Much more significant has been the rise of ride hailing, for example, and more recently, micro mobility shared services like dockless bike share boom and bust and now dockless scooter share, none of which was on the horizon at that point in 2011.]
This may seem difficult as experience tells us. Car-dependent households see policies that threaten their car use and especially their car ownership as unreasonable, since they often perceive much of their car use as compulsory and without palatable alternatives. Nevertheless, this section seeks to highlight several ways in which policy might be able to help melt car dependence and reduce the attractions of mass car ownership without provoking too strong a backlash.
Some of these will be pursued for reasons that have little to do with our scenario, but which may nevertheless further it. Some will make the melting of automobile dependence the explicit goal.
Urban planning reforms aimed at various objectives, including public health, affordable housing, as well as energy and climate change, among others, may also be able to help erode the grip of automobile dependent assumptions and regulations. Some of these also appear to be gathering momentum. The relevant urban planning reforms include reform of parking requirements, reforms to rigidly-segregated low-density zoning practice, transit-oriented development efforts and suburban retrofits to intensify suburban sub-centers and strip malls.
[In retrospect, yes, various of these reforms are happening in various places, but all too slowly for many of us.]
There are also several transport policy agendas that could assist the shift away from car ownership, even if pursued for other reasons. An enhanced environment for walking and cycling is being pursued in many places for various reasons, including public health and safety, clean air, livable streets, and enhanced accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities. Momentum is also gathering for reform of road cost recovery policies for reasons that are unrelated to automobile dependence. These reasons include declining fuel tax receipts, local government financial strains, technological opportunities in telematics for road pricing, among others. Cost recovery reform could potentially have a profound impact.
[I think I still agree with all of that. But it still is not happening very widely just yet.]
I have suggested that if the efforts mentioned above are pursued for the sake of goals that have widespread support, their inadvertent impact on the attractiveness of car ownership may provoke less resistance than an explicit policy effort would. However, this may not always be enough. The fact that these policies target car ownership and usage only indirectly does not necessarily save them from the resistance associated with the politics of automobile dependence and the defense of cheap motoring by people who feel they lack alternatives.
Therefore, before discussing more policy positive possibilities, I would like to take a detour to argue that challenging automobile dependence more directly may be getting easier politically. Perhaps we need not shy away from further direct assaults on it.
In fact, evidence is mounting that much of the edifice of automobile dependence that supports mess car ownership was created, and is kept in place only with the support of an extremely heavy hand from government, especially at the local level. So for example, Jonathan Levine, Michael Lewyn and Ryan Avent, among others, highlight that it is zoning, not market preferences that mostly reinforces low density sprawl in North America. Donald Shoup and others have also highlighted that excessive and mostly free parking arises primarily from parking requirement regulations (and other parking regulations). Similar regulatory forces prompt oversupply of parking in many countries. Many countries also have tax incentives or exemptions that favor low density greenfield development. And of course subsidized road investments that focus on easing congestion with capacity increases tend to promote sprawling development.
[This idea that car dependency is not a market phenomenon is perhaps more widely known now than it was in 2011. So I probably wouldn't need to labor that point so much if I was writing this essay now. Or maybe I do?]
Furthermore, lock-in to automobile dependent patterns itself often limits choices rather than expanding them. The era in which car-centric policy expanded individual choice is long gone for most countries. Policies that lock us deeper into car dependence have the effect of stifling choice and making cars ever more compulsory. Automobile dependence at several scales restricts the housing, neighborhood and travel choices of individuals and households. This choice reduction is real, even if it initially arose voluntarily, as individual decisions or via collective political agreements by communities, especially local governments.
Car ownership itself can be argued to create distortion in the market of day-to-day travel, especially with cost structures dominated by fixed costs. It inhibits subsequent travel choice-making to entrench over use. [See here (PDF) for more on this idea of car possession causing distortion or "rigidities" in trip choice-making.]
This will sound odd if you think of car ownership as the normal way to achieve high mobility. But it makes more sense if we compare car ownership with the benchmark of a car-lite lifestyle with excellent comprehensive multimodal mobility and with access to car-based mobility on a fee-for-service basis. This arrangement prompts users to make many more active decisions about which mode to use for which trips.
[In other words, we can only see car ownership causes distortions in people's travel choices and behavior when we compare with an alternative in which people can also choose cars if they want, but in which they are not faced with distortions causes by ownership or possession themselves. They don't own their own car, they don't possess the car, so their traveling choices are not distorted by that particular feature.]
Arguably, a shift away from mass car ownership could open up options that are otherwise cut off by the lock-in of automobile dependence. This perspective also suggests that lock-in to automobile dependence may not be as robust as it has seemed. If it is propped up more by regulation than by market preferences, then perhaps it is vulnerable to reforms to those regulations.
This also opens the possibility that the active promotion of a shift towards mass 'metered access to shared cars' and of the melting of automobile dependence could come to be seen as a way of enhancing choices and of reducing not increasing onerous impositions by government. [I guess I'm making something like a market urbanism pitch here.] Making auto dependent structures face a market test is not coercion. It would allow market processes to open up richer choices and make it easier for everyone to express and realize their preferences.
This section therefore focuses on policy possibilities that aim to facilitate, although not force, a melting of car dependence and a shift to car lite lifestyles. The emphasis is on policy approaches that offer some hope of being effective, yet politically palatable and avoid being heavy handed. Many such agendas are already being pursued of course. Here are a few examples.
[You be the judge of whether I was/am realistic here.]
Most jurisdictions could easily identify and or moderate subsidies and regulations that promote automobile dependence, yet have little clear benefit and narrow support. This would not eliminate culprits that still have widespread support such as systematic underpricing of cars and car-oriented zoning. But it would be a start. We also need a stronger push to bring telematics-based services such as pay-as-you-go insurance to the vehicle fleet as a key pathway to accelerate the shift to distance-based road charging (Grush, 2010). Bradshaw points out in this volume that such road user charging can be a key nudge towards 'metered access to shared cars' by shifting fixed to variable costs.
There may also be a case to deliberately set road user charges for personal household vehicles at a slightly higher rate than for 'metered access to shared car' vehicles in order to explicitly focus attention on the distortion of traffic behavior inherent in personal possession of a vehicle. Along similar lines, we might consider directly rewarding car free households in recognition of their role in keeping alternatives to the private car viable, perhaps through a monthly lottery for which only car-free households are eligible.
[I have to say that Chris disagreed with me on that. He said that make being car-free or car-lite seem some kind of sacrifice that you have to sort of be compensated for, whereas he wanted to argue that it has inherent advantages.]
There are many possibilities. But I would now like to focus on just two policy efforts that I believe have strong potential or a good claim to be choice enhancing.
The first is parking policy reforms that build on the proposals of Donald Shoup. Such reforms should work in a gradual choice-enabling way to make investments in parking face more of a market test. This should allow a gradual decline in the massive oversupply of parking that currently exists in many places. It would make parking more expensive in precisely the places where alternatives are richest. It would also provide a boost for 'metered access to shared cars', which are thrifty on parking space per person served.
The second promising agenda is reform of mobility-service industry structures and regulatory frameworks in order to foster "combined mobility" [as it is called by UITP and called mobility as a service by various others], and thus boost the appeal, viability and integration of metered access to shared cars, transit and others. In order for an alternative package of mobility options to compete with car ownership successfully, each of its components needs to scale up and improve and, in addition, the package as a whole needs to become much more integrated so that it is attractive as a lifestyle choice.
In most places, such improvements are beyond the capacities of existing regulatory arrangements and industry structures. For example, in many cities, there are institutional barriers that inhibit cooperation between transit operators, taxi services, and car-sharing operators [and today, we could add ride-hailing, bike sharing and scooter-sharing operators]. Furthermore, today's vertically-integrated 'metered access to shared car' services may not lend themselves to scaling up. Existing car-share, taxi and car rental companies combine customer service information and dispatch and fleet operations and compete with other similarly vertically integrated operators. For the customers of one car-share company, access to the fleets of other companies is often difficult, expensive or nonexistent. This reduces the appeal of car sharing wherever there are competing operators, especially in low density areas.
So perhaps there is the case for a restructuring of MASC (metered access to shared cars) services to much more strongly encourage cross-fleet access. For example, this could be achieved with an arrangement in which customers deal with a mobility retailer which has access to a common dispatch system, possibly government mandated, to enable easy access to the fleets of all competing fleet operators. Such an arrangement creates a new layer of "mobility retailers" or "mobility brokers" in the industry structure.
[So here I was talking about what we now refer to as combined mobility or mobility-as-a-service. Many of these same issues are important even now in 2019, with the same dilemmas, perhaps in slightly different form. So it's interesting to look back to 2011 and what I was talking about here.]
So these mobility retailers or mobility brokers would handle the retailing, marketing and information end of your mobility needs but would leave vehicle operations to fleet operators, which would probably be separate companies. Eventually, each city might have several mobility retailers in competition with each other. However, unlike the competition by today's car-share companies, such competition would not limit your access to the whole range of mobility services.
Such data-intensive mobility retailing companies have only recently become a much more realistic possibility, for reasons that include advances in telematics and real-time urban mobility data sharing, the rise of smartphones, and the emergence of new social network-based spatial mobility services such as ride sharing, and peer-to-peer car sharing. To reach such a scenario may not happen spontaneously, however, it may require some modest government assistance or regulation to achieve the transition.
We can also find cause for cautious optimism about such change by noting that there are already some places where a car-lite or car-free lifestyle is chosen freely by significant numbers of affluent people who can clearly afford to own cars. Examples include the inner cities are various metropolises such as Paris, Tokyo, New York City, Hong Kong, Berlin and many others.
A shift away from mass car ownership for places that are currently strongly car-dependent is much less easy to imagine. Metered access to shared cars may need to play a much more central role in the transformation of more automobile dependent places then in the inner cities. This is because these areas will still have trouble being served well by non-car modes. As mentioned earlier, peer-to-peer car sharing and other as yet untested ideas, such as Chris Bradshaw's proposal for "two-station car-sharing", with some cars having a pod in residential areas at night and a pod in an employment district during the day, may help extend the appeal of metered access to shared cars into suburban contexts. [So by the way, there's an example of Chris Bradshaw's interesting, imaginative and visionary thinking he was a really was an ideas person.] Nevertheless, this will be a challenge since the current niche for metered access to shared cars is in the dense mixed use areas.
[In 2019, this problem is still here. And despite the greatly enriched alternatives, it's still a problem that the alternatives to having your own car, you know, in a suburban automobile dependent area are still considered not good enough by most car owners.]
For newly militarizing parts of the world. Mass uptake of metered access to shared cars may be able to offer governments an attractive solution to the politics of disappointment over mobility aspirations. If continued mass motorization is snatched away, even if only by circumstances, upwardly mobile, people will need to be offered a quality alternative to the cars that they had dreamed of owning.
[This is relevant to what's happening in Singapore actually. And you may have listened to my episode about the 'Singapore story - warts and all'.]
[So that's where I ended. It was an optimistic and hopeful ending. The scenario I discussed hasn't happened yet. I'm still hoping! Do you think it can happen? What did I miss?
As I said, this was also a tribute to Chris Bradshaw. We miss you Chris.]
Avent (2011) The Gated City (Amazon Kindle Single).
Barter, P. (2008) ‘Car Possession as Problematic for Urban Travel Markets’, in Meschik, M. and G. Sammer (eds.) Symposium Proceedings 4th International Symposium on Travel Demand Management “Visions, Concepts and Experiences of Travel Demand Management”, 16-18 July, Vienna-Semmering, Austria. pp. 41-50.
Bradshaw, C. (2007). How Carsharing Can Reduce the ‘Drive to Drive’ and Improve Walkability. Presented at the Walk21 8th Annual International Conference on Walking and Liveable Communities, Toronto, Canada 1-4 October 2007.
Grush, B. (2010) Creating a market for road user charging, Grush Hour blog, 28 December 2010, http://grushhour.blogspot.com/2010/12/creating-market-for-road-user-charging.html
Levine, J. (2006) Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future).
Lewyn, M.E. (2007) Five Myths About Sprawl, Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 23 (Spring), pp. 81-106.
Monheim, R. (2003). Visions for city traffic and mobility, in Tolley, R. (ed.) Sustainable Transport: Planning for walking and cycling in urban environments. Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, 84-96.
That's the focus of this article and podcast episode (Reinventing Transport #11).
It is based on an essay I wrote in 2011 (but unfortunately never published). I speculated about a future dominated by "shared" modes of transport and with much less personal possession of motor vehicles. I was overly optimistic in places and likely wrong on various points. But I hope I was wrong in thought-provoking ways. I think this is still relevant 8 years later to ideas like Mobility as a Service and initiatives such as the "Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities" and the New Urban Mobility (NUMO) alliance. But you be the judge.
This edition is also a tribute to Chris Bradshaw.
Chris Bradshaw was the person who asked me to write the essay on ending mass car ownership. It was for a journal special edition he was editing which later fell through, unfortunately.The title of Chris' introductory essay gives you an idea of the focus: "Making do with fewer cars using Metered Access to Shared Cars (MASC) to avoid the coming global car population explosion". It also hints at his independent mindedness.
Knowing his flair for interesting transport policy ideas, I actually emailed him in August 2018 to ask him on to this podcast! Chris replied promptly but he said that he was extremely unwell. It was a rare kind of cancer. He was hopeful surgery would help and said that being on the podcast would be a good thing to do as he recovered. So I wished him well and made a note to get back to him later. I followed up later in the year, but I got no answer.
Sadly, when I searched I found that Chris died on 3 November 2018 at the age of 74.
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Images via
http://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/christopher-j-bradshaw-1071252228
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Chris was a Community Relations Officer in the planning department at the regional municipality of Ottawa Carleton in Canada.
But I knew him for his wider policy engagements. He was co-founder of Ottawalk, an example of that rare beast - an active pedestrian advocacy group - as well as co-founder of Pednet, North America's first pedestrian rights coalition. He was also a co-founder of Ottawa's first car-sharing business and had a long-time interest in car-lite urban transport alternatives. Chris was also an active and generous participant in various online discussions on urban transport throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
I always found Chris a great inspiration. For a taste of his idea-filled writings, see his blog. Here is a 2014 video of Chris talking about his activities in Ottawa.
My essay: "Could mass car ownership melt away without draconian policies?"
[I share most of the 2011 essay below. I will also make some new comments, since much has changed since I wrote it. Many of the ideas below build on a conference paper I wrote in 2008, which you can find here (pdf). Here goes.]In the introductory essay in this volume, Chris Bradshaw suggests that his vision of mass uptake of "metered access to shared cars" should arrive organically, since the heavy hand of government would provoke public resentment and resistance.
Is such an organic transition realistic? Could a mass shift away from private motor vehicle ownership happen without draconian and unpopular impositions by policymakers?
Although the scenario discussed in this volume may seem at first far fetched, I will argue that it is much more than mere wild speculation.
Plausible social, economic, and business trends may indeed provide a significant push in the right direction. A policy push is almost certainly also necessary but it may not need to be heavy handed or involve the trampling of individual choice.
Some of this push can come from other policy agendas pursued for reasons that have nothing to do with car ownership or metered access to shared cars. But some impetus will come from explicitly aiming to escape automobile dependence and promoting the rise of alternatives. I will argue that these do not need to be unacceptably interventionist. A policy push to help us escape the trap of car dependence would also arguably be enhancing of personal choice rather than restricting freedom.
The Shift We are Talking About
Before proceeding to discuss how it might come about, I would first like to be a little more explicit about the shift that I envisage.It is broadly in line with the vision explained by Chris Bradshaw in the introductory essay of this volume [and sadly never published]. It involves the emergence of an attractive alternative to the car-owning lifestyle. This alternative would be centered on an integrated package of mobility options. This package includes transit but goes far beyond it to include ubiquitous metered access to shared cars (MASC) among others.
It is a shift in lifestyles and not merely a change in day-to-day mobility choices. It involves a gradual but significant shift in how excellent mobility is obtained and framed so that, eventually, most people see excellent mobility as best achieved via access to a rich integrated tapestry of services, including cars, mostly accessed on a shared and or fee for service basis rather than via mass individual ownership.
[Back to 2019 and clearly lots of people have been thinking along these lines since 2011 such as Robin Chase and the founders of MaaS Global (mobility as a service) among others. I was by no means the first. See below.]
For highly motorized societies, this will mean a reduction in the number of private motor vehicles. For newly motorizing societies, it means a shift in trend lines, but may still involve some increasing car and motorcycle numbers.
Privately owned cars will probably still play a role for certain groups of people and for rural dwellers. However, such cars would no longer be the majority method for achieving excellent ability. This vision will make our relationships with cars more "provisional" and less "compulsory".
[The word "provisional" appeals to me as a way to capture the goal of making cars seem less compulsory for people.]
It is not a completely new vision, and a number of other authors have discussed something like it for more than a decade. Most of them inspired by the notion of ambitious, scaled up car sharing. Examples include OECD (1997), Adams (1997), Monheim (2003), Topp (2006) and Bradshaw (2007). [There is a list of references at the end of this article.]
The next few sections focus on the central question of the essay: is an organic shift away from mass car ownership plausible without draconian government action?
[Keep reading below]
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Reasons to be skeptical
I first need to acknowledge that there are indeed formidable obstacles to the scenario. In many places, especially in North America, mass car ownership seems very deeply entrenched. Furthermore, many places that do not yet have mass car ownership seem set on a trajectory towards it. If we look at car ownership trends across many countries, a future with much lower levels of car ownership would, at first glance, seem unlikely except as a distant possibility.Mass private ownership of cars involves self reinforcing processes that tend to make car dependence become ever more entrenched. The process of accommodating large numbers of cars and facilitating their use has a path dependent character involving profound changes to transport infrastructure, the built form at several scales, streetscapes, urban regulations, the organization of relevant professions and various social norms and expectations. High use and ownership of cars can often be said to be "locked in", so that no easy reversal of these changes is possible. This situation has been labeled automobile dependence.
Even in countries that don't yet have high levels of car ownership, many of the trends all seem in the wrong direction. There have been many efforts to stand up against the trend, but successes have been few.
Car dependence also has a grip at the household and individual level. For many people around the world, who have voluntarily locked themselves into car oriented lifestyles, their past choices such as home location have undermined their subsequent ability to use alternatives to cars. This contributes to the political difficulty of reducing automobile dependence. Car owners often come to see their car use as almost compulsory.
So, many readers may therefore be skeptical of the potential for 'metered access to shared cars' becoming a central part of an attractive alternative to car ownership for the masses. After all, car sharing now seems to serve a rather small niche. There are also formidable obstacles to having taxis play a stronger role in many cities, too many of which are trapped in a broken regulatory framework that caps taxi numbers and turns taxi licenses into a tradeable asset.
[Of course, this was before the rise of ride hailing (or ride sourcing) services such as Uber, Grab, Ola, Didi, Lyft, etc, etc. And of course, 2011 was long before people were thinking about scenarios around automated vehicles such as Robin Chase's, 'heaven' or 'hell' scenarios; the hell scenario being the privately-owned AV scenario and the heaven scenario being a scenario in which autonomous cars and autonomous transit vehicles are predominantly public or shared vehicles. This actually dovetails with some other scenarios in this essay, even though I hadn't dreamed of that possibility at that point.]
Transit systems in many cities are also structured and regulated in ways that inhibit innovation and the ability to rise to the occasion even if car ownership were somehow to decline. Clearly, there is nothing inevitable about Bradshaw's scenario. Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss the possibility.
The rest of this essay offers perspectives that make change seem more plausible, perhaps even likely.
Wider forces that might push us towards car lite mobility scenarios
This section considers wider forces for radical change that originate beyond the transport system but which could open market-based pathways for change in urban mobility without public policy playing a major role. The next section will then discuss policy agendas to reduce mass car ownership, and yet still avoid being seen as draconian.Wider forces beyond the urban transport arena, which do not involve policy activism include disruptive changes in technology, in business and in the economy. For example, a decade or more of deleveraging and deflation in the rich economies might make car ownership less affordable. [Well, that hasn't happened! There has been deflation and deleveraging, but there's been a boom in loans for car ownership.] A period with sustained high fuel and commodity prices is another possibility. [And again, that hasn't happened.]
Simultaneously, a number of technological changes in business innovations may be poised to disrupt mobility systems and to enhance the capacity to respond to the pressures just mentioned. Continuing innovation in mobile communications and computing devices, smartphones, telematics and in social media are already threatening to disrupt numerous areas of business in inherently unpredictable directions. [So this was just before the huge rise in apps and services via those apps.]
One such wave of innovation is especially relevant. This is the trend towards collaborative consumption and the closely related idea of a shift from products to services (Prettenthaler and Steininger,1999).
Numerous new and transformed urban mobility services are prominent examples of this shift. They are beginning to weaken the perceived link between car use and car possession.
[I tend to use the word 'possession' rather than ownership to take account of things like people who have a company car at home. They don't own it, but they possess it. And it for all intents and purposes, all of the behavioral issues are just like having your own car.]
And these trends are enhancing the prospects for developing an attractive and comprehensive alternative to having one's own car. Examples include car sharing, bicycle sharing, ride sharing, integration of public transport and its marketing, and integrated mobility packages, car free housing, parking unbundling, new pricing technologies, advances in vehicle telematics and the emergence of transport information services delivered via apps on mobile devices. These latter initiatives may multiply the power of these various services by integrating them and unleashing network economies and complementarities for both users and providers.
[So you can see that there was a bit of excitement at that time. Many of us could see change coming, but we couldn't see exactly what changes were coming.]
The theme of this volume taps into this zeitgeist by proposing the mass uptake of metered access to shared cars, which would represent a dramatic scaling up of collaborative consumption in the urban transport arena. The buzz around this collaborative consumption shift suggests to many that it may be possible to make alternatives to ownership sufficiently convenient and compelling that a massive shift away from car ownership could indeed occur organically, without government compulsion. It certainly seems possible that further innovation may make alternative mobility packages [in other words, mobility-as-a-service kind of packages] more and more attractive. Possible examples include the peer-to-peer, one-way and floating car-share innovations. Such improvements might further expand the range of contexts in which the car owning lifestyle faces as a serious competitor. I'll return to this topic later when I consider possible explicit government efforts to accelerate the process.
[As it turned out, the car sharing scene has been growing, but it hasn't been explosive. Much more significant has been the rise of ride hailing, for example, and more recently, micro mobility shared services like dockless bike share boom and bust and now dockless scooter share, none of which was on the horizon at that point in 2011.]
Policies to melt automobile dependence without being heavy handed
Now, let's turn to policy. This section considers if policy might also assist the shift, but without being seen as too draconian.This may seem difficult as experience tells us. Car-dependent households see policies that threaten their car use and especially their car ownership as unreasonable, since they often perceive much of their car use as compulsory and without palatable alternatives. Nevertheless, this section seeks to highlight several ways in which policy might be able to help melt car dependence and reduce the attractions of mass car ownership without provoking too strong a backlash.
Some of these will be pursued for reasons that have little to do with our scenario, but which may nevertheless further it. Some will make the melting of automobile dependence the explicit goal.
Policies pursued for other reasons
One possibility is that policies that gain support for other reasons might inadvertently also help erode automobile dependence. Important arenas for such policies outside of urban transport policy include climate change policy and energy policy. Plausible reforms in these areas could strongly reshape incentives in urban mobility systems. For example, by increasing the cost of fuel.Urban planning reforms aimed at various objectives, including public health, affordable housing, as well as energy and climate change, among others, may also be able to help erode the grip of automobile dependent assumptions and regulations. Some of these also appear to be gathering momentum. The relevant urban planning reforms include reform of parking requirements, reforms to rigidly-segregated low-density zoning practice, transit-oriented development efforts and suburban retrofits to intensify suburban sub-centers and strip malls.
[In retrospect, yes, various of these reforms are happening in various places, but all too slowly for many of us.]
There are also several transport policy agendas that could assist the shift away from car ownership, even if pursued for other reasons. An enhanced environment for walking and cycling is being pursued in many places for various reasons, including public health and safety, clean air, livable streets, and enhanced accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities. Momentum is also gathering for reform of road cost recovery policies for reasons that are unrelated to automobile dependence. These reasons include declining fuel tax receipts, local government financial strains, technological opportunities in telematics for road pricing, among others. Cost recovery reform could potentially have a profound impact.
[I think I still agree with all of that. But it still is not happening very widely just yet.]
I have suggested that if the efforts mentioned above are pursued for the sake of goals that have widespread support, their inadvertent impact on the attractiveness of car ownership may provoke less resistance than an explicit policy effort would. However, this may not always be enough. The fact that these policies target car ownership and usage only indirectly does not necessarily save them from the resistance associated with the politics of automobile dependence and the defense of cheap motoring by people who feel they lack alternatives.
Therefore, before discussing more policy positive possibilities, I would like to take a detour to argue that challenging automobile dependence more directly may be getting easier politically. Perhaps we need not shy away from further direct assaults on it.
Undermining the market credentials of automobile dependence
Many of the arguments both for and against action to erode car dependent make the assumption that these arrangements are primarily a market outcome, and the efforts against them must involve government constraints on individual freedom. This assumption is increasingly being disputed.In fact, evidence is mounting that much of the edifice of automobile dependence that supports mess car ownership was created, and is kept in place only with the support of an extremely heavy hand from government, especially at the local level. So for example, Jonathan Levine, Michael Lewyn and Ryan Avent, among others, highlight that it is zoning, not market preferences that mostly reinforces low density sprawl in North America. Donald Shoup and others have also highlighted that excessive and mostly free parking arises primarily from parking requirement regulations (and other parking regulations). Similar regulatory forces prompt oversupply of parking in many countries. Many countries also have tax incentives or exemptions that favor low density greenfield development. And of course subsidized road investments that focus on easing congestion with capacity increases tend to promote sprawling development.
[This idea that car dependency is not a market phenomenon is perhaps more widely known now than it was in 2011. So I probably wouldn't need to labor that point so much if I was writing this essay now. Or maybe I do?]
Furthermore, lock-in to automobile dependent patterns itself often limits choices rather than expanding them. The era in which car-centric policy expanded individual choice is long gone for most countries. Policies that lock us deeper into car dependence have the effect of stifling choice and making cars ever more compulsory. Automobile dependence at several scales restricts the housing, neighborhood and travel choices of individuals and households. This choice reduction is real, even if it initially arose voluntarily, as individual decisions or via collective political agreements by communities, especially local governments.
Car ownership itself can be argued to create distortion in the market of day-to-day travel, especially with cost structures dominated by fixed costs. It inhibits subsequent travel choice-making to entrench over use. [See here (PDF) for more on this idea of car possession causing distortion or "rigidities" in trip choice-making.]
This will sound odd if you think of car ownership as the normal way to achieve high mobility. But it makes more sense if we compare car ownership with the benchmark of a car-lite lifestyle with excellent comprehensive multimodal mobility and with access to car-based mobility on a fee-for-service basis. This arrangement prompts users to make many more active decisions about which mode to use for which trips.
[In other words, we can only see car ownership causes distortions in people's travel choices and behavior when we compare with an alternative in which people can also choose cars if they want, but in which they are not faced with distortions causes by ownership or possession themselves. They don't own their own car, they don't possess the car, so their traveling choices are not distorted by that particular feature.]
Arguably, a shift away from mass car ownership could open up options that are otherwise cut off by the lock-in of automobile dependence. This perspective also suggests that lock-in to automobile dependence may not be as robust as it has seemed. If it is propped up more by regulation than by market preferences, then perhaps it is vulnerable to reforms to those regulations.
This also opens the possibility that the active promotion of a shift towards mass 'metered access to shared cars' and of the melting of automobile dependence could come to be seen as a way of enhancing choices and of reducing not increasing onerous impositions by government. [I guess I'm making something like a market urbanism pitch here.] Making auto dependent structures face a market test is not coercion. It would allow market processes to open up richer choices and make it easier for everyone to express and realize their preferences.
Choice enhancing policy nudges to escape car dependence
So far in this essay, I have argued that major changes in the economy, the business world and the broad policy context for urban mobility services may be able to help a shift away from mass car ownership towards a "MASC" centered set of alternatives (metered access to shared cars - MASC). The choice destroying phenomenon of automobile dependence stands in the way. The grip of automobile dependent trends may not be as tight as we have assumed because it is propped up by out-of-date regulations that can be repealed, much more than by market preferences. Efforts to undermine automobile dependence should be seen as choice enhancing.This section therefore focuses on policy possibilities that aim to facilitate, although not force, a melting of car dependence and a shift to car lite lifestyles. The emphasis is on policy approaches that offer some hope of being effective, yet politically palatable and avoid being heavy handed. Many such agendas are already being pursued of course. Here are a few examples.
[You be the judge of whether I was/am realistic here.]
Most jurisdictions could easily identify and or moderate subsidies and regulations that promote automobile dependence, yet have little clear benefit and narrow support. This would not eliminate culprits that still have widespread support such as systematic underpricing of cars and car-oriented zoning. But it would be a start. We also need a stronger push to bring telematics-based services such as pay-as-you-go insurance to the vehicle fleet as a key pathway to accelerate the shift to distance-based road charging (Grush, 2010). Bradshaw points out in this volume that such road user charging can be a key nudge towards 'metered access to shared cars' by shifting fixed to variable costs.
There may also be a case to deliberately set road user charges for personal household vehicles at a slightly higher rate than for 'metered access to shared car' vehicles in order to explicitly focus attention on the distortion of traffic behavior inherent in personal possession of a vehicle. Along similar lines, we might consider directly rewarding car free households in recognition of their role in keeping alternatives to the private car viable, perhaps through a monthly lottery for which only car-free households are eligible.
[I have to say that Chris disagreed with me on that. He said that make being car-free or car-lite seem some kind of sacrifice that you have to sort of be compensated for, whereas he wanted to argue that it has inherent advantages.]
There are many possibilities. But I would now like to focus on just two policy efforts that I believe have strong potential or a good claim to be choice enhancing.
The first is parking policy reforms that build on the proposals of Donald Shoup. Such reforms should work in a gradual choice-enabling way to make investments in parking face more of a market test. This should allow a gradual decline in the massive oversupply of parking that currently exists in many places. It would make parking more expensive in precisely the places where alternatives are richest. It would also provide a boost for 'metered access to shared cars', which are thrifty on parking space per person served.
The second promising agenda is reform of mobility-service industry structures and regulatory frameworks in order to foster "combined mobility" [as it is called by UITP and called mobility as a service by various others], and thus boost the appeal, viability and integration of metered access to shared cars, transit and others. In order for an alternative package of mobility options to compete with car ownership successfully, each of its components needs to scale up and improve and, in addition, the package as a whole needs to become much more integrated so that it is attractive as a lifestyle choice.
In most places, such improvements are beyond the capacities of existing regulatory arrangements and industry structures. For example, in many cities, there are institutional barriers that inhibit cooperation between transit operators, taxi services, and car-sharing operators [and today, we could add ride-hailing, bike sharing and scooter-sharing operators]. Furthermore, today's vertically-integrated 'metered access to shared car' services may not lend themselves to scaling up. Existing car-share, taxi and car rental companies combine customer service information and dispatch and fleet operations and compete with other similarly vertically integrated operators. For the customers of one car-share company, access to the fleets of other companies is often difficult, expensive or nonexistent. This reduces the appeal of car sharing wherever there are competing operators, especially in low density areas.
So perhaps there is the case for a restructuring of MASC (metered access to shared cars) services to much more strongly encourage cross-fleet access. For example, this could be achieved with an arrangement in which customers deal with a mobility retailer which has access to a common dispatch system, possibly government mandated, to enable easy access to the fleets of all competing fleet operators. Such an arrangement creates a new layer of "mobility retailers" or "mobility brokers" in the industry structure.
[So here I was talking about what we now refer to as combined mobility or mobility-as-a-service. Many of these same issues are important even now in 2019, with the same dilemmas, perhaps in slightly different form. So it's interesting to look back to 2011 and what I was talking about here.]
So these mobility retailers or mobility brokers would handle the retailing, marketing and information end of your mobility needs but would leave vehicle operations to fleet operators, which would probably be separate companies. Eventually, each city might have several mobility retailers in competition with each other. However, unlike the competition by today's car-share companies, such competition would not limit your access to the whole range of mobility services.
Such data-intensive mobility retailing companies have only recently become a much more realistic possibility, for reasons that include advances in telematics and real-time urban mobility data sharing, the rise of smartphones, and the emergence of new social network-based spatial mobility services such as ride sharing, and peer-to-peer car sharing. To reach such a scenario may not happen spontaneously, however, it may require some modest government assistance or regulation to achieve the transition.
Possible tipping points and synergies in the melting away automobile dependence and mass car ownership
Possible threshold effects and synergies may provide some further hope that our scenario for change may become possible without draconian policy impositions. For example, many of the alternatives to private cars, including 'metered access to shared cars' have network economies. Their convenience and attractiveness may increase dramatically if they can become sufficiently ubiquitous. There's also a political dimension to this threshold idea. Once the various alternatives to private car ownership reach a critical mass, it becomes more difficult to claim that cars are necessary when objecting to policies that resist auto dependent. Ubiquitous 'metered access to shared cars' especially undermines such claims. Since even if you need to drive sometimes you don't necessarily need to have your own car to do so. 'Metered access to shared cars' may also help erode the value of cars as positional goods that signal high status.We can also find cause for cautious optimism about such change by noting that there are already some places where a car-lite or car-free lifestyle is chosen freely by significant numbers of affluent people who can clearly afford to own cars. Examples include the inner cities are various metropolises such as Paris, Tokyo, New York City, Hong Kong, Berlin and many others.
A shift away from mass car ownership for places that are currently strongly car-dependent is much less easy to imagine. Metered access to shared cars may need to play a much more central role in the transformation of more automobile dependent places then in the inner cities. This is because these areas will still have trouble being served well by non-car modes. As mentioned earlier, peer-to-peer car sharing and other as yet untested ideas, such as Chris Bradshaw's proposal for "two-station car-sharing", with some cars having a pod in residential areas at night and a pod in an employment district during the day, may help extend the appeal of metered access to shared cars into suburban contexts. [So by the way, there's an example of Chris Bradshaw's interesting, imaginative and visionary thinking he was a really was an ideas person.] Nevertheless, this will be a challenge since the current niche for metered access to shared cars is in the dense mixed use areas.
[In 2019, this problem is still here. And despite the greatly enriched alternatives, it's still a problem that the alternatives to having your own car, you know, in a suburban automobile dependent area are still considered not good enough by most car owners.]
For newly militarizing parts of the world. Mass uptake of metered access to shared cars may be able to offer governments an attractive solution to the politics of disappointment over mobility aspirations. If continued mass motorization is snatched away, even if only by circumstances, upwardly mobile, people will need to be offered a quality alternative to the cars that they had dreamed of owning.
[This is relevant to what's happening in Singapore actually. And you may have listened to my episode about the 'Singapore story - warts and all'.]
Conclusion
In conclusion, even if some of the arguments here are necessarily speculative, they strongly suggest that a shift away from mass car ownership should not be hastily dismissed as a fantasy. An easily-imagined set of external trends, wider policy agendas and explicitly pro 'metered access to shared car' policies may make such an apparently implausible scenario possible.[So that's where I ended. It was an optimistic and hopeful ending. The scenario I discussed hasn't happened yet. I'm still hoping! Do you think it can happen? What did I miss?
As I said, this was also a tribute to Chris Bradshaw. We miss you Chris.]
Here are some of the references mentioned above:
Adams, J. (1997) Alternative policies for reducing dependence on the car, in R. Tolley (ed.), The Greening of Urban Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Western Cities. John Wiley & Sons, London, 239-250.Avent (2011) The Gated City (Amazon Kindle Single).
Bradshaw, C. (2007). How Carsharing Can Reduce the ‘Drive to Drive’ and Improve Walkability. Presented at the Walk21 8th Annual International Conference on Walking and Liveable Communities, Toronto, Canada 1-4 October 2007.
Grush, B. (2010) Creating a market for road user charging, Grush Hour blog, 28 December 2010, http://grushhour.blogspot.com/2010/12/creating-market-for-road-user-charging.html
Levine, J. (2006) Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future).
Lewyn, M.E. (2007) Five Myths About Sprawl, Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 23 (Spring), pp. 81-106.
Monheim, R. (2003). Visions for city traffic and mobility, in Tolley, R. (ed.) Sustainable Transport: Planning for walking and cycling in urban environments. Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, 84-96.
OECD (1997). Sustainable consumption and individual travel behavior: Report of the OECD Policy Meeting. Paris, 9-10 January 1997. OCDE/GD(97)144OECD. Organization for Economic Co–Operation and Development, Paris.
Prettenthaler, F. E. and K. W. Steininger (1999). From ownership to service use lifestyle: the potential of car sharing, Ecological Economics, 28, 443–453
Shoup, D. (2005). The High Cost of Free Parking. Planners Press, Chicago.
Topp, H. H. (2006). Trends, innovative course settings and levers for mobility & transport: Seen from the year 2030, World Transport Policy & Practice, 13 (1), 18-30.
UITP (2011) Becoming a real mobility provider (Combined Mobility: public transport in synergy with other modes like car-sharing, taxi and cycling), UITP position paper, April 2011, International Union of Public Transport (UITP), via http://www.uitp.org/mos/focus/FPComMob-en.pdf.
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