Two sides of the same coin? Private car ownership in Sweden and Norway since 1950

Abstract

Norwegian private car density has lagged behind the Swedish and did not reach same national levels until the late 1980s, despite the same GDP per capita levels. Can both the time lag and the diffusion process be explained with national differences in income, institutions, infrastructure and population settlements? Or have regional differences in income and population density affected the outcome? The aim of this article is to compare car diffusion in Norway and Sweden in order to find explanations for the national and regional patterns of car diffusion. The conclusion is that car diffusion in Norway and Sweden displays two sides of same coin; the national levels converged, but the process did not follow the same regional pattern. Regional differences in income and population density have in general been a significant explanation for car density in Sweden, but not in Norway.

Notes

1. Bil Sweden, Bilismen i Sverige (Stockholm: BIL Sweden, 1961).

2. Knut Boge is comparing Danish, Swedish and Norwegian road policy in Knut Boge, ‘Votes Count but the Number of Seats Decides: A Comparative Historical Case Study of 20th Century Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Road Policy’ (diss., BI Norwegian School of Management, 2006). Although he takes into consideration other driving forces and prerequisites for car ownership besides road construction, the focus is on the decision making about infrastructure investments and not on the diffusion of private cars.

3. There are some comparative studies on transport policy (Thomas Pettersson, ‘Centre, Periphery and Institutional Path Dependence: Transport Subsidies in Sweden and Norway’, Journal of Transport History 27, no. 2 (2006): 80–96) and infrastructure patterns (Lena Andersson-Skog, ‘National Patterns and the Regulation of Railways and Telephony in the Nordic Countries up to 1950’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 48, no. 2 (2000): 30–46).

4. Boge, ‘Votes Count’; James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975; James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

5. Farideh Ramjerdi, Lars Rand, Inger-Anne Sætermo and Siv Ingebrigtsen, Car Ownership, Car Use and Demand for Alternative Fuel Vehicles, TØI Report 342/1996 (Oslo: Transport⊘konomist institutt, 1996); Lars Jacobsson, Bilprognos 1972–1985: Försäljning, skrotning och bestånd (Stockholm: Industriens utredningsinstitut, 1973).

6. As shown in, e.g., Rudi Volti, ‘Mass Motorisation in Spain’, Journal of Transport History 25, no. 2 (2006): 116–24; Rudi Volti, ‘A Car for the Great Asian Multitude’, Technology and Culture 49, no. 4 (2008): 995–1001.

7. See, e.g., Kenneth Asp and Olof Lundin, Public Transport in the Era of the Automobile, VTI Report 166A (Linköping: Statens väg-och transportforskningsinsitut, 1981); Jacobsson, Bilprognos 1972–1985; Lars Jacobsson, Personbilsmarknaden under 1980-talet (Stockholm: Sv. Handelsbanken, 1980); Jan Wallander, Studier i bilismens ekonomi (Stockholm: Industriens utredningsinstitut, 1958). In Per Lundin, Bilsamhället: Ideologi, expertis och regelskapande i efterkrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2008) and Per Lundin, 'American Numbers Copied! Shaping the Swedish Postwar Car Society’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 2, no. 3 (2004):303–37, the author shows how the early city planning and parking standard in Sweden took shape, and from where the ideas where imported. In Sverre Knutsen and Knut Boge, Norsk vegpolitik etter 1960 – Styckevis og delt? (Oslo: J.W. Cappelens Forlag AS, 2005), 128–31, 269–89, 361, the authors argues that the expansion of the main roads in the Oslo area during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in considerably less traffic and environmental problems. They conclude that earlier restrictions concerning parking and driving in the problem area in order to handle the traffic situation had a negative outcome (with, e.g., a decrease in commerce and industry in the area, and increased commuting).

8. Jacobsson, Bilprognos 1972–1985, 25–6, 53–4; Jacobsson, Personbilsmarknaden, 18–9; Lars Jacobsson, Personbilens framtid i Sverige: Kvantitativa prognoser för bestånd, försäljning och skrotning till år 2015 (Stockholm: Handelns utredningsinstitut, 1997), 16–7. See also Flink, The Car Culture; and Michael Berger, The Devil Wagon in God's Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979) for the diffusion pattern of automobility in the United States, where especially rural population settlement became an important factor early in the process.

9. Per Kågesson, Reducing CO2 Emissions from New Cars: A Progress Report on the Car Industry's Voluntary Agreement and an Assessment of the Need for Policy Instruments, (Brussels: European Federation for Transport and Environment, 2005); Per Kågesson, Varför är Sverige sämst i klassen? Den svenska fordonsflottan i ett europeiskt perspektiv, Vägverket Rapport 14 (Borlänge: Vägverket, 2004).

10. Boge, ‘Votes Count’; Per Østby, Flukten fra Detroit: Bilens integrasjon i det norske samfunnet (Trondheim: Univ. Senter for teknologi og samfunn, 1995).

11. Volti, ‘A Car for the Great Asian Multitude’.

12. Per Østby, ‘Educating the Norwegian Nation: Traffic Engineering and Technological Diffusion’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 2, no. 3 (2004): 247–72.

13. Boge, ‘Votes Count’, 128–31.

14. Bilismen i Sverige. Opplysningsrådet for Veitrafikken, Bil- og veistatistikk, Oslo, Opplysningsrådet for Veitraffiken.

15. Gustav Nielsen, ‘Kollisjonen mellom bilen og byen’, in Byens veier: Lokal transport og arealpolitik, ed. Andreas Hompland (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2001), 32. Gustav Nielsen is chief research planner at the Institute of Transport Economics (TØI).

16. In his dissertation ‘Votes Count’, Boge uses a similar periodization for a comparison of the road policy in Denmark, Norway and Sweden – namely, prior to 45, 1945–1959, 1960–1981 and 1981–2005.

17. Per Østby, Bilen i 1950-årene – omrisset av et teknologisk system?, STS Working Paper 11/89 (Trondheim: NTNU, Department of Interdisciplinary studies of culture, 1989), 22.

18. Per Østby, A Road to Modernity: Highway Planners as Agents for Social Transformations, STS Working Paper 8/90 (Trondheim: NTNU, Department of Interdisciplinary studies of culture, 1990), 2.

19. Ramjerdi et al., Car Ownership, 5.

20. Ola Honningdal Grytten and Magnus Lindmark, Currency Gifts, Convergence and Divergence in Two Neighbouring Economies (Bergen: NHH, Department of Economics, 2006), 17.

21. Honningdal Grytten and Lindmark, Currency Gifts.

22. Flink, The Car Culture, 33.

23. Per Østby, De gyldne årene – Massebilisme på 1960-tallet, STS Working Paper 10/90 (Trondheim: NTNU, Department of Interdisciplinary studies of culture, 1990), 3, 6.

24. Bilismen i Sverige 2001, 52.

25. Transportarbetets utveckling: Redovisning av tidsserier samt metoder för beräkning av transportarbetet, SIKA PM 2004:7.

26. Innenlandske transportytelser 1946–2001, Statistisk sentralbyrå 2003. The increase in air transportation in Sweden went from 0.3 billion passenger kilometres in 1965 to 3.6 in 2000, and from 0.3 to 4.4 in Norway. The railway transportation for the same years went from 5.3 to 8.3 in Sweden, and 1.6 to 2.8 in Norway.

27. Per Kågesson, Vilken framtid har bilen? En analys av vägtrafiken (Stockholm: SNS Förlag, 2007), 48–49.

28. Bilismen i Sverige 2001; John Thomasgaard and Lars Kjell Tomren, Firmabil og samfunns⊘konomi. En analyse av firmabilenes samfunns⊘konomiske betydning og virkninger av firmabilbeskatningen (Oslo: Handelsh⊘yskolen BI, 1993).

29. Østby, De gyldne årene, 11.

30. Kågesson, Vilken framtid har bilen? En analys av vägtrafiken, 292.

31. http://www.ssb.no/transport/.

32. Kågesson, Vilken framtid har bilen? En analys av vägtrafiken, 292.

33. Kågesson, Vilken framtid har bilen? En analys av vägtrafiken, 292.

34. Kågesson, Vilken framtid har bilen? En analys av vägtrafiken, 7.

35. Boge, ‘Votes Count’; Andersson-Skog, ‘National Patterns’.

36. Boge, ‘Votes Count’.

37. Østby, ‘Educating the Norwegian Nation’, 248.

38. Knutsen and Boge, Norsk vegpolitik etter 1960, 59.

39. Gunnar Falkemark, Politik, mobilitet och miljö: Om den historiska framväxten av ett ohållbart transportsystem (Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag, 2006).

40. Personbilpolitikk: Personbilen i norsk samferdsel, NOU 1984:6, 70.

41. The total cost for Norway was 5,895 NOK, and for Sweden 3,325 NOK (NOU 1984:6, 72).

42. NOU 1984:6, 79.

43. Kågesson, Varför är Sverige sämst i klassen?; NOU 1984:6.

44. Ramjerdi et al., Car Ownership, 51.

45. Jan Antonsson, Bilen och skatten: Reglerna från 2002 (Göteborg: Tholin & Larsson, 2002), 21.

46. Thomasgaard and Tomren, Firmabil og samfunns⊘konomi, 12.

47. Bilismen i Sverige 2001; Antonsson, Bilen och skatten, 23.

48. NOU 1984:6, 95; Thomasgaard and Tomren, Firmabil og samfunnsokonomi, 19.

49. NOU 1984:6; Eirik Wærness, Omfang og fordeling av firmabilordninger og andre naturalytelser, ECON Rapport 35/98 (Oslo: ECON Senter for Økonomisk analyse,1998), 17.

50. Asp and Lundin, Public Transport.

51. Statistisk Årsbok 2007; Statistisk Årbok 2006.

52. In 1950, the Norwegian population was 47% of the Swedish (3,280,296 to 7,041,829), and 49% in 1980 (4,092,340 to 8,317,937) (Statistisk Årsbok 2007; Statistisk Årbok 2006; http://www.ssb.no/aarbok/tab/tab-046.html).

53. Statistisk Årsbok 2007; http://www.ssb.no/areal/.

54. Lars Magnusson, Sveriges ekonomiska historia (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999), 434–7.

55. Østby, De gyldne årene, 5.

56. A ‘densely populated area’ is defined as a settlement with 200 inhabitants or more according to Statistisk Årsbok; and Andreas Hompland, ed., Byens veier: Lokal transport og arealpolitik (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2001), 145.

57. If indexed and 1950 = 100, Swedish urbanization 1950–2000 is 127 and Norwegian 148.

58. Jacobsson, Personbilens framtid i Sverige, 16–7.

59. ‘County’ in this article is used as an expression for both the Swedish län and the Norwegian fylke. The number of counties in Sweden was 25 in 1950 and 21 in 2005. In 1968, Stockholms län and Stockholms stad became Stockholms län. In 1996, Kristianstad and Malmöhus became Skåne and in 1997, Göteborg- och bohus, Älvsborg and Skaraborg became Västra götalands län. The number of counties in Norway was 20 in 1950, and 19 in 2005. In 1972, Bergen became a part of Hordaland.

60. Statistisk Årsbok.

61. Statistisk Årbok.

62. Knutsen and Boge, Norsk vegpolitik etter 1960, 30.

63. Boge, ‘Votes Counts’, 13.

64. Boge, ‘Votes Counts’.

65. Boge, ‘Votes Counts’, 12.

66. Boge, ‘Votes Counts’, 25.

67. Pearson correlation from the SPSS correlation matrix produced for Table 7.