The future of automobile society: a socio-technical transitions perspective

Abstract

Automobile society has been triumphant for a century. While this success is often ascribed to entrepreneurial tenacity and indefatigable demand, it is more correctly credited to auspicious political, economic and cultural trends. The macro-scale factors responsible for the entrenchment of automobility in developed countries are now moving in reverse direction. A socio-technical transitions perspective emphasises how declining industrial influence, stagnating wages, growing income inequality, increasing vehicle operating costs and changing sociodemographics are now undermining the foundations of automobile society. Three expressions of this process are considered: claims that transport planners are engaged in a ‘war’ against the automobile, emergent evidence that vehicle use is reaching saturation (the so-called ‘peak car’ phenomenon) and apparent disinclination of youth to embrace automobile-oriented lifestyles. Although these developments suggest some instability in the socio-technical system, the lock-in of key features and the paucity of practicable alternatives suggest that declarations of a pending transition are premature.

Keywords:

• mobility futures
• transition management
• Generation Y
• Net Generation
• smartphone
• iPhone
• demotorisation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their cogent comments on a prior version of this article.

Notes

Early entrenchment of the automobile is partly (and ironically) attributable to the support it received from proto-sustainability advocates in the field of public health. Reform-minded sanitary professionals championed the car during the early years of the twentieth century because it promised to make horses for urban transport obsolete. It was, of course, at the time unthinkable that in due course households would outfit themselves with two and more vehicles.

The personal car has also served as an important source of public revenue through the collection of vehicle and gasoline taxes and other licensing and operational fees. In short, numerous political and economic stakeholders have had an interest in an expanding system of automobility.

The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman (2011), recently captured the changing situation in the following terms: ‘All around the world, highways are being torn down and waterfronts reclaimed; decades of thinking about cars and cities reversed; new public spaces created’.

This is not to say that the automobile has not over the years attracted critics motivated by pollution, safety, or other harms, but they were typically seen as malcontents who failed to adequately appreciate the benefits of automobility. See Ladd (2008) for a comprehensive account.

The advent of battery-electric vehicles and the longer-range commercial potential of hydrogen-fuel cells both represent highly partial interventions for addressing the range of problems that beset the automobile.

I have elsewhere detailed the political use of military metaphors in public policy controversies (Cohen 2009b).

An early salvo was launched by the American political commentator B. Bruce-Briggs in a 1973 book entitled The War Against the Automobile. The volume was a response to publications such as Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (published in 1965), as well as more belligerently titled writings such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1966 essay ‘The War Against the Automobile’ (The Public Interest) and Lewis Mumford's article ‘The American Way of Death’ (New York Review of Books) from the same year.

The warrant of this distinction is largely unfounded. Let me take myself as an example. I own a car (actually two) and normally use it on a daily basis. I also walk, run, bicycle and use public transit. Sometimes the car is useful and sometimes it is not. I am grateful for not having to rely on it for all trips. Strategies to divide the world into pro- and anti-automobile coalitions may be polemically powerful, but they are ultimately based on artificial distinctions.

De Place (2011) provides a useful media analysis of the Toronto and Seattle cases. See Shaer (2011) on the New York City situation where an alleged ‘bike-lane war’ has been taking place.

Cox is a transport policy consultant who previously served on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and several federal committees and working groups. He is associated with a number of conservative think tanks and writes frequently about transport affairs for publications in the USA and UK. Cox drafted the document as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and it was published as a ‘special report’ by the Foundation.

Cox charged that the primary source for these observations was a ‘flawed’ report prepared for American Public Transportation Association by the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, a research and consultancy organisation based in British Columbia.

See Litman (2011) for a more comprehensive critique.

A November 2010 Harris Poll found that in the USA the automobile industry (along with oil, pharmaceuticals, health insurance, tobacco and telecommunications) was one of the least likely economic sectors to be thought of as honest and trustworthy. Only 8% of respondents answered the following question in the affirmative: ‘Which of these industries do you think are generally honest and trustworthy – so that you normally believe a statement by a company in that industry?’ For further details on the survey and its results, see http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/648/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/Default.aspx

The observation appears in Deloitte & Touche's 2009 report, ‘Gen-Y: America's Youth Weighs in on Making Cars Cool Again’, available at http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/automotive_gen_y_event_release_final1(1).pdf

For example, see Grist, Fast Company, The Daily Green, The Bellows, Felix Salmon, Autoblog and CleanMPG.

See Heinberg (2007) for a discussion of the more general concept of ‘peak everything’ and Goodall (2011) for a treatment of the related notion of ‘peak stuff’.

Millard-Ball and Schipper (2011) use the term ‘peak travel’ which captures a more diverse array of transport modes. It is also interesting to note that the peak car hypothesis has its own sage-like forerunner in the person of Denys Lawrence Munby (1919–1976), an Oxford-based transport economist who identified the peaks of several transport modes using an unprecedented dataset assembled over his career (Crabtree 2011).

A complementary (though not comparable) increase in non-motorised and public transport was noted for the same period.

According to Hartwell (2010), the experience of buying a car for many Gen Y-ers is tantamount to a visit to the dentist.

The author-poet Frederick Seidel (2011) recently considered the extent to which smartphones and similar devices are coming to replace motorcycles. He asks forlornly, ‘Are motorcycles passé? Are they sort of over? … The iPhone, 4S, the iPad 2, the 11-inch and 12-inch thin, light MacBook Air computers – these are the sleek gorgeousness young people go on about, have to have, and do have in the millions …. It's their operating speeds that thrill. Young people cut a bella figura on their electronic devices’ (italics in original).

Japan is likely the most prominent exemplar of this trend of declining interest in automobility among youth. The Japanese use the term kuruma banare – which translates roughly into ‘demotorisation’ – to describe this cultural shift (Kashiwagi 2008; Kageyama 2009).

See Sheller (2004) for detailed consideration of the persistence of automobile-oriented commitments.

For instance, Deloitte & Touche has been conducting an annual ‘Automotive Generation Y Survey’. The 2011 instalment is entitled ‘Gaining Speed: Gen Y in the Driver's Seat’. An indication of the magnitude of the research challenge is signalled by the report's observation that ‘what is most important to Gen Y has changed each year Deloitte has fielded this survey [3000 respondents in 2011]. In 2009, a premium was placed on safety. In 2010, more emphasis was devoted to value. According to 2011 survey results, “cockpit” technology and the shopping experience have emerged as the leading differentiators for Gen Y when considering and purchasing an automobile’.

The case of the UK provides an interesting contrasting example. In a joint statement issued in January 2011, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles announced removal of national planning restrictions established in 2001 requiring local councils to limit the number of parking spaces in new residential developments and to set high parking charges. The policy revision was prompted by a desire on the part of ‘the Government [to call] off Whitehall's war on the motorist by scrapping the national policy restricting residential parking spaces and instructing councils to push up charges’ (my italics). See http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localgovernment/2011/01/parking-space-limits-for-new-homes-and-higher-parking-charges-guidance-scrapped.html