In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.
“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”
He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.
The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.
Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.
Here in Great Britain, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21. The cost of all accidents, including an estimate of those not reported to the police, was around £28.4bn in 2020, or around 16% of the current NHS budget. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.
But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.
The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.
From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.
Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.
In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.
It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.
The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.
• This article was amended on 2 September 2022 to clarify details about the cost of road accidents. The 2020/21 figures for fatalities or serious injuries were for Great Britain, not the UK. The cost cited was for not just these types of accidents, but all accidents. And the original cost cited was for 2016; this has been updated to the 2020 figure to provide a more direct comparison with the accident figures, and the NHS budget comparison has been amended accordingly.
John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor
