Wheels come off an American romance

Is America beginning to fall out of love with the automobile, asks Geoffrey Lean.

By Geoffrey LeanPublished: 5:54PM GMT 01 Jan 2010
Is America beginning to fall out of love with the automobile? It is, as Zhou Enlai famously said about the consequences of the French Revolution, far too early to tell. But next week a new study will report that the number of US cars actually dropped last year, after a century of apparently unstoppable growth.
The Washington-based Earth Policy Institute – a small think tank with a knack of spotting new trends – will announce that the US passenger-vehicle fleet fell from 250 million to 246 million in 2009. Nothing on this scale has happened before; it stagnated in 1998 and fell slightly during the 1991 recession, but otherwise has been growing by an average of 3.69 million annually since 1960.

Is this just a blip, caused by deeper recession? Maybe. But Lester Brown, president of the institute, thinks something fundamental is happening, and that numbers will continue to fall throughout this decade.
One reason, he says, is "market saturation"; there are now five cars in the country for every four registered drivers. But he also cites rising fuel prices, increasing congestion, "mounting concerns about climate change" and "the declining interest in cars among young people who have grown up in cities".
Of course, any decline will be more than offset by increases elsewhere, especially in China and India. But a cultural shift in the country that is home to nearly a third of the world's vehicles would still prove a landmark