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Cars are the 20th century’s icons of economic progress. One way of distinguishing
developed and developing countries is by the number of cars people own.
In the US, every other person owns a car; in India, the figure is 1 in 500.
Cars have dictated transport policy worldwide for four decades but their
domination must end.

This is the conclusion of Britain’s leading transport researchers, who
met in London this week at a conference entitled ‘Transport and Society’.
They agreed that traffic congestion and environmental pollution, particularly
the car’s contribution to global warming, will get worse unless the design
and use of cars is more strictly controlled.

The conference was the culmination of a two-year research effort funded
by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, an independent charitable foundation that,
ironically, was set up to encourage road building and car use. According
to Phil Goodwin, director of transport studies at the University of Oxford
and a member of the government’s Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road
Assessment, a shake-up of priorities for transport research is essential.
But this will be possible only if policy makers heed the conference’s advice.

Goodwin says that the new consensus among transport researchers is a
direct result of the latest forecasts for traffic growth. The number of
cars on British roads increased from just over 2 million in 1951 to 18 million
in 1988. The Department of Transport predicts there will be an extra 25
million cars by 2025. This would give Britain more cars per head of population
than present-day Los Angeles, where exhaust emissions and the local climate
combine to make the city air as heavily polluted as almost any in the Western
world.

Besides being extremely hungry for space, the car is a major contributor
to global warming. Cars produce carbon dioxide, the single most important
greenhouse gas. In Britain, transport accounted for about 22 per cent of
the carbon dioxide produced in 1988, with cars responsible for half this
amount. In countries belonging to the OECD, transport contributed nearly
one-third of the carbon dioxide produced; in China, however, transport contributed
less than 5 per cent.

The World Climate Conference in Toronto in 1988 recommended a reduction
in carbon dioxide emissions to 80 per cent of 1988 levels by 2005. While
most European governments have fallen into line, Britain pledged only to
stabilise the emissions at their 1990 level by 2005. As well as lacking
urgency and allowing an increase in emissions in the short term, even this
pledge looks unachievable in view of the rise forecast in traffic. The British
government insists that transport must play its part in curbing emissions
of carbon dioxide but, as Goodwin says, ‘the numbers do not add up’.

The government could do several things to curb carbon dioxide emissions
from vehicles. A strictly enforced reduction in the maximum speed limit
from 70 to 50 miles per hour would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 6 per
cent, says Earth Resources Research, an independent organisation based in
London, in a study that was part of the two-year project supported by the
Rees Jeffreys Road Fund.

Emissions would also drop if cars used less fuel. Changing from petrol
to diesel engines would reduce fuel consumption by 20 to 30 per cent, estimates
the Energy Technology Support Unit, a research company based in Harwell.
The ETSU also says that replacing geared transmission systems with continuously
variable ones, which automatically maintain the most efficient ratio of
engine speed to road speed, would reduce fuel consumption by 10 to 15 per
cent.

Following the oil crisis of the early 1970s, car manufacturers devoted
R&D resources to improving the fuel efficiency of their vehicles. This
seemed to pay off. Official petrol consumption figures, which measure the
efficiency of new cars under laboratory conditions, improved by 22 per cent
over the 10 years to 1988, when the benefits of the innovations halted.
But this improvement was not translated into comparable fuel efficiency
on the road, as Britain’s National Audit Office discovered, because motorists
were not keeping their cars well tuned. As a result, the vehicles used more
fuel and discharged more exhaust fumes than they should have done.

Two reports last year suggested that little has changed for the better.
The ETSU found that the amount of fuel used to move one person one kilometre
in a car had increased slightly since the 1950s. And a study by a motoring
organisation, the Royal Automobile Club, found that emissions of carbon
monoxide from nearly one out of every five cars are above the limit of the
standard due to be introduced in Britain in November for vehicles more than
three years old-a clear indication of how out of tune some cars are.

There is more pessimistic news from ERR. Even if cars incorporate every
fuel-saving measure-and some of the assumptions underlying the success of
the measures are optimistic-the increase in the number of vehicles will
ensure that the volume of carbon dioxide emissions from cars will not be
reduced significantly over the next 15 years. Thereafter, adds ERR, emissions
are likely to rise in line with the number of cars. ERR’s study also says
none of the alternative fuels will solve the problem. The director of ERR,
Malcolm Fergusson, says that the government could do some things immediately,
such as encouraging car manufacturers to display the fuel efficiency of
their vehicles more prominently. ‘But I don’t think the government can even
make the standstill on carbon dioxide work without radical measures, such
as a large increase in fuel tax.’

Without radical change, transport planners foresee enormous environmental
problems. In the past 40 years, the number of cars in the world has increased
tenfold to around 500 million. The potential for traffic growth in the developing
world remains enormous. If the rest of Asia were to achieve the same ratio
of cars to people as Japan, which is not high by Western standards, the
number of cars in the world would double.

In November 1989, the British government became a signatory to a radically
different kind of transport policy agreed by the European Council of Ministers
of Transport. The two-page declaration proposed to make car users pay for
the damage they do to the environment and ‘as a priority, a full range of
possible measures that can be taken to reduce transport’s contribution to
the greenhouse effect be set out together with the costs and practical problems
of implementing them’.

Britain’s Department of the Environment also made a distinct policy
shift. In its White Paper last year on the environment, This Common Heritage,
the department called for a change in policies to reduce the demand for
transport.

Reducing demand could be the key development. A flaw of official traffic
statistics is that they ignore the fact that new roads encourage more growth
even though this is ‘almost self-evident’, says Tony May, professor of transport
studies at the University of Leeds. The government now plans to curb the
need for new roads. Last year it announced a joint study that will look
at ways of reducing the need for both car journeys and the lengths of journeys
driven. This policy will encourage other forms of transport, such as public
transport, walking and cycling.

In the past, a consequence of the growth in the number of cars has been
that motorists have increasingly chosen to live further from their work,
the shops, the schools and their friends. Traffic flows more freely in the
suburbs and engines run more efficiently as a result but fuel consumption
is much higher, say researchers from Murdoch University in Perth. They found
that the fuel efficiency of a car driving into the centre of Perth from
2 kilometres away was about 10 per cent lower than that of a car from 20
kilometres away. Both motorists had to cope with the congested city centre,
but suburban dwellers had the advantage of clear roads on the way in. The
fuel consumption of the suburban car was 80 per cent higher, however. The
principles apply to other cities, say the researchers. In Houston, traffic
flows freely at an average speed of 51 kilometres per hour, whereas in Tokyo
it moves at less than half that speed. But cars in Houston consume more
than eight times as much fuel as those in Tokyo.

May says the aim must be to reduce ‘the demands we make on transport’
so that people ‘still carry out their activities but closer to base’. Government
policy makers are willing to accept this message, he says: ‘There is a growing
understanding of the way forward.’ May chairs the committee that coordinates
the financing of transport research by the Science and Engineering Research
Council and the Economic and Social Science Research Council.

Much current research is channelled into European Community projects,
under the umbrella of DRIVE (Dedicated Road Infrastructure for Vehicle Safety
in Europe). These projects are designed to use modern electronics and information
technology to make journeys easier and quicker for drivers. In the future,
says Goodwin, the research will have to switch to controlling demand instead
of increasing supply.

Changing the pattern of development is theoretically attractive but
difficult in practice because it requires long-term policies that must outlast
the tenure of politicians. The 1990 environment White Paper resurrects,
in almost the same words, a strategy taken from the 1977 White Paper on
transport policy, which wanted to ‘reduce our absolute dependence on transport’.
For the past 13 years it has been conveniently forgotten.