Car use

The Financial Times reports that the operators of the M6 Toll road are willing to allow vehicles to use it free of charge when the parallel motorway is congested, in return from release from an obligation to part-finance a link road. The M6 Toll is a 27-mile for which the private sector operator has a 50-year concession. Charges are £5.50 for cars and up to £11 for lorries, for a 20-minute journey. Traffic is down as much as 45% from peak usage in 2006.

While some of the decline in use must be due to the economic downturn, it looks as though the time saving benefits are too little to justify the toll for many road users. This might seem surprising for lorries for whom ‘time is money’, one would suppose. But perhaps fleet operators skilled in just-in-time delivery can cope with congestion adequately on the parallel roads, without incurring the toll.

The Economist magazine has a report on the future of the car containing useful updates on powertrain development, and also a section on driverless cars, a recent enthusiasm of the Economists writers in the light of technology demonstrations by Google and a number of car manufacturers.

Driverless cars could prolong driving by older people, and reduce accidents, insurance and medical costs, and congestion. But decades of road safety legislation would have to be over-turned before cars could roam the streets without a qualified and sober driver at the controls. VW’s research chief is skeptical, not expecting a fully automated car within twenty years.

I share this view. The benefits of robot chauffeurs do not seem sufficiently great to overcome the barriers to introduction.

The Financial Times reports a revival of cycling in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a city of 11m people famous for its traffic jams, but also now the world’s largest public bike rental scheme, used by as many as 400,000 people a day. The city aims for 50-60 per cent of people walking or riding electric and regular bikes.

This is a very sensible policy, given the limited capacity for car traffic in growing densely populated metropolises.

I was surprised at how few Nanos I saw on both city and rural roads on a recent trip to India. The Tata Nano was built to sell at about US$2000, as the cheapest car in the world, aimed at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ market. It is a simple yet good looking  small car, which was expected to sell well, yet hasn’t. The explanation I heard is that Indians are very conscious of status, so that a car that is advertised as cheap is not attractive. A bit of a marketing blunder in the short term. In the long run, a low cost vehicle should provide a good basis for market expansion.

The weekend issue of the Financial Times has the front page headline ‘Cars no longer stars as the young find themselves forced off the road’. The story is that the number of young people taking driving tests is falling as high insurance costs and demographic changes begin to transform a generation’s relationship with cars. This is followed up over most of page 3, quoting me amongst other experts. The motor industry is well aware of the trend but uncertain how to respond. It hopes that when the economy recovers, young people will come back to cars. However, Gordon Stokes, of Oxford University, is cited as saying that people who learn to drive when they are less than twenty do about 40% more mileage a year than those who earn when they are about thirty.

There may well be a generational shift in attitudes to the car underway.