We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Car website. However, if you would like to, you can change your cookies at any time
The start point for the best source of fleet information |
Something unprecedented happened on Britain's roads last year.
For the first time since records began in 1949, the volume of traffic fell for a second year in succession.
That may not seem so surprising in a recession but it's beginning to look as though the UK has reached a crossroads in car travel.
Over the last 60 years, car use in Britain has risen from 15 billion kilometres a year to 250 billion. And, up until 2008, only three events briefly interrupted the seemingly inexorable growth in travel and congestion.
The first was the Suez crisis, way back in 1956. The other two were OPEC oil supply squeezes in 1974 and 1979. Recessions and the fuel protest of 2000 did slow the growth of traffic to a crawl occasionally, but we've never seen two successive years of contraction until now.
Actually, make that three. The DfT's latest national traffic survey results show that 2010 is heading in the same downward direction.
Does this matter? Is it a good or a bad thing? Well it matters a lot when Government ideas about road tolls and infrastructure investment are predicated on continuing massive growth in traffic (which they are).
When we're told that tolls are the only way to prevent total gridlock, it helps to know how close we are to the tipping point.
As it happens, the DfT have helpfully posted a wealth of tables and charts online. And guess what. It turns out that we've been steadily trending toward the end of traffic growth for nearly half a century.
Back in the 1960s car travel sometimes grew by 16% a year - hence the horrendous jams your dad can remember. But since then the trend has been downhill all the way apart from a brief blip in the late 1980s, around the time that oil prices crashed below ten dollars a barrel.
Draw a trend line on a chart of annual traffic growth from 1950 to 2000, and you'll see that it would have turned negative around 2012 whatever happened. The current recession merely brought the date forward by a few years.
It seems that official projections of future traffic volumes were based on increasing car ownership. But the DfT's own charts show that although car ownership has increased by nearly 20% over the last 10 years, car use has only risen by 6%.
For many, the need and desire to use a car is changing. On-line shopping and free services like Skype are replacing car journeys with van deliveries and video calls. It's also true that the high cost of fuel is squeezing marginal car users with a small, fixed budget for petrol out of the traffic stream.
Many other factors are also at work but it's safe to say that one of the main reasons for declining traffic is that the cost of motoring has turned round and is now rising after many decades of falling in real terms. But at the same time, the figures for car ownership underline how vitally important it is for people to have access to one.
We'll have to see whether these trends really take root over the next few years. My guess is that they will - and that will have far-reaching implications for fleet and HR policy.
BusinessCar magazine ©2019
Business Car Magazine © 2020 | Business Car is part of NS Media Group.
