I do believe, however, that it will slow radically within one more generation. The development of out-of-town shopping centres is slowing, largely because the need is close to being satisfied by the present crop. Similarly, we are probably in the early stages of a revolution in commuting patterns, where the rush-hour thins as a greater proportion of the workforce is able to do more work from home.Anyone predicting a slowing in the growth of car use has to face the fact that every previous prediction has been wrong and there is not much evidence yet of this slow-down. Remember the days when people used to go for a drive just for the sake of giving the car a spin?If recreational car use must level off soon, so also will other functions.
It starts slowly, moves very quickly as the technology hits the mass market and the costs come down, then reaches saturation point. It has happened with a whole range of domestic goods, from televisions to washing machines; it will happen to personal computers. So car use will level off.We must be approaching a stage where most people are spending as much time in their cars as they want to: the desire for personal mobility may be enormous, but it does have a saturation point. The take- up of new technology almost invariably follows an "S" curve.
If the love affair with the car that Britain experienced in the Fifties and Sixties seems quaint, it is in its bright spring in Eastern Europe and the prosperous coastal zones of China.But what happens next for us in Britain? Just as technical development of the car will only inch forward from now on until some replacement for the internal combustion engine arrives, so too, I think, the social adaptation to the car is more or less complete.If that sounds an absurd hostage to fortune, consider this. Everyone is equal in a traffic jam, but each can proclaim their wealth and status by the car in which they sit.That same statement about human desires and aspirations is still being made today. Children walked to school; their mums shopped daily on foot; dads went to work on public transport or a bike.That pattern of life has been swept away. Our roads and cities have struggled to keep pace with the advance of car ownership, which has driven forward with astonishing power.In social terms it has been a great liberating force, an assertion of individuality and freedom - but it has been more than that, too. The car was a machine of democracy: breaking down division by class and replacing it with differentiation by wealth. Motor transport had brought some development to pre-war cities and suburbs - traffic lights, arterial roads - but even in the late Forties most of us were still using the same communal forms of transport of a generation earlier - trains, trams and trolley- buses - or else simply not travelling.