The Ten Myths of Automobile Dependence

Abstract

The myths about automobile dependence are analysed and dismissed as no longer having the inevitability they once had. The myths relate to wealth, climate, space, age, health and social problems, rural life styles, the road lobby, land developers, traffic engineering and town planning praxis. Only the tenth one seems to continue to have an inevitability due to entrenched practices which should now be updated and replaced.

Full text

Abstract
The myths about automobile dependence are
analysed and dismissed as no longer having the
inevitability they once had. The myths relate to
wealth, climate, space, age, health and social
problems, rural life styles, the road lobby, land
developers, traffic engineering and town planning
praxis. Only the tenth one seems to continue to have
an inevitability due to entrenched practices which
should now be updated and replaced.
Keywords
Automobile dependence, cities, development,
engineering, myths, new urbanism, planning, traffic.
Introduction
Cities show varying degrees of automobile
dependence (Newman & Kenworthy, 1989, 1999). The
rationale for justifying the extent of car-based low
density dispersal has many different forms which are
encountered whenever discussions are held showing
the variations in different city forms and
transportation patterns.
In Table 1, we list 10 of the most common reasons
which have been suggested to explain the
phenomenon of automobile dependence. This paper
will argue that none of them are sufficient in
themselves. They are therefore called ‘myths about
automobile dependence’. They are the basis for
addressing public policy and administration issues to
do with cities and cars as they reach to the
The Ten Myths of Automobile Dependence
Peter Newman & Jeff Kenworthy
Address for correspondence
Peter Newman
Professor of City Policy, Director, Institute for Science and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
<
newman@central.murdoch.edu.au
>
Jeff Kenworthy
Senior Lecturer in Urban Environments, Institute for Science and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
<
kenworth@central.murdoch.edu.au
>
Table 1: 10 Myths about the Inevitability of Automobile Dependence
Table 1: 10 Myths about the Inevitability of Automobile Dependence
1 Wealth
Automobile dependence is an inevitable consequence of wealth. People will always buy
cars and larger amounts of private urban space, thus alternative urban forms, public
transport and non-motorised modes will inevitably die out as people get richer.
2 Climate
Automobile dependence is inevitably induced by warm climates where people can enjoy
low density suburban lifestyles, whereas compact, transit-oriented cities are mostly in
cold climates.
3 Space
Automobile dependence is inevitably part of countries that are very spacious, whilst those
with little space have compact cities.
4 Age
Automobile dependence is an inevitable feature of modern life and thus new cities
developed predominantly after 1945 show it more than old cities.
5 Health and Social Problems
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the reaction to density and its health and
social problems.
6 Rural Lifestyles
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the attraction of rural lifestyles in the
suburbs with their associated promise of withdrawal from the evils of city lifestyles.
7 Road Lobby
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the powerful combination of road
interests.
8 Land Developers
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the powerful interests of land speculators
and developers and there is little that planning can do to stop them.
9 Traffic Engineering
Automobile dependence is an inevitable outcome of the standard processes of
transportation planning.
10 Town Planning
Automobile dependence is inevitably regulated into cities by local town planning.

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assumptions that are causing so many policy makers,
practitioners and activists to feel there is nothing
they can do about automobile dependence.
Dispelling the myths about automobile dependence
Wealth
Automobile dependence is an inevitable consequence of
wealth. People will always buy cars and larger
amounts of private urban space thus alternative urban
forms of transportation will inevitably die out as
people get richer.
Many urban commentators suggest there is an
inevitable link between rising living standards and
rising demands for private space and car use (e.g.
Gomez-Ibanez, 1991). ‘As soon as people get enough
money they will buy a car and move to the suburbs’ is
how the inevitability is generally expressed.
Stopping these sprawling car-based cities is therefore
like being the hapless King Canute.
Rising living standards obviously do impact on
transportation and land use (Schafer & Victor, 1997).
Historical analysis shows how cities have moved
outwards following trams and trains, and then cars, as
people developed the economic means to take
advantage of these technologies. Also, increasing
incomes meant that people could afford to buy bigger
homes and more spacious surroundings which
they appreciated for cultural reasons.
However, the link between living
standards and a more car-based, low density
city is not automatic. In fact, the
correlations are very weak and in more
recent times are going in the opposite
direction (see Newman & Kenworthy, 1999,
and Figure 1). Thus the future does not
necessarily bring more automobile
dependence. Technological determinism
based on cars can be switched into transit if a
quality service is available and the major
road and freeway systems are operating
close to capacity. Cultural choices vary and
the dream of space in the suburbs can be
replaced for some with a dream of urban
living near to the full range of amenities and
cultural attractions. In addition to this, the
economic processes which link wealth and
urban form, as suggested above, are much
more complex than conventional argument
has considered.
An analysis by Frost (1991) provides a
detailed understanding of the link between
wealth and urban form based on whether
wealth is mostly reinvested in new suburban
infrastructure or into industrial development. North
American and Australian cities have mainly done the
former and hence have developed low density, car-
based cities while others have become more compact
as they reinvested more into industrial innovation.
Frost seriously questions whether any cities can
continue to move in the direction which assumes
growing wealth from our rural hinterlands is the basis
of urban growth patterns. The financial problems with
urban sprawl have led the Bank of America to reject
investment in dispersed suburbs in favour of more
compact development (Bank of America, 1994)
Other urban researchers (reviewed in Newman &
Kenworthy, 1989) have shown how levels of car
ownership and use are significantly less in higher
density areas of cities at all levels of wealth (why
use a car if you can walk or take transit more quickly
and conveniently?).
Our global cities data (Newman & Kenworthy
1989, 1999) reveal a significant difference between
U.S./Australian and European/Asian cities in their
density and in their car use patterns – and yet
European city incomes are higher. Indeed many
European cities have per capita incomes 20% to 50%
higher than in Australian and U.S. cities, yet are four
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
U.S.
Australian
Toronto
European
Wealthy Asian
Developing
Asian
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
GRP (US$, 1990)
Car use
(km/capita/year)
Figure 1: Car Use vs City Wealth
Cities
US$
km
Note: GRP = Gross Regional Product
Source: Newman & Kenworthy, 1999

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times as dense and two to three times less intensive in
their car use.
When we talk to European planners they are
adamant that their urban policies are determined to
minimise sprawl. Most European urban and
transportation policy documents indicate a strong
commitment to, and belief in, physical planning
policies intended to contain sprawl and to provide
effective alternatives to the car. These policies have
taken a while to begin working, but results are
becoming more evident in some cities.
Perhaps some of the last European cities to tackle
automobile dependence are those in the U.K., but
their Planning Policy Guidance Notes (PPG) 6 (1996)
and 13 (1994) favour re-urbanisation and reducing the
need to travel. The new policies suggest that there
should be no more new ‘out of town’ shopping centres.
This has come in response to the decay of their cities
under Thatcherism, which was stopped equally by
the 900 anti-motorway groups and the business owners
in traditional centres whose trade was dying. As the
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1994)
put it:
‘There has been a significant shift in thinking
away from what Lady Thatcher once called the
‘great car economy’.
In the U.K. they seriously question the notion that
greater wealth means greater use of cars and more
sprawl. Examples of the old way of car-based
thinking still emerge and some steps backward are
taken, but the universal belief in the car as a source of
wealth is no longer quite as dominant. Mobility and
wealth have become decoupled as the quest for the
sustainability agenda becomes more and more
mainstream.
There are now many examples of wealthy cities in
which densities have gone up and in which transit
and walking/cycling have grown at the expense of car
travel. The data trends show that European cities
were in general reducing in density but at a slower rate
than in U.S. cities. Now they are reversing like
Stockholm which grew in density in each part of its
city in the 1980s and also grew in wealth. The changes
towards re-urbanisation that have occurred rather
than being due to incomes reducing, have often
occurred because of the attraction of market processes
which appear to favour compact urban nodes. This
appears to be because of the new information-based
city which favours more intense multi-nodal urban
environments, or simply because of different planning
priorities, e.g. transit preferred to highways due to
the politics of high capacity roads which are no
longer favoured by communities.
Finally, it is worth remembering that the most
expensive places to live in all U.S. cities are in their
high density downtowns such as in New York
(Manhattan), Boston (Beacon Hill), Philadelphia
(Society Hill), San Francisco (Knob Hill or Mission
Bay) and so on. There appears to have been a long
term market in the U.S. for these areas which favour
dense, walking-based urbanity and increasingly there
is a shift in the suburban market to nodes that are
more city-like. See, for example, the publications
from the Center for the Livable Communities which
show this change in urban values very clearly (Center
for the Livable Communities, various dates).
Climate
Automobile dependence is inevitably induced by warm
climates where people can enjoy low density suburban
lifestyles, whereas compact transit-oriented cities are
mostly in cold climates.
The argument generally goes like this: a warm, low
rainfall climate means people spend time outdoors,
they travel more and have large private blocks of
land for their houses so they can enjoy gardening,
barbecues, swimming in private pools and so they can
give children the extra space for sports and games. In
relation to Perth, one early 1980s transportation study
proudly proclaimed:
‘Our climate promotes the ‘quarter-acre’ and ‘fifth
acre’ block: we seek space for garages and gardens,
pools and patios, barbecues and boats’ (Director
General of Transport, 1982, p.65).
Conversely, the argument is that in cold climates,
snow and ice motivate people to take transit rather
than drive a car on dangerous roads and that people
don’t mind living in compact, apartment settings
because outdoors is so unattractive. An interesting
variation on this occurs in Calgary (renowned for its
frigid winters). Here the planners say that the reason
Calgarians so much like their low density, single
family homes is because the climate is so cold! How
so? ‘Well if you live in such an awful climate you
want to be able to rush outside as soon as the weather
turns nice!’ (Calgary City Planner personal
communication).
Our global cities study of 32 cities found there was
no correlation between gasoline consumption (a key
indicator of automobile dependence) and average
annual temperature, or between urban density and
average annual temperature (Newman & Kenworthy,
1989).
This at least suggests there is nothing about hot

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weather, as such, which induces travel or sprawling
cities. Conversely, there appears to be nothing about
cold climates which induces people to drive little and
cram together in apartments. Certainly, indoor
activities can be just as attractive in hot weather as in
cold weather. The positive effect of climate on certain
outdoor activities such as gardening and games is not
limited to hotter climates, particularly considering
the popularity of winter sports.
The use of transit seems also to be related to more
than just climate. All our data show that it depends
on how fast transit is relative to cars, how frequently
it comes and how easy it is to get to.
If we go beyond the scope of the global cities study,
it is easy to find cities that are not cold and yet have
a high density urban form with good transit and much
more use of non-motorised transportation. In Europe
there are Athens, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome. In the
Middle East there are, for example, Istanbul, Cairo,
Jerusalem and Teheran, with many Middle Eastern
cities continuing to build in a compact way to create
micro climates with shade and orientation of
buildings and public spaces to optimise cool breezes. In
South and Central America almost every city has a
hot climate – Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro,
Lima, Buenos Aires – and all are compact and high
density. In the U.S. there are Honolulu which
features some very high density areas such as in
Waikiki, and the dense, compact city centre of old San
Francisco. In Asia, again all cities are densely
populated regardless of the climatic conditions.
Alternatively, many cold northern cities are low
density and car oriented. Detroit and Denver have
few supposed car-enhancing climate features for much
of the year, but are totally dominated by the
automobile and extensive, low density suburban land
use.
If low density planning and high car use are
encouraged in a city, it is probably for deeper reasons
than lifestyle induced by the climate.
Space
Automobile dependence is inevitably part of countries
that are very spacious, whilst those with little space
have compact cities.
‘It might just be that here, in the biggest State in
the sparsest continent, we love space... It may be a
faintly amusing concept to many of us to imagine
Perth people crammed together in a transportation
efficient city on the edge of the wheatbelt and
outback, and next to the void of the Indian Ocean’
(Western Australian Director General of Transport,
1982, p.65).
A number of points can be raised about such
assertions. Other countries with ‘plenty of space’
have not developed sprawling cities along the lines of
those in Australia and North America with densities
of about 10 to 20 people per ha.
Central and South America have vast areas of
rural land similar to the U.S. and Australia but their
cities are all high density (Buenos Aires 80 per ha,
Salvador 90 per ha, Santiago 144 per ha, Lima 171 per
ha, Caracas 175 per ha and Mexico City 224 per ha).
Russia has no shortage of land but its cities are very
efficient users of space (Moscow 139 per ha and St
Petersburg 85 per ha).
However, more compact cities in countries with lots
of space are not limited to developing world
situations. In fact Stockholm, historically one of the
world’s most wealthy cities, has consciously sought to
develop in a more compact way despite having an
abundance of space (Cervero, 1995). Sweden has vast
expanses of rural land, mostly forest, but the few cities
are for the most part highly compact with little
wasted space. Sweden has a long tradition of planning
urban services in an equitable and efficient manner.
Stockholm has no ‘need’ to concentrate its land use
because of lack of space, but its planners believe that a
good city has:
•
a railway station within 500 to 900 meters (i.e.
short walking or cycling distance) of most housing;
•
a train service without a timetable, i.e. a frequency
of 12 minutes or less; and
• people living not more than 30 minutes from the
city centre.
These policies ensure a compact urban form based
around a fast electric train with housing and other
land uses concentrated around stations. Indeed, as is
shown in our latest data, Stockholm is the only city
which actually lowered its per capita use of cars a
little between 1980 and 1990, it grew in transit use
from 302 to 348 trips per capita and, at the same time,
it grew in density in its central city, its inner city and
its outer area.
If a nation has ‘plenty of space’ it does not
automatically lead to a low density urban form where
land use is highly inefficient, although this
perception in the U.S. and Australia appears to play
some role in facilitating or at least justifying the low
density city. Frontier land views of space (cowboy
cities) can be rationalised in a frontier economy. Now
we are all global cities in a global economy and as our
data suggest, those cities not addressing the global

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agenda (including sustainability) may well go the
way of the cowboy.
Age
Automobile dependence is an inevitable feature of
modern life and thus new cities developed
predominantly after 1945 show it more than old cities.
The city’s age does affect its spatial and
transportation traditions. Cities founded before the
middle of the 19
th
century were built around walking,
then transit spread the city out, and finally the car
allowed even lower densities. However, many modern
cities have been built with a walking-based or
transit-based urban form around which they continue
to develop. Asian cities, including modern Tokyo,
Seoul and Hong Kong are high density walking and
transit cities with tiny levels of car use compared to
U.S. and Australian cities. European cities mostly
maintain their medium-density, transit-oriented land
use in much of the new development which has been
added to these cities in the age of the car’s dominance.
The sprawling low-density city is essentially a
U.S. and Australian phenomenon – one taken to the
extreme in old railway-based cities such as Detroit
and Los Angeles, which were rebuilt into totally car-
based cities. It is now being recognised that such fully-
motorised cities cannot function efficiently and hence
rail systems are making a comeback in most
Californian cities, along with a growing trend
towards re-integrating development into high
density, mixed use patterns around stations.
Canadians have perhaps gone furthest in beginning
to change from car-based sprawl to more compact,
modern rail-based cities, having adopted a deliberate
policy on this in the early 1970s (see case study on
Toronto and Vancouver).
Although a city’s age is important in its spatial
traditions, it is not an inflexible determinant.
Health and Social Problems
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the
reaction to density and its health and social problems.
While recognising the economic and environmental
problems of automobile dependence, some urban
commentators suggest that the primary motivation
behind low density cities is one of health and social
amenity. They draw on a long tradition that ‘density
is bad for you’.
The spread of disease was always thought to be
through the air (via ‘miasma’), and lowering
densities was seen as a way to improve health
through a ‘wholesome supply of good air’. This
justification for the garden suburb continued even after
a century of medical evidence showed that sewerage
and sanitary facilities were the key factors in the
promotion of good health. Cities such as Hong Kong
and Singapore have extremely high health rates, yet
some planners and academics still talk about the need
for plenty of space for your health.
Social ‘ill health’ (crime, delinquency, suicide,
drug taking) has also been linked to higher density,
yet there is no consistent evidence to support this. We
analysed crime rates and density (Newman &
Kenworthy, 1989) and found that the data showing
how low density reduces crime (as is so often stated)
are very difficult to find. Poverty is the biggest
correlate with crime, especially if there are extremes
of wealth nearby (Knox, 1982). But this occurs at all
densities. Indeed crime seems to be higher in low
density cities in the U.S. (Newman & Kenworthy,
1989). International data tend to suggest European
crime rates are lower than in the U.S. and Australia,
and Asian city crime rates are even lower than in
Europe (Fischer, 1976).
Obviously socio-cultural factors dominate the
causes behind these data – but the evidence goes
against the belief that increased density leads
inevitably to increased crime. There is also a larger
body of literature which suggests that higher density
that is designed to create ‘defensible space’ for
neighbourhoods may keep down some forms of crime,
probably because of the ‘eyes on the street’
phenomenon (Jacobs, 1961; Newman, 1972; Gehl, 1994;
Sherlock, 1991; & the New Urbanist Writers). Other
literature shows the importance of community
empowerment in easing crime (Herbert, 1982;
Rosenbaum, 1986) and this process requires sufficient
density for neighbourhoods to become communities.
At the very least, the data suggest there is no
inherent relationship between higher density and
crime and the common fear about increasing densities
leading to an increase in violent crime is unfounded.
The one main study by Schmitt in 1963 which
suggested a relationship between density and social
disorder is widely quoted, but Schmitt’s 1966 paper in
which he re-examined the data and no longer found
the correlation, is rarely quoted. The Australian
sociologist Paul Wilson suggests: ‘rhetoric about the
effects of high rise living must rank as one of the major
hoaxes imposed by social scientists on an unsuspecting
public’ (Wilson, 1976, p.45-46).
Not only has urban sociology had this particular
strand of being anti-density, there are other social
sciences afflicted by it as well. Psychologists in the

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Anglo-Saxon world have studied rats in cages,
students crammed in rooms and people walking in
crowded city streets and concluded density is bad for
us. Major critiques of these studies have shown that
either their results cannot be reproduced, are
meaningless (rat studies), or they do not consistently
show problems with density (Fischer, 1976;
Baldassare, 1979; Guskaynak & LeCompte, 1977). For
example, crowding sometimes produces positive
effects in behavioural studies and not the expected
negative. The classic studies of New Yorkers avoiding
mugged victims in the street was attributed to the
density of people, but when repeated in Dutch cities
this did not occur (Korte, 1976). Despite such studies,
the belief in the negative impact of density remains
very strong. Yeung (1977) concludes that so many of the
studies on density were dominated by ‘half truths
based on ethnocentric perspectives’ (p.594), suggesting
that we have wanted to find negative aspects of
density. Baldassare (1979, p.6-7) suggested that
‘In a sense crowding became the non-social
explanation of the society’s social problems’.
Against the anti-density tradition there is another
that has emphasised the positive human benefits of
increasing densities. Freedman (1975) developed a
crowding model which tries to make sense out of the
conflicting evidence from empirical studies, while
also recognising the adaptability of humans. He
suggests that ‘crowding is not generally negative and
it does intensify human reactions to other people’. It
stimulates human interaction, which means the
human effects of density are up to us. Higher density
produces negative effects if we design it that way, but
we can also make higher density into something
beneficial.
This is why we can find examples of high density
areas with problems, then produce examples where
the opposite is true (studies summarised in Newman &
Hogan, 1981). For example, Conway & Adams (1977),
in a study of identical apartment buildings found one
had a high level of social disturbance while the
other did not; the difference was attributed to better
management. Others have studied the role of
individuals or collectives of residents who were the
catalyst for social cohesiveness and stimulation as
part of a high-density complex.
The growing literature on crime reduction through
urban design mentioned before is based on the need for
human scale at the street level with diversity and as
much activity as possible (e.g. Gehl, 1994). The data
are suggesting that if communities want to create
livable areas, then it is essential that they are
brought together. Minimising crime and creating
healthy cities, is not a crude process of simply
reducing densities. In fact data from Durning (1996,
p.24) suggests people in low density car dependent
suburbs are more likely to die from a car accident than
urbanites living in high crime areas are likely to die
from violence.
Rural Lifestyles
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the
attraction of rural lifestyles in the suburbs with their
associated promise of withdrawal from the evils of
city lifestyles.
Cities with low densities and a great commitment
to the private car, usually have an Anglo-Saxon
tradition, and attempts to increase urban densities in
Anglo-Saxon countries in the latter part of the 20
th
century have been met with strong opposition from the
urban community. The reactions have been so
emotional as to suggest that more than just
environmental or economic factors are involved, and
that such reactions probably lie deep in cultural
attitudes.
Literature of an anti-urban character has
frequently come from Anglo-Saxons suggesting they
are scared of increasing densities because they have
little of a pro-urban tradition. The dominant cultural
tradition has never really been committed to the city.
Artists and intellectuals from this tradition have not
believed the city is a force for good, a place where
culture can grow and all that is best in the human
spirit can thrive. In general, English, American and
Australian traditions have idealised rural places and
their literary heroes are from the countryside, the
prairie and the bush. Cities in this view serve only to
corrupt the purifying aspects of country life.
This idyllic view of rural life, is called
‘pastoralism’ and asserts that the country provides
solitude, innocence and happiness. This tradition has
been seen as the answer to human yearnings right
through the twentieth century and has its expression
in some arcadian philosophy and to some extent has
been continued in the ecology literature of today. It
reached its zenith in the literature of nineteenth
century authors such as George Elliot, Thomas Hardy
and D.H. Lawrence in England and with Banjo
Patterson and Henry Lawson in Australia. In the U.S.
the tradition is based around authors such as Thomas
Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Henry Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry
James.
The pastoral tradition has not led to a return to

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village life; instead it has helped create the
rationale for the suburban lifestyle. The pastoral
anti-urban tradition appears to have been grafted into
Anglo-Saxon cities by people withdrawing behind
their private suburban walls to escape the negative
impacts of city living. The rationale for this kind of
living has been developed through town planning
theorists like Frank Lloyd Wright, through
organisations like the Town and Country Planning
Association with its motto of ‘nothing gained by
overcrowding’ and through the rural images promoted
for each new fringe suburb by the real estate industry.
However, each new spacious ‘rural’ kind of suburb
is soon surrounded and engulfed by more suburbs and
the appeal of rural life is never quite what the real
estate brochures promised. Indeed, most of the
problems of the city seem to follow and distances are
so large that automobile dependence is endemic.
European and Asian traditions are much less anti-
urban and have always maintained strong
commitments to cities where people can meet in the
street and in public spaces, where green space can be a
public facility rather than a large private space, thus
automobile dependence is not an inevitable process
arising out of these cultures.
Many social scientists have also criticised the
romantic approach to rural life with its negative
approach to cities. They instead have asserted that
the city, particularly the high density city, can be a
positive force of culture and human experience, just as
rural life can be a source of deprivation and that the
rural/urban dichotomy has directed attention away
from more fundamental sources of social disorder and
loss of innocence (Ellul, 1970). That is, the city need
not be a source of human alienation and environmental
disaster, but can in fact be the opposite. As Howarth
(1976) says
‘… it is impossible to describe a natural element for
man, in contrast to which city life may be
considered unnatural’ (p.300).
Thus there is an opposing tradition which stresses
the positive aspects of dense cities and tends to have
an anti-suburban rather than anti-urban thrust. In this
tradition there is much more hope and attractiveness
in the mixed, dense neighbourhoods of old cities with
their variety and history. Such writing can be found in
the midst of the more dominant anti-urban literature
in Anglo-Saxon cities (Williams, 1985; Mumford, 1938;
Kunstler, 1993). The writings of Jane Jacobs have
provided a strong urban voice along these lines for
town planners since the early 1960s. Gratz (1989),
Holtz Kay (1997) and others have followed in this
organic city tradition and today youth culture in
particular is far more celebratory about urbanism.
Artists in many cities are some of the pioneers that
help in the revitalisation of older urban areas and the
re-urbanisation process described in this book is being
driven by younger professionals.
The power of the anti-city myths cannot be
underestimated as a continuing force in causing
automobile dependence, but it is not an inevitable
process. The task for this generation of urban
politicians, developers and managers is to help
facilitate some of the enthusiasm for urban life if the
processes of anti-urban development are to be
reversed. The evidence that it is possible to reverse is
clearly there in virtually every Anglo-Saxon city,
though some show it more than others (Newman &
Kenworthy, 1999).
Road Lobby
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the
powerful combination of road interests.
The politics of transportation is dominated by an
acrimonious conflict between road and rail lobbies.
The most controversial story of this sort concerns the
road lobby which dismantled the urban electric rail
systems in U.S. cities. In the 1930s a holding company,
National City Lines, which was made up of interests
from oil, tyre and car industries, bought the private
electric streetcar systems in 45 U.S. cities and then
closed them down (Klein & Olson, 1996). According to
Snell, the reasons for this were clear: ‘one subway car
or electric rail car can take the place of from 50 to 100
automobiles’ (Snell, 1974). In 1949 a Grand Jury
ultimately convicted General Motors, Standard Oil of
California, Mac Trucks, Phillips Petroleum and
Firestone Tyres on a criminal indictment of anti-trust
conspiracy, but the damage had been done. Los
Angeles was the worst affected with 280 million
passengers a year being pushed into buses and cars and
within a few decades there were four million cars in
LA and the era of automobile dependent U.S. cities
had begun. (Snell and others (e.g. Holtz Kay, 1997)
also highlight the role of the so called ‘National
Highway Users Conference’, pioneered by General
Motors’ Alfred Sloan which, in 1932, brought together
automobile, oil and other highway interests to lobby
for road funds and an end to mass transit funding. The
result was the U.S. Highway Trust Fund through
which the U.S. government spent $1,845 million on
highways between 1952 and 1970, while rail systems
received only $232 million. The establishment of this
fund and its massive spending on the U.S. Interstate

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Highway System set in place automobile dependent
trends that have continued to grow steadily to the
present day. Between 1981 and 1995 the spending on
Federal Highways in the U.S. grew from $9 to $19
billion whilst transit stayed at $4 billion. It is not
hard to see why U.S. cities continued their rapid car
use growth in the 1980’s.)
Similar lobbies exist in all countries (Hamer, 1987)
but not all are as successful as in the U.S. The political
power of the road lobby everywhere is strong but not
overwhelming; governments are answerable to the
wider public as well as to the lobbyists. The influence
of strong private industry lobbies for the automobile in
many European and Asian countries has been
minimised by equally powerful lobbies for transit.
Data show that transit support and funding can be
given a high priority, and recent trends in transit
demonstrate that it can influence the future direction
of our cities. The political appeal of new and
upgraded rail systems in conjunction with urban
villages, can be a powerful force to reshape
automobile dependent cities, just as road lobbies
previously shaped them.
Land Developers
Automobile dependence is inevitably created by the
powerful interests of land speculators and developers
and there is little that planning can do to stop them.
In the same way that transportation politics can
determine transportation priorities and hence urban
land use, it is possible to examine land politics and see
how it determines urban land use and thus
transportation patterns.
Capitalism is based on the accumulation of wealth
and its investment into physical assets which
produces further wealth. Cities appear to have been
built in cycles with most construction related to the
level of capital accumulation. Suburbanisation is
explained as the need to invest capital in both the
land and transportation systems to service it (Harvey,
1973; Walker, 1978). Most suburbanisation follows
economic booms and when the economy contracts, so
the city turns back into itself rather than expanding
on its fringe.
North American and Australian auto cities have
been analysed to show how suburban land has been
developed in response to capital accumulation (Cox,
1978; Sandercock, 1975, and Badcock, 1984). In these
cases urban planning is seen as having little power to
direct urban growth for public purposes; private
capital just maximises private gain wherever it likes.
But not all capitalist cities have optimised
private gain in an automobile dependent way. Many
European cities, in particular, have managed to create
a far less car dependent kind of urban growth.
Developers still make money, but their capital is used
to create the kind of densities that enable social goals
to be achieved, such as walkable and transit-based
cities.
The statement is often made that developers in the
U.S. and Australia would not put up with this kind of
socialistic control over their development ‘rights’. We
are not so sure that the systems in Europe and the
U.S./Australia are that different.
The land development system in U.S. cities and
Australian cities is still under planning control. The
process has many built-in subsidies which favour
capital to invest in land on the urban fringe. Primarily
the building of large roads from Federal grants opens
up the land which normally would not be worth
developing. Then local government offers a range of
incentives to have the development come to them
rather than in other areas. Both of these processes are
market interventions. In other places they would be
described as socialism.
Then the developer takes the large set of
regulations which have been developed over years of
suburb building and dutifully carries them out in their
development – again it is a process controlled by
planning. Undoubtedly the process of achieving less
automobile dependent cities is helped if there is a
city-wide planning agency which is deliberately
attempting to minimise sprawl. However, a city-wide
planning agency can also facilitate car dependent
sprawl.
In the late 1990s some developers are realising
that profits can just as readily be derived from urban
development practices that are more socially and
ecologically responsible. Such developers are putting
their capital into re-urbanisation, transit-oriented
development and New Urbanism development. For
them, the planning process in the U.S. and Australia
is hopelessly socialistic, full of inappropriate
subsidies and out-of-date regulations. The
revitalisation of the inner city in Australia, the New
Urbanism suburbs in the U.S., the transit-based
development in Portland, and the growth management
in Boulder, Colorado, are all forging new, more
sustainable ways of physical planning. Some of this is
given direction by public agencies but frequently the
new alternatives are coming from private sector
sources who are pioneering ways to create more
sustainable settlements in a public planning milieu
dominated by out-of-date, automobile dependent

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assumptions. A more sustainable public planning can
be further facilitated, but much is already happening
without this being the driving force.
Planning is always going to be needed to guide the
development process. To change development away
from automobile dependence does not need draconian
planning intervention – that is often already there. It
just needs a new professional praxis which can
facilitate development of a different kind in different
parts of the city. Investors can still make money, but
the process is helping to build in sustainability not
automobile dependence.
Traffic Engineering
Automobile dependence is an inevitable outcome of
the standard processes of transportation planning.
The most important of the technical procedures in
transportation planning is the land use/transportation
modelling process which emerged in the mid-1950s as
a distinct area of study. The purpose of these studies
was to plan for anticipated growth in population, jobs
and traffic as far ahead as 20 years, so as to ensure an
equilibrium between the supply of transportation
facilities and demand for travel as it arises out of
land use.
The concept of the ‘grand transportation study’ was
embraced with enormous enthusiasm with virtually
every developed city at some point between 1955 and
1975 undertaking at least one major transportation
study. They were part of what a city had to do to be
‘modern’. The 1950s and early 1960s were a very
optimistic and prosperous period characterised by
booming car ownership and the political expectation,
at least in the U.S. and Australia, that the car would
be the future of urban transportation. Thus right from
the outset land use/transportation studies tended to be
strongly associated with planning for roads and cars
rather than a balance of transportation modes, and
most of the U.S. and Australian land
use/transportation studies pioneered the building of
elaborate highway and freeway systems.
Transit, especially rail, was glossed over and
almost eliminated from cities like Detroit, Phoenix
and Houston. Most forecasting was based on private
transportation growth and land use patterns based
around this. Once such land use is in place the only
transit that can service it is an inefficient bus service,
thus the conclusion is inevitably reached that a
massive increase in road funding is needed to provide
the ‘grand plan’ needs.
Most major cities which built extensive freeways
then found that this process spread out land use and
generated more and more traffic, until very soon after
completion the freeways were already badly
congested.
The obvious response to the failure of freeways to
cope with traffic congestion is to suggest that still
further roads are urgently needed. The new roads are
then justified again on technical grounds in terms of
time, fuel and other perceived savings to the
community from eliminating the congestion. This sets
in motion a vicious circle or self-fulfilling prophecy of
congestion, road building, sprawl, congestion and more
road building. Automobile dependence is inevitable in
such traffic engineering.
Awareness of this phenomenon, now called induced
or generated traffic, is increasingly common in the
literature. In fact, traffic is now being referred to not
as a liquid that flows where it is directed, but as gas
which expands to fill all available space (Litman,
1998).
There has developed an alternative to this kind of
road planning treadmill which is comprehensive land
use/transportation planning that develops
alternative transportation systems and different land
use patterns aimed at minimising unnecessary
movement. The comprehensive plan is a much more
community-based project that invites a city to
envision its future and then seeks to find the
appropriate infrastructure. This process requires a
much more creative role from planners and engineers
who need to provide the land use and transportation
mix most able to meet the complex needs of the
community. Other models are now available such as
LUTRAQ from Portland that allows all options
including new transit systems to be tested rather than
just road options (1000 Friends of Oregon, 1993, 1997a
& 1997b). There is also clear evidence that if road
capacity is removed then a high proportion of traffic
just disappears; this ‘traffic evaporation’ or ‘traffic
de-generation’ also gives another tool to cities
struggling with how to manage their future (Goodwin,
1994).
Urban planners and the general public are now in a
key position to assert their roles in the development
of cities. New goals and objectives can be given to the
transportation/land use modelling process based
around balancing the roles of various modes and
minimising total travel in the urban system. The need
to revitalise city centres and to protect
neighbourhoods threatened by traffic means that the
technical road planner using 1960s models cannot be
the sole determinant of decision making. The U.S.
TEA-21 legislation gives the framework for their new

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approach.
Pressure from the community has meant that
traffic calming is now on the agenda in virtually
every developed city and many in the developing
world. This European concept has been a major focus
for many traffic engineers in European cities for 20
years, but is now a central issue for engineers and
planners in every Auto City.
Technical planning tools and the politics which
seems to go with them will always play a role in the
area of transportation planning, but there is no
necessary reason why these should favour roads and
suburban sprawl to the exclusion of other
transportation modes and more compact patterns of
development. Many cities are indicating how this new
balance can be found.
Town Planning
Automobile dependence is inevitably regulated into
cities by local town planning.
Low density suburbs around the world are often
very similar in form as well as function. They can
frequently be traced to a similar set of urban codes
that have been developed and become known as ‘town
planning’ regulation. Such heavily automobile
dependent suburbia if left to a process of standardised
mass production will inevitably create more and more
of the problems outlined earlier.
This kind of planning is also facilitated when
‘town planning’ is considered to be what occurs at the
local subdivision level and no overall strategic
direction for the city or its regions is ever created.
However, strategic planning is now a much more
developed process and especially where a city-wide
government or co-ordinated set of governments, can
provide a plan for the whole city. In such plans there
are strategic networks of transportation, strategic
land use that complement this and comprehensive
processes and incentives to encourage the plan’s
implementation. In the U.S. such plans are required as
part of TEA 21.
Conclusion
The ten myths of automobile dependence are still
alive and well in urban transportation policy
discussions. However, the underlying basis for them
seems to have lost its edge and the professional
certainties are no longer so clear; indeed the evidence
is growing daily that automobile dependence is not
economically, environmentally or socially good for
cities. However, the problem of how to do detailed
planning at the local level which is not automobile
dependent is still not solved. The regulations on set
backs, road widths, design, densities and mix, all
favour the suburban model we see in nearly every new
suburb. Developers wanting to change this find the
process very hard. This is the one area of
inevitability which still seems to be true. The few
new suburbs which have broken the mould have not
yet been absorbed into professional praxis. Thus
groups, such as the New Urbanism, are trying to
develop a new praxis or code of development which is
not so automobile dependent.
Each of the first nine myths are important to show
that they are not inevitable, but this tenth myth
about town planning is particularly important to
overcome. All the other myths depend to a large
extent on how well a city can plan, i.e. how well the
broader goals and aspirations for a city’s future can be
translated into practical community processes where
the public realm is improved, not slowly eaten away.
And how detailed design can create attractive,
ecologically sensitive, low auto-dependent
development This final myth must be finally robbed
of its inevitability through new town planning
practices.
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