Reducing Personal Mobility for Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract

Many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments are seeking to reduce levels of private car travel, particularly in cities. Reductions can be justified by the need to reduce the external costs of private transport including global climate change and local air pollution. A number of approaches have been suggested for addressing these problems, particularly global warming. This chapter examines a number of policies for mobility reduction, an important means for transport climate change mitigation. Four OECD countries (Australia, Japan, the UK, and the USA) are used as case studies. It is found that use of IT, carpooling, and land-use planning, whether voluntary or legislated, cannot be expected to produce much reduction in either car passenger-km or in vehicle-km. Nor will reliance on voluntary approaches for car travel reduction by encouraging more use of environmentally friendly travel modes. Only by reductions in the convenience of car travel or large increases in its monetary costs can large and sustained reductions in travel greenhouse gas emissions be produced, However, heavy reliance on market forces such as very large increases in motoring costs is inequitable in OECD countries. The only equitable approach is to reduce the convenience of car travel, for example, by large travel speed reductions and by a reversal of the usual present ranking of travel modes: car, public transport, and active modes.