It is no accident that cars should have dominated North American and Australian cities so completely. Cars need vast tracts of land. Not just for the motorways, but also for parking, whether at home, downtown for office workers or by the supermarket for shoppers. About one square mile of parking is needed for a million cars. Urban sprawl and the inefficient use of land also produce a huge increase in energy consumption.
People living close to city centres, tend to take a bus or a train when they travel.
People in the suburbs are much more likely to have cars. Australian studies have shown that people in the suburbs use about five times as much energy getting to work as those living in the inner-city, because they travel the longer distances by private automobile. The irony is that the more space we devote to automobiles the more they demand. Even Los Angeles now realizes the limits of basing transport policy solely on the car. Mick Hamer is a journalist based in London.