I’ve had the opportunity to make presentations to a number of organisations in recent months, including the Universities Transport Studies Group annual conference, the Transport Planning Society, the Independent Transport Commission, as well as the staff of a couple of policy units in Whitehall.  The theme has been that of ‘sustainable travel behaviour’, and is a development of the ideas set out in the book ‘The Limits to Travel’.  A paper can be found on the Documents section of this website.

The argument I develop is that the demand for daily travel has saturated because we have sufficient access and choice to meet our needs.   My analysis of over thirty years of data from the British National Travel Survey points to the conclusion that the main purpose of daily travel is to gain access to an increasing range of destinations and hence to have more choice over where to work, live shop etc.  But the need for such choice is finite and so it is not unexpected to find that the average distance travelled per person per year has stabilised over the past decade, having previously grown steadily for a century and a half.

Saturation of demand for daily travel in a developed economy is evidently helpful in respect of concerns about sustainability.   But this concept does not form part of conventional modelling of travel behaviour, which generally predicts car use growing as incomes rise, without cease.