Car ownership is falling in London but car traffic is falling even faster

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting figures confirming the decline of car culture in London. First, the 2011 Census results showed, as summarised by London City Cyclists, that the number of car-free households is growing across Inner London. Then the National Travel Survey showed that car travel per person in London fell 22% in just seven years (table NTS9904 here). Finally, as pointed out by Angus Hewlett on Twitter, here's a survey (admittedly from a fortnight ago) showing that "One in seven Britons said they were part of a household which owned a car that was only used occasionally", a figure that rose to one in five in London.

That survey suggests that car ownership has some way to fall yet in London. To get a better sense of this I plotted the trend in distance travelled by car (from DfT table TRA8905a) against the trend in the number of cars (from table VEH0204) for London and England as a whole in the chart below. Both series are rebased to start at 100 in 2000.

What this shows is that in England as whole the number of cars has risen 15% since 2000 and the distance travelled by car just 2%, while in the Greater London area the number of cars has risen 5% but the distance travelled by car has fallen 13%. The leftward turn in both lines is an indicator that distance driven per car is falling in both London and England, but it's falling particularly fast in London, in fact by 15% since 2000. The average car in London drives around 9,100 km per year (down from around 11,000 in 2000), compared to 13,800 km a year for the average car in England as a whole (also down, from 15,400 in 2000).

So it's no surprise that there are lots of 'ghost cars' hardly being driven in London, or that, particularly in the last few years, many Londoners are deciding that it's just not worth the cost and hassle of owning one. I'd expect this trend to continue for some time yet and the number of cars in London to shrink further (though it is worth bearing in mind that across London as a whole there are more cars than there were in 2000). I just hope we use the extra space freed up for useful things rather than just dropping the cost of parking even further.

What do homeowners have a stake in?

Today's Census figures showing a fall in home ownership have excited plenty of comment about the struggles of so many people to get on the property ladder. With excellent timing, the IPPR came out with some research yesterday examining some of the knock-on effects of these housing pressures. Jenny Pennington, the author of the research, summarises the argument here. I recommend people read the full report as it has some really good qualitative evidence on the social consequences of high housing costs, such as people having to delay starting relationships or having children. But there's one particular result I'd like to focus on. Jenny writes:

Secure housing also makes a real difference to the way people invest in a particular community. Owning a home increases a person's sense of belonging to a neighbourhood. For example, an individual who has lived in the same home for 20 years without owning it is likely to feel the same sense of neighbourhood belonging as someone who owns their home, but has lived in it for just six years. Young people who did not own their home talked about not really seeing the point of committing to the area in which they lived or getting to know the people they shared a street with.

This conclusion is arrived at through a robust-looking analysis of survey data, and I'm sure it's accurate as far as it goes. I would just caution that it's very hard to control for all the relevant factors here, particularly the crucial one of how long people intend to stay in a neighbourhood. Someone who expects to be moving on in a few years is likely to be less keen to either buy a home (given the transaction costs involved) or get much involved in local community matters. If the average level of 'expected mobility' in the population rose (because more people need to move to find work, for example), then we should probably expect to see both less home ownership and less 'neighbourhood belonging' - but home ownership wouldn't be the causal factor.

That said, I suspect there probably is a positive effect of homeownership on community belonging, even if it is hard to identify empirically. Pure self-interest would suggest that homeowners are likely to be more committed to the improvement of their area, because when you own a home somewhere you are to some extent stuck there (transaction costs again), and the value of your (very large) financial investment will be determined by what does or doesn't happen in its surroundings.

Lest anyone think I'm just being cynical for the sake of it, there is some pretty good evidence that homeowners' attitudes towards community issues are influenced by the expected impacts on house prices. Here's Christian Hilber, writing in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2010:

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that the positive link between homeownership and individual social capital investment is largely confined to more built-up neighborhoods (with more inelastic supply of new housing). The empirical findings provide support for the proposition that in these localities house price capitalization provides additional incentives for homeowners to invest in social capital. The findings are also largely consistent with the proposition that built-up neighborhoods provide protection from inflows of newcomers that could upset a mutually beneficial equilibrium involving reciprocal cooperation.

Translated, what this means is that home owners really do put more effort into building social ties ('social capital investment'), but only really in places where it's harder to build new housing ('more inelastic supply'). One possibility is that this is because in such areas any local improvements as a result of stronger social ties are more likely to result in higher house prices, while in areas with elastic supply rising demand results in more new homes and no effect on prices. It's worth noting that Dr Hilber previously found that in Massachusetts even elderly homeowners without kids tend to vote for (and pay for, through taxes) investment in schools because it increases the value of their home.

Many people might say there's nothing wrong with any of this, and that if home ownership gives people a financial incentive to care more about their neighbourhood then so much the better for home ownership. My concern is that it also seems to give people a financial incentive to oppose new housing supply in their neighbourhood, as new development may reduce the value of their home (either through a supply effect or the amenity impact of extra housing) or, as Dr Hilber suggests, upset the social balance they have helped create. If homeowners are really less likely to be socially virtuous when housing is plentiful then it sounds like a society with high levels of home ownership and strong social ties may also be one with a persistent housing shortage.

And indeed, that's kind of what the basic numbers suggest. Surveys show that a sizeable majority of home owners say they would oppose new homes being built in the local area, while private tenants are basically split and social housing tenants are in favour of new housing. And over the long run, the rate of new housing supply has fallen while the rate of home ownership has risen. The graph below charts one against the other for England as a whole, starting in 1972 and ending in 2011. Throughout most of the 1970s we were building around two new homes for every new household, but over time, the rate of building fell as the rate of home ownership rose. There was obviously a lot of other stuff going on at the time so I'm not categorically claiming a causal relationship, but it's not a particularly positive picture either.

To sum up, I'm not sure home ownership gives people a stake in 'society' so much as it gives them a stake in their local neighbourhood, which is not the same thing, especially if one way to 'help your neighbourhood' is to prevent new homes being built there. That may make sense from a household's perspective (in fact for many people it certainly does) but that doesn't mean it makes sense for society as a whole.

A few notes on getting Britain cycling

The All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group is holding an inquiry into how 'Get Britain Cycling' and they want evidence by the 5th, so the following is just some notes for my submission, mainly to get me to write something down rather than endlessly opening more browser tabs.

There is a large latent demand for cycling that is not being realised because of safety concerns
Just 2% of trips under 2.5km are cycled in the UK, compared to 14% in Germany, 27% in Denmark and 37% in the Netherlands (Pucher and Buehler).

Research by Transport for London found that only 7% of 'potentially cyclable' trips in London were currently cycled, and that safety (the lack of it, more precisely) is the greatest barrier to cycling.

A large DfT survey carried out in December 2009 found that:

• 60% of people who can ride a bike say it's too dangerous for them to cycle on the roads, including 71% of women and 72% of those aged 60 or over.
• 52% agree they would cycle more if there were more dedicated cycle paths (30% disagree).
• 86% of people say that cycling is the least safe form of transport.

In 2011, two thirds of people in the British Social Attitudes survey said they were not very or not at all confident about cycling on the roads (DfT table).

Research shows that high quality, separated infrastructure is safest and most popular

• "The key to achieving high levels of cycling appears to be the provision of separate cycling facilities along heavily travelled roads and at intersections, combined with traffic calming of most residential neighbourhoods". Pucher and Buehler, 2007
• "Consistent with gender differences in risk aversion, female commuter cyclists preferred to use routes with maximum separation from motorized traffic. Improved cycling infrastructure in the form of bicycle paths and lanes that provide a high degree of separation from motor traffic is likely to be important for increasing transportation cycling amongst under-represented population groups such as women". Garrard et al, 2008.
• "The greater the physical separation from motor vehicle traffic, the higher the women's share of cyclists". Pucher et al, 2010.
• "The lower risks on quiet streets and with bike-specific infrastructure along busy streets support the route-design approach used in many northern European countries. Transportation infrastructure with lower bicycling injury risks merits public health support to reduce injuries and promote cycling". Teschke et al, 2012.

We have a severe shortage of the right kind of cycling infrastructure
The under-utilisation of bikes for short trips, the survey findings on subjective safety and the high casualty rate in places where cycling is more popular all point to a widespread and severe lack of high-quality cycling infrastructure in Britain.

To get Britain cycling in safety central government must urgently address this deficit by

• Revising DfT cycle design guidance so that high-quality, Dutch-standard cycling infrastructure is given the highest priority;
• Making available sufficient ring-fenced funding to introduce high-quality separated cycling infrastructure in towns and cities across Britain in the next five years;
• Allocating this funding through a competitive bidding round in which funding goes to the proposals that combine the highest quality design with the greatest impact in terms of current and potential cycling demand.

Leadership from central government is vital 

Many local authorities lack understanding or expertise in designing for cyclists, and in many parts of the country so few people cycle that they hardly impinge on local political consciousness at all. The fastest and best way to get local authorities to act is for central government to provide the right funding and the right guidance.

Higher rates of cycling will save people money and bring wider benefits

• In total, people in Britain cycle about 3.1 billion miles a year (DfT). 
• But on a per person per day basis, people in the Netherlands cycle about 12.5 times as much as those in the UK (Pucher and Buehler). 
• That suggests that if people in Britain individually cycled as much as the Dutch we'd cover about 39 billion miles a year. 
• According to these figures from Edinburgh cycling saves you between 55p and 60p per mile compared to driving, taking all costs into account. 
• So people in Britain are already saving almost £2 billion a year by cycling instead of driving, but if they cycled at Dutch rates they would save over £20 billion.
• These figures may be a touch too high, since there are other (and usually cheaper) alternatives to cycling than the car. They're also fairly dependent on volatile variables like petrol prices.
• But they also exclude the wider social and environmental benefits of cycling and driving, which are very large (even taking into account higher average casualty rates from cycling), perhaps three times as high as the private cost savings (Figure 3.1 here).
• So it's probably fair to say that achieving cycling rates akin to those in the Netherlands would deliver private and social benefits to the value of tens of billions of pounds. 

Map of 2001-2011 population change in London

Update: Those intelligent people in the Intelligence team at the Greater London Authority have now made a better map of population change between 2001 and 2011, which I think you should look at rather than mine (there's more GLA analysis of the Census here). 

The GLA map is better because (a) it uses ward boundaries, which unlike the statistical boundaries I used have not changed over time and therefore offer a like-for-like comparison; (b) it compares Census 2011 population to the 2001 mid-year population, which the GLA thinks is a more reliable figure than the 2001 Census figure, and (c) it's interactive! So I've put my map below the fold here, just for reference.

The gender dimension of road danger

This BBC article about 'black box' devices in cars which monitor your driving for insurance purposes features lots of standard-issue outrage from drivers who can't see why how badly they drive should be anyone else's business but it also touches on the interesting issue of whether female drivers are safer than males. You don't have to look too hard to find plenty of commentary on this topic, but hard facts are more difficult to come by. Here's something from 2004:

Male motorists were responsible for 88% of all driving offences that resulted in findings of guilt in court in England and Wales in 2002, the Home Office statistics showed. Furthermore, men committed almost all the most serious offences, such as causing death and dangerous driving: women committed just 6% of the death or bodily harm offences in 2002 and just 3% of dangerous driving offences. Men were also responsible for 96% of vehicle thefts and 97% of offences relating to motorcycles.

Those are pretty huge differences, but perhaps, and I'm just speculating here, partly down to different treatment of men and women by the justice system. You can also look at the different rates at which men and women are involved in collisions resulting in injury, with the caveat that the figures don't necessarily imply anything about who's at fault. I looked at DfT's 2011 road casualties data, and found that in 85% of collision where a pedestrian died the driver of the vehicle (mostly cars but also vans, motorbikes, HGVs and a couple of bikes) was male, compared to 71% of cases resulting in serious pedestrian injury and 69% of cases resulting in slight injuries. This table suggests that men account for about 65% of the miles driven in Britain, so they do seem to have a higher rate of involvement in pedestrian casualties (trying to calculate rates for all kinds of collisions is more complicated).

What was most interesting to me is that males also account for a higher share of pedestrian casualties too: 68% of fatalities, 60% of fatal or serious injuries and 57% of slight injuries in 2011, according to this table. Other figures show that men and women do roughly equal amounts of walking, so these numbers do seem to provide some support for the idea that guys take more risks - or maybe just have worse judgement - than girls whether they're in cars or on foot.

The wider issue is that men also have more influence over transport policy and road safety, with the result that the issue is treated more as one of personal responsibility than as one of public health. The same cognitive biases that tell us we should be able to look out for ourselves ensure that we basically can't.

Urban expansion: learning from 19th century London

Paul Collier says that African cities should learn from the example of 19th century London when it comes to housing policy. London was able to build decent housing for working people because its building regulations weren't onerously high, because landowners split their land up into separate plots for small firms to build out while retaining ownership themselves, and because the legal system of ownership and tenure was clear enough to allow building societies to lend with confidence.

All good points, but I would just a couple of things. First, 19th century London also benefitted from rapidly falling transport costs, which enabled development to take place on greenfield land. Stagnation in transport technology makes it harder to keep expanding the urban frontier and compels us to try and redevelop existing urban areas.

Also, it's not just African cities but 21st century English cities which could learn from the example of Victorian London, in particular on the land ownership front. What usually happens these days is that a developer buys a large site and then waits for the most opportune moment to develop the whole thing, which can take a long time. This arrangement means you are basically creating a local land monopolist, with all the problems that entails. Ideally, government should instead try to split the task of building the site out between a number of smaller firms, who would then be competing against each other, which should raise both the timeliness and the quality of development. Obviously this is much harder when government doesn't own the land, although the German practice of umlegung (land assembly) seems to be a reasonably close approximation.

If you like your neighbourhood so much then let more people live there

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post here about the lovely city of Santa Monica, which prides itself on its greenness yet has seen barely any population growth in recent decades despite sky-high house prices.

For Santa Monica you can subsitute any number of nice, exclusive places in the US and across Europe. Here in London we have an excellent example in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the average house price is over a million pounds (pdf) but where the population and the number of households actually fell, albeit only slightly, between the 2001 and 2011 censuses compared to an increase of 8.3% across London as a whole (xls).

Demand for housing in K&C is clearly through the roof, so how come its population isn't growing? The reason is that planning policy, backed up with overwhelming political support from borough residents, makes it very difficult to build any new housing in the area. So very little does get built, so rising demand just pushes up prices.

K&C is a somewhat extreme example (70% of it is in a conservation area!) but the general pattern is widespread. More people want to move to urban areas to be closer to job opportunities or to avail of improvign urban environments, but the people who are already there don't want their neighbourhood to change so they campaign against new housing developments, and politicians dutifully vote those developments down. The supply shortfall pushes up prices, so only the richest can afford to move in and those less well-off either stay put or move to somewhere less nice and/or further out.

I think this is quite a bad situation, because it results in affordability problems, greater segregation by income and environmentally damaging urban sprawl as housing supply is diverted to places further away from jobs and services. And indeed, you hear a lot of concern about these issues in urban political discourse - but what you generally don't hear is any connection being made with all those anti-development crusades that contribute so much to the problems.

Of course there may be downsides to densification of existing urban neighbourhoods in response to rising demand. A lovely neighbourhood may not look quite as lovely when it's had some buildings replaced or some blocks of flats added. Personally I think these things can go either way and some areas would be much improved by densification, but I also think these basically aesthetic considerations are just not that important compared to the effect on people's lives of making more housing available in places where they want to live.

At its root, this is an issue of social justice and of personal ethics. People who care about social justice should be worried about a political process which gives all the power to people who already inhabit a neighbourhood and none to the people who would like to (see Matt Yglesias again). And people who think of themselves as ethical should ask themselves whether they can justify excluding others from enjoying the same neighbourhood they like so much, while adding to our already serious problems of affordability and car-dependent development.

A land value tax would be unpopular for the same reasons that it would be great

I was surprised a while back to find that the Liberal Democrat conference policy paper on housing included a call for a land value tax (LVT), because the current party leadership shows absolutely no interest in implementing one. But then LVT has long been a cause beloved of earnest policy wonks and loathed by politicos. I'll get to why that is in a moment, but first it's worth rehearsing what I like to call the neoliberal-environmentalist-progressive case for an LVT.

An LVT is a tax on the value of land, excluding the value of anything built on it. The logic is that the relative value of different plots of land is nothing to do with the landowner's activities but is purely a product of their locations and the access they grant to amenities, infrastructure and other 'locational goods'. And because land is fixed in supply and location, taxing it doesn't have the distortionary effects that taxing income or consumption might. So because the community effectively creates the value of land, the community should also draw the benefit rather than let landlords get rich by doing nothing.

Part of the attraction - for policy wonks - of an LVT is that it would provide an incentive for valuable land to be used for its most productive purpose. So if you own a plot of land in a great location, the high tax on it gives you a very strong incentive to get as much money out of that site as possible, which might mean building offices or housing or whatever - the point is that you do with that land whatever maximises its value, subject to whatever constraints the planning system sets . This outcome is good for the landowner (who reduces their net tax bill), good for the government (who gets the tax revenues) and good for whoever ends up occupying the buildings on the land, as they get homes or workplaces they would otherwise not have.

But as Duncan Stott Stoddard points out on the IEA blog, there is a significant problem here, in that current planning policy in this country (and most others) is mainly concerned with restricting landowners' abilities to maximise income from their land by building stuff on it. Building something a bit taller than the surrounding buildings is basically illegal across large swathes of this country, as is switching uses from residential to commercial or whatever. Retaining these extremely strict regulations on land use would negate much of the benefit of an LVT. In fact, it would arguably make an LVT quite unjust, in that you would be increasing some people's tax bills while preventing them increasing the income from their land to compensate.

So as Duncan says, an LVT should really go hand in hand with looser planning regulations. That way you maximise both the benefits of an LVT and the benefits of looser planning - the latter because if you loosen up planning policy without an LVT you are basically enriching landowners (by increasing their potential income) again without them having done anything to deserve it. And allowing landowners with valuable land to build lots of housing on it also means that if they pass the cost of their LVT onto those who occupy the land (i.e. tenants or apartment owners), then obviously the more occupiers there are the lower the cost is for each of them. This can mean that the per-household LVT is significantly lower in city centres than it is in the suburbs - which is also a benefit, since people living at higher densities are imposing fewer costs on the community in terms of infrastructure requirements, energy use and so on.

So a combination of a land value tax and looser planning regulations would very likely deliver cheaper housing, more tax revenues, a fairer distribution of wealth, a shift in the tax system away from distortionary income taxes, and a more sustainable and energy-efficient pattern of land use. Who wouldn't want that?

Lots of people, it turns out. In particular you've got all those homeowners who bought into a neighbourhood which then improves around them, driving up the value of their property and generally making them very happy with their lot. Coming along and telling them that actually they should pay a bit more for their good fortune and perhaps consider building a block of flats on their land will probably have this large and vocal constituency reaching for the pitchforks. But as well as the people who have got lucky in the property market, an LVT will probably also incite the ire of anyone who aspires to get lucky in the property market, which is to say pretty much everyone.

After all, just about everyone everyone wants to be that person who buys a property and sees it rocket in value through no skill or effort of their own. Yes it's unearned wealth and so policy wonks will say it raises important issues of social justice and economic efficiency and yadda yada, but everyone wants to achieve huge wealth, preferably without earning it. An LVT says nobody should get away with amassing unearned wealth through locational good fortune without paying some appropriate fee to providence.  In other words, it is an attempt to put a stop to free lunches via the property market. But people like free lunches, and if they don't currently have access to one they like to think that some day they will. And that, it seems to me, is why politicians are scared of land value taxation.

Neverthless, I do think the world would be a better place if we had more land value taxation, and it could happen if enough people get behind it and crank up the machinery of persuasion. Environmentalists, progressives, tall-building aficionados and tax reformers should recognise the benefits, hold their noses and start forming coalitions to lobby for this, because our leaders are going to require a lot of persuading.

We choose how congested our roads are

This BBC article about traffic congestion in Sao Paulo carries on like 180km traffic jams are an inescapable fact of life there and congestion is an insoluble problem. They even find a professor of engineering and transport from a Sao Paulo uni to say that "No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion".

Completely ending traffic congestion may be very difficult, but there are certainly cities who have reduced it substantially by doing things which Sao Paulo has chosen not to do. Congestion charging in Stockholm, Singapore and London has sharply reduced the level of traffic in their inner cities, and there is no doubt that if they were to whack up the prices that traffic would fall even further. Many cities have also built comprehensive, high quality rail systems, and given buses priority express lanes on main roads. But in Sao Paulo, instead of a congestion charge they introduced a rotating car number-plate ban which reduced traffic in the short term but mainly encouraged people to buy more cars. The metro system is far too small given the size of the city. And historically their buses haven't been given enough priority over other traffic and so suffer from the same congestion as cars. Hence, huge traffic jams.

I'm not suggesting these are easy choices, especially for a rapidly expanding city like Sao Paulo. Most cities are not fortunate enough to have built a huge underground system over a hundred years ago when it was nice and cheap, like London did. Sao Paulo now has a growing bus rapid transit system and big plans to expand the metro, but because Brazil is a democratic country where most people have the right not to be turfed off their land, building vast infrastructure projects is much harder and slower than it is in, say, China. Likewise, it's not easy to find the money to build a subway network big enough to adequately serve a city of 20 million people, or to convince drivers that they should pay to use roads they previously used for free. Those kinds of things are very hard, which is probably why more cities don't choose to do them.

But one reason they're hard is that many people are not convinced they are worthwhile, and that in turn is partly because the public discourse around these issues seems wilfully uninformed. There are solutions available which are workable and demonstrably effective. It's one thing to consider and reject them, but to pretend they don't exist is something else altogether.

Mapping pedestrian casualties in London

The Department for Transport publish full data on recorded road casualties on data.gov.uk, and I've been playing around with the data a bit recently, partly as a way of learning some new software skills.

The map below (best viewed at full size) is one result, and shows serious and fatal pedestrian casualties in London in 2011 which were the result of collisions with bikes (in red) or cars (in turqouise). Bigger circles represent fatalities and smaller ones serious injuries.

In total there were 980 serious or fatal pedestrian casualties in London in 2011, of which 33 resulted from collisions with bikes (one fatal) and 609 resulted from collisions with cars (38 fatal). The remainder resulted from collisions with motorbikes, goods vehicles, buses and other vehicles, but I didn't show them as I wanted to keep it simple and was mainly interested in comparing cars and bikes.

Techie details: I downloaded the csv data for casualties, accidents and vehicle records for 2011, used R to merge and filter the data, used QGIS to convert the data to a shapefile, and used Tilemill to combine that shapefile with some other layers, apply stylings and export to PNG. Tilemill does some puzzling things like leaving some of the markers brigher than others for no apparent reason, but hopefully that will be ironed out in future versions.