Map of the week: Two car households
A slightly historical flavour to our map of the week. It looks at what happened during the 1990s (between the censuses of 1991 and 2001) in terms of second-car ownership.
The map on the left shows where the two-car families lived: you can see the commuter belts around London and the West Midlands clearly I think.
The map on the right reveals who was buying a second vehicle or giving one up.
Given the arguments posted on this blog earlier this week over whether a car is a "luxury", it is not surprising that with the economic growth of the 1990s and cuts to public transport, rural areas saw the greatest increase in second car ownership.
But no-one could miss the extraordinary story in London.
Used-car dealerships up and down the land were obviously busy selling the cars Londoners had decided to forego. The congestion charge didn't come in until 2003, so was it simply congestion that led Londoners to hop on the bus or bike?
I will try to get an update on this for a future map of the week to see whether global warming is having any impact. For now, I would like to get some thoughts on whether you aspire to a second car or want to reduce your carbon footprint!
I'm 
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Why the question....."Do you want a second car or REDUCE your carbon footprint?"
This assumes that a second car will INCREASE your carbon footprint...why?
My car is a large engined petrol, and I am looking to buy a second car with much higher mpg which I can then use for going to work, therefore allowing me to just use my larger one for outings etc at weekends.
This will REDUCE my petrol comsumption.
My wife uses the tram. Although we live near a tram stop, my place of work is off the tram or bus beaten track.
Just because you have a second car doesn't mean you travel more miles.
This is why the raod tax should be SCRAPPED not increased, and the tax put on fuel...hence more fuel used, more tax paid.
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We'd love to drop from two cars to one but we live in a rural village in Worcestershire. My wife starts work early, before the bus service runs, such as it is and I work around the country as a freelance.
The nearest place we can by bread, milk or veg is five miles away. I use a bike when I can but it's no fun in the rain and wind.
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"...whether you aspire to a second car or want to reduce your carbon footprint..." - if you buy second hand, having 2 cars is not inconsistent with reducing your carbon footprint. A family may have a bigger car for when there is a need for lugging around the whole crew, or lots of stuff, but a small efficient car for times when the big one isn't needed. If they went for one car only, likely they would choose the people carrier.
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I'm struggling to deal with all the woolly thinking in this post.
There's two-car ownership, global warming, and apparently some kind of 'extraordinary story' in London where second car ownership has remained ALMOST STATIC for 10 years.
How is this in any way extraordinary? Londoners haven't foregone anything. They're still buying and selling cars, because cars have to be changed, but the market hasn't grown.
Then you've conveniently ignored population growth which affects your beloved global warming. Since 1991 the UK's population has increased by 3 million. That'll be around another 2 million cars on the roads, most of them around London and the South-East. However, there are hardly any new roads so congestion is worse, which means fuel efficiency is lower and pollution is worse.
Dear me, what a mess.
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The congestion charge didn't come in until 2003, so was it simply congestion that led Londoners to hop on the bus or bike?
I would want to examine another trend - the trend for smaller families and more single people living alone. If the number of single person households has been increasing faster in London, then obviously that will impact of car ownership. And in terms of carbon footprint, more households is probably a bad thing. Check please!
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I find the comments on 2 car households very interesting , the only problem is that round where I live 2 is not enough for some ! Many of my neighbours have 3 or more cars for a household that consists of 2 adults and children . There's the car to take the kids round ( usually a huge 4 x 4 or people carrier ) , the car to take them to work , the car for the weekend , oh , and maybe a motorbike as well for a bit of fun . When all the vehicles are at home my quiet little cul de sac looks like a car park at a supermarket . Do we really need so many cars ? ( from a 1 car 2 adult household ) .
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Very interesting and not surprising that the biggest range of increases seem to be in Scotland especially the rural bits! Surprising the increase around Edinburgh though. Anyway, you have made the bold assumption that people reading your article own a car already (not too much of a criticism honest! A fair enough one I am sure). We don't own a car but would like to as it would make getting out and about to go walking a bit easier at weekends! Would getting a car actually also increase our footprint? It's hard to see how much that would increase our carbon footprint considering by car we could reach the Trossachs in about an hour (from where we live) but by train and bike it will take 2.75 hours so which is better environmentally? I would agree also with the statement that getting a second car necessarily increases your footprint. Some cars perform better over long distances compared to urban running therefore two cars could possibly reduce the footprint made.
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We have two cars as occasionally we need to be in two places at once. One car is used primarily for my business and the other car is by my wife's
If we used one car that car would probably do slightly more miles than we currently do in both cars as a result of the extra journeys. In practice we do around 9,000 miles per annum altogether in both cars even though we live in a village in rural Suffolk. Two cars need not mean high mileage or high consumption just convenience.
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Good to see a piece of reporting that is not just London centred.
Surprise, surprise - not all of us live 20 yards from a tube station.
Until someone provides the density of 'public' transport that exists in London accross the whole country (impossible) then many of us will NEED personal transport.
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In terms of why London has a low amount of cars is very simple. The vast majority of people travel to work via public transport.
Having lived in London and never requiring a car, we now in the North of England, my wife and I are in a situation where we BOTH need a car to get to work and back. Public transport is simply inadequate to meet our needs and always will be because there are not the sheer number of people to demand a high quality service as there is in London.
For us it has very little to do with our carbon footprint - it's about paying the bills - No car - no work.
The real question is when will our government take the bold long-term decision to invest in Hydrogen technology... this is surely the best option for the future and I believe as a nation we have an opportunity to pioneer this technology. I find it frustrating that a hydrogen bus has been running in London since 2000 and this tehnology has not advanced enough to roll it out to more of the bus fleet (a predicted 10 buses by 2010) I can't help but think that we can do better and invest in the infrastructure to make it possible to have hydrogen cars available to the public. Then perhaps with a highly viable green alternative I think you will find a lot of people making a choice to be more 'green'.
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Another thing to consider in the London story is parking. People I know in London have said that the number of residential parking permit schemes has increased, and the costs of those permits have also increased considerably. Is this true (and do these schemes treat 2nd cars differently)? Might this be a reason for the decline of 2nd cars?
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Cars are a necessity in rural areas (no public transport so no car = no job) but there is an acute lack of affordable housing. So the trend is not just to two-car households (mum and dad both working/shopping/school-running) but three and four-car households (mum and dad plus grown-up son and daughter still at home because there is nowhere else to live). In many rural areas, increasing social/economic pressure leads to more cars per household or emigration. It isn't always a sign of affluence.
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Living in London, in a small road with a controlled parking scheme. I am amazed that we are allowed three car permits per household. Surely it would make sense for the environment, parking problems etc to limit multiple car ownership especially in congested cities with plenty of transport links.
We have many families here with 3 cars more as a status symbol rather than being essential. Cluttering up the roads, causing more parking problems. Most of us in cities can manage with one car per household. More than one should be justified. Also we should be encouraging people to move to smaller cars, for economic, environmental as well as safety and space reasons. In the past families etc managed with smaller cars, and we could again.
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The second map is somewhat deceptive because the percentage change in London is much smaller than in other areas even if it is the only area which shows a reduction - the colour change implies more significance than is warranted. I'd agree the reason for Londoners giving up cars over this period was the road saturation and gridlock that led to the congestion charge. But the effect of relatively cheaper cars and of the reduction in provision of public transport outside London is of more major significance to where we are now. I think it would be more interesting to see the first map repeated for 2001, 1981 and 1971 alongside the 1991 map.
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We have moved house from a rural backwater to a small town so we could reduce to 1 car as it was too expensive to run 2. The town has better transport links although it is not the panacea we had hoped for.
In the three months we have been here we have suffered a torrent of verbal abuse on one journey, resulting in a court appearance as a witness, a rail link bus that consistently fails to make the station on time and poor weekend services.
The buses that do run are slow, mostly as a result of pensioners with their free passes, hopping on and then off 2 stops later and winding through every village between towns. The trains are crowded and unreliable resulting in 3 out of the 4 journeys we've undertaken missing connections.
You CAN do without a second car, but it is very inconvenient. We are actively considering purchasing a second car again.
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Please, Please! Don't put information on the website refering to UK Statistics. I followed this link with great interest, until I saw the sad old mistake of using England and Wales and calling that the UK. It is not!
This sort of sloppy reporting only promulgates the feeling of a real split in the UK. I despair of the BRITISH Broadasting Corporation when this sort of thing consistently happens. No wonder there is a feeling that the Media at large is pushing people into an "Anti- Union" stance".
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I think that whilst public transport is not fully taken back in to public hands to properly integrate it, made much cheaper - or free, and massively invested in car ownership will be a necessity for many.
Where I live in rural and remote Argyll I could not live and work unless I had my car. Likewise my husband could not live or work if we did not have a second car.
Buses are far and few between and not frequent enough to make it a viable choice to use them if you have set times to be places for children and have weekly shopping to carry. I live over two miles from a bus stop up a dirt track.
I think that if the Government want people to use their cars less then they need to vastly reinvest in public transport (e.g re-lay removed rail tracks) and community transport schemes. I reckon most people that I know do car share journeys for their children's journeys (hence the need for people carriers) and use public transport when possible (e.g. in cities where transport is more integrated and available).
Penalising people for having 4x4s and people carriers is missing the point. If the road tax were income based then maybe people who did not need cars would not buy them. All the system does at the moment is to clear the roads of poorer people for the rich and increase poverty and destroy industry in rural areas.
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We are a one car family living in Hampshire and working in London. We got rid of our gas guzzler and our little run around and replaced both cars. We now have one car and save ourselves over £200.00 per month. We walk and catch the train whenever possible. We also have bicycles. Healthier and wealthier.
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The BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation, why then when the give statistics only include England and Wales?
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19 - uh? it has scotland, just the map is slightly dodgy, something to do with proportion, you can even see the hebrides
fairly clear stats, london became too congested and the good public transport system and high cost of living made it an easy step to using public transport - for the rest of us, economic prosperity and cut backs on public spending led to greater car ownership (as mark said)
what is more striking is the w.midlands, why has birmingham, as the second city, moved towards more cars? cut backs? i don't know birmingham very well but i thought it had at least a decent public transport system these days (altho bear in mind this data is 7 years old now)
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While Londoners are apparently giving up their second car a more interesting question would be why they even need one car.
Public transport in the capital puts the rest of the country to shame, there is no need to own a car at all for a daily commute. Perhaps keep one to visit those relatives that live a long way off, but there's no need for one let alone two cars every day in London.
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@11: residential parking schemes are becoming more common and, frankly, appeared not a moment too soon where I am. The charge is fairly notional (£60 a year) and means that my road is no longer jammed, between about 0600 and 2000, by the cars of people who drove from miles away in order to park as close as possible to a Tube station. However, I feel the real difference has been made by "cars by the hour" organisations such as Zipcar. Several people I know have given up their car now that they can borrow one for the 2 or 3 hours they need it in order to do the weekly shop.
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I think you will find the rise of the 2nd car is directly relational to the fall of bus services which are no longer run by councils with legal minimum standards of service. Profiteering local operators now operate the minimum service and change the maximum for it in order to make obscene profits. Good service is now not part of the equation.
The problem is to bring these services up to scratch will cost money Britain no longer has. Of course Brown will attempt to take that money from motorists using the flimsy excuse of the environment!
So why not have two cars, and don’t say the environment, have you seen the weather?
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Has 2-car ownership in London actually decreased? The yellow hexagons have the range -2 to 0%, but the next range above is 1 to 2%. So where's the boundary? It looks like it could be at 0.5%, in which case some yellow hexagons might still refer to an increase. Can you check please?
Also, to the people pointing out that 2-car ownership may imply reduced emissions, what happens if you factor in the energy used to make the cars in the first place? I'm *guessing* that it takes far more energy to make a car than the car would consume in petrol in its lifetime. Can anyone confirm or deny that? I'm also guessing that even if you buy a car second hand, that has an indirect impact on how many cars are manufactured, since other people might be less likely to buy new cars if they couldn't sell them as easily after a couple of years.
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Perhaps the reason that London shows a 'net loss' in 2 car ownership is because most of the 2 car owners have moved out - mainly to East Anglia....
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I'm not sure this means anything. As I read it two-car ownership has stayed pretty constant in London, which isn't the same as reducing. And what about single car ownership?
I have lived in the same road in South London for 23 years. During that time car ownership has climbed, and has increased in the last 5 years. I can now no longer park in my street at night.
I am planning to buy a smaller (shorter) car in the first instance, and if I get a job that is based in London I may get rid of the car altogether. My partner is an independent midwife and therefore cannot really live without hers.
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Why are people questioning the stats? Mark, I hope you ignore them as I can clearly see and I think most people can that the map is of the whole of the UK. The shape of the map distorts regions but Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow are visible. The important thing to remember is not to read too much into what the map does tell us. It says the ownership of second cars has increased generally overall Scotland and in many commuter belts. In many places the increase has been modest and in/ around London there has been a decrease. Some areas may actually be a shift in demography. All those who weren't eligible for a car in 1991 becoming eligible in 2001 and more than likely living at home. Public transport changes probably also play a role. I think everybody would like to minimise their carbon footprint (cf) but taking a bus doesn't automatically reduce it. If the bus is near empty then individual cf will be relatively high. I think we just aspire to a car. Getting out into the country is a lot harder without one! (e.g. to get to Roslin from the northside of Edinburgh easily takes 1.25 hours, in a car maybe 30-45mins, how much lower are the footprints?).
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Considering that most of the greenhouse gases come from commerce and industry, and the fact that Methane from Biomass outstrips that from having cars - AND coupled to the fact that emissions and consumption from cars has improved over the years as a matter progress through consumer demand - NOT from legislation alone - I feel totally guilt free about owning a Mini to head off to work and do my shopping trips, and a 4 litre sporty Jaguar for long journeys and weekends.. Sorry but there is still NO 100% conclusive proof that the CO2 increases over the past 100 years have caused changes in earth's temperature.. And there are bigger problems than cars. The destruction of the rain forest is by far the biggest problem since it acts as the planets regulator. Stop the destruction and allow the earth to regulate itself properly.
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