Gordon Stokes

THE ROLE OF ADVERTISING AND THE CAR

There currently exists some sort of consensus that the present level of increase in demand for cars and car usage cannot continue without congestion and major problems for the environment. Yet persuading people to think differently about car transport may be difficult. The car has inherent advantages over other forms of transport, and, perhaps more importantly, it has some sort of psychological hold over many people. In part, emotional attachments are formed because of the image bestowed on cars by the advertisers and other media. This paper investigates the nature of the connection between the demand for cars and car advertising. The final part of the paper seeks to indicate how attachment to the car could be reduced and the role that advertising has to play in this process.

The Prospects for Future Levels of Car Access and Use

This paper aims to build on similarities and differences in empirical findings and analytical approaches in papers in a special issue of the Transport Reviews journal on peak car. These differences are encapsulated in a new exploratory tool, which gives transparent future scenarios, at the aggregate national level. The model is based on age cohorts, with some degree of behavioural inertia, as the means of incorporating the most frequently noted age-related feature of the new trends. This is modified by different readings of the differential effects of population growth and location, immigration, and policy effects. Account is also taken of different assessments of the future track of Western Economies and of the impacts that economic factors have on travel behaviour, this being one of the core distinctions between peak car research and traditional models. Using UK data the suggestion is of a base projection for overall car use per person which is broadly stable for the next 20 years or so, falling slightly by 2036. The conclusion is that the combined effects of findings reported in this Issue are big enough to affect future transport conditions to a much more substantial extent than has been traditionally assumed.