We’re on the road to carmageddon

The number of motor vehicles per household in Australia is accelerating. Why is the number of cars growing faster than the number of people?

Maps showing motor vehicles per household across Australia show the need for two or more cars in regional Australia and the popularity of multiple-car ownership on the city fringe.

There was a line of thinking some years ago that the popularity of motor vehicles was waning, that millennials were less enamoured with cars than earlier generations.

The reason being that more people were choosing to live close to the city centre, and that public transport as well as bicycles, scooters and walking were now the preferred bases for personal mobility.

Plus there was an ethical consideration that motor vehicles contribute to congestion and carbon emissions.

And so it has come as something of a surprise to see the 2021 Census report a 14 per cent increase in the number of vehicles parked at or near the householder’s home on Census night in comparison with 2016.

Over the same period, the number of households increased by 9 per cent as indeed did the population. This prompts the question: Why is the number of cars growing faster than the number of people? This could be due to millennials suddenly embracing cars, or it could be because of a surge in the car-driving age group, or maybe this is a pandemic-inspired response of car-driving foreign students and expats departing Australia and leaving their cars behind.

The bottom line is that cars are multiplying at a faster rate than people. And it’s not just that there are more cars per household, it’s that more cars are being added to existing multiple-car-owning households.

Over the five years to 2021, the number of no-car households increased by 31,000, or 5 per cent. However the number of households with 4+ cars increased by 21 per cent. In fact, growth in all car-owning households outpaced no-car households over these years.

Sometimes the Census delivers a profound if somewhat blunt social truth about the Australian people. Sure, some Australians are pursuing the sophistication of an inner-city lifestyle where space (and a car) is traded for convenient access to the CBD. However, a bigger cohort is choosing the space and the multiple-­­car-owning freedom of middle and outer suburbia and possibly beyond.

There were signals of this cultural shift in the piece I wrote about housing last month where it was demonstrated that the number of four-bedroom homes in Australia had increased by 401,000 over five years or by 18 per cent. This number is 13 times bigger than net growth in no-car households (such as apartments) over the same time frame (31,000). According to the Census, the number of households with 4+ cars jumped by 464,000 over the five years to 2021.

Whichever way these numbers are cut, the evidence is clear. The vast bulk of Australians want the kind of space and mobility that is offered by 3 and 4+ bedroom homes and with separate motor vehicles for more or less each resident person of driving age.

This is a city planner’s worst nightmare: more people with more cars pushing further out in pursuit of space thus placing pressure on peak-hour road usage. The solution offered by the planning community over many years was the development of an urban growth boundary which was designed to contain urban sprawl. This policy was combined with a program of urban densification and especially along transportation corridors.

High-density apartment living was supported in order to reduce our overall reliance upon the motor vehicle. And there’s no doubt the policy struck a chord with 20-and 30-something millennials who wanted access to CBD-based knowledge-worker jobs.

But the Census – that blind demographic truth teller of Australian preferences – is telling a different story. It seems Australians want big homes with multiple bedrooms and garaging for multiple cars.

The property development industry needs to ask which business they want to be in: one that builds 31,000 no-car households over five years or one that delivers 464,000 4-plus-car households over the same time frame.

But Australia’s accelerating fixation with the kind of mobility ­offered by multiple motor vehicles doesn’t end there. City planners’ plans to combat the advent of an “Australian carmageddon” – city containment and densification – isn’t working. Or at least not to the extent the aspiration for low-density living combined with multiple motor vehicles has diminished.

Plus, the pandemic has disrupted if not directly challenged a central plank to the central argument for high-density living: the financial and other costs of road development required to connect outer suburban living spaces with inner-city workplaces.

But now, with the rise of the work-from-home movement, there is much less need for intra-city travel. Indeed, it is possible that yet another of the city planners’ ideals – the rise of the 20-minute city – could in fact become a reality. And if so, the evidence is that the 20-minute-city isn’t being delivered by nuanced planning policies but by the irrepressible will of the Australian people.

The 20-minute city is the idea of being able to live-work-play all within 20 minutes of home. This ideal can be delivered in Australia if there is a sufficient shift in the proportion of the workforce preferring to work from home. (The key figure measuring this shift at the Census will be released in late October.)

Perhaps it is time for planners, bureaucrats and others interested in delivering a better quality of urban life to reassess the effectiveness of city planning which is based on the pre-pandemic notion that 95 per cent of the Australian workforce commutes daily to a workplace. If this proportion falls to 90 per cent, let alone to 80 per cent, then the very basis upon which Australia’s major cities operates changes.

Indeed, why not create a series of self-contained masterplanned communities where cars are used not so much for dreary commuting but for shorter-distance trips in order to connect or for the purpose of leisure, caring, shopping, learning and, occasionally, for visiting workplaces?

The car-as-commuter-vehicle has dominated city planning and thinking for 70 years; perhaps it’s time to listen to the Census, to read the will of the Australian people, and conceptualise a different model such as a series of interconnected but largely self-contained suburban communities.

The Census identifies specific places where car numbers have increased faster than the population including, for example, Rockbank-Mt Cottrell on Melbourne’s western flank. Between 2016 and 2021 motor vehicles increased sevenfold whereas the population increased sixfold.

In other places such as Sydney’s Kensington (which includes the University of NSW), the population dropped but car numbers increased over the past five years. This supports the theory that exiting foreign students sold motor ­vehicles, creating a higher concentrations of vehicles per household in specific places.

The highest incidences of motor vehicles per household typically cluster on and beyond the city fringe in places such as Victoria’s Narre Warren where this figure reaches 2.69 and in Wyong Shire’s Jilliby-Yarramalong, where it reaches 2.67. In the northern part of the Melbourne CBD (nearest Carlton), there are just 0.25 vehicles per household.

Maps showing motor vehicles per household across Australia show the need for two or more cars in regional Australia and the popularity of multiple-car ownership on the city fringe. There are remarkably few places across Australia where there are fewer than one car per household.

We are indeed a great car nation and, judging by the 2021 Census, we won’t be giving up our hard-won motor-vehicle-based lifestyle for some time yet.

Bernard Salt is executive director of The Demographics Group; Data and research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.