Talk:Peak car

Synthesis tag
Would prefer to see content objections worked out on the talk page so they can constructively be worked on. List specific actionable words and sentences and sources that are a problem and I will fix. Thanks and look forward to working with you. Green Cardamom (talk) 21:45, 1 September 2011 (UTC)


 * "Some of the references provided do not support the Peak car theory --> check Brookings study and Millard-Ball & Schipper"


 * I'm not sure I agree with that statement which is pretty broad and general, but even if it were true, just because a source used in the article didn't "support peak car theory" (which BTW I'm not even sure it's a theory, rather an observed phenomenon) doesn't make the article OR. We can certainly have articles on Wikipedia that discuss a controversial idea that also include sources that contradict that idea - which I don't think is even the case here, but if it were, the article would be better for it. Green Cardamom (talk) 21:53, 1 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your answer and bringing the discussion here. I am not finished reading all the papers yet and I am quite busy this week, but next week I have more time and will point out the issues (actually I was planning to rewrite the article based on what each of the sources actually says). Nevertheless, the Brooking study, in the ref provided explicitly says: "Amid the current recession and declining gas prices, drops in driving should continue, creating dramatic impacts in the realms of transportation finance, environmental emissions, and development patterns. Government officials and policy makers at all levels must account for these potential long-term consequences." And if you read the study, just follow the link, in the conclusions says that vehicle ownership seems to have reached saturation, so there is a limit to how much travel people can do, which is not related with the so called peak travel theory (as the Australian authors claim). The UK study refers only to the UK and congestion pricing is involved. Furthermore, this is not a mainstream theory in transportation planning or engineering (I am a practitioner transportation engineer with 30 year experience at the international level), so readers should somehow be aware of this fact. I suggest that while we clarify these issues, the article is tag as a warning (I suggest OR if you do not like the one I chose before). I leave the decision to you.--Mariordo (talk) 02:15, 2 September 2011 (UTC)


 * What do you think about renaming the article?--Mariordo (talk) 02:15, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

First off I apologize, I was offline due to Irene so didn't have a chance to respond to the renaming, which I have no objection to, although I think the name is still no consensus and "peak car" has more use in the popular press and is more catchy so prefer it but not stuck on it. Welcome and encourage a total re-write of the article by an expert in the field of transportation, as you can tell I just found the major sources and listed them, it's a stub article. I'm not sure I understand what you quoted above, as it seems to support peak car. One thing that is confusing is different countries have different patterns and different studies focus on different scales. Aware this is a new idea and not central among mainstream transportation professionals, though have not found any substantial rebuttal to the papers, just some comments here and there. I'm not a fan of tagging articles unless discussion becomes intractable, so long as we're making progress I don't really see the article as being OR, if it would help I can move the two cited sources into a further reading or external link as they are not integral to the text. Green Cardamom (talk) 02:46, 2 September 2011 (UTC)


 * For the time being, leave it as it is. The main issue is that different studies cite different reasons for the slow down, and those related to gasoline prices and the economic crisis (like the Brookings study) are temporary, not permanent, so the comparison with peak oil is inappropriate (and also for this reason I prefer "Peak car use"). Also, based on the materials in the sources I read so far, a long term slow down in the US is mostly related with car ownership saturation and older population. In several European cities, congestion pricing (London & Stockholm) is a factor, and some cities have indeed increased substantially transit ridership. In the US the slight increase in transit ridership is more related with the financial crisis. Finally, I am looking carefully at the Australian study, which is actually doing the synthesis, and the claim that several cities around the world have increased their density (as an explanation) is pretty dubious, just compare 1960 against today. I will try to expand the edit keeping the finding within the scope of each publication. I expect to start doing the major re-write by Sep 5th, but please keep an eye, I will appreciate your feedback and suggestions.--Mariordo (talk) 03:32, 2 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Just to note that it is my London car-miles per head of population per year peaked in 1993 and have been falling since and are not therefore directly related to the congestion charge. To quote: "Metz, a former chief scientist at the Department for Transport, explains that the population density of London has been going up, but the number of car trips per day has stayed steady. In other words, car journeys per person are falling. "This reached its peak in the early 1990s, has been declining ever since and it's projected to go on declining as the population keeps growing," says Metz." Metz does however also say It's not clear yet why London and a few other places are experiencing a fall in car-use, but a number of social trends, transport policies and technologies appear to be having a cumulative effect. Car traffic has indeed also declined a lot since the charge was introduced but that is a separate story. Lets keep working on this interesting subject and watch out very carefully for POV and synthesis.PeterEastern (talk) 13:51, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

Table
What is the meaning of the table? What is decreasing? It should be more clear. --Ita140188 (talk) 08:57, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Good point! I have now added a clarification. Is that better? PeterEastern (talk) 13:42, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you! --Ita140188 (talk) 09:09, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

Definition
I have adjusted the definition in the lead. Firstly, I believe that it is more accurate to describe it as a hypothesis. Secondly, I think that although it is called 'peak car' it seems to be based on peak vehicles miles, not peak car miles but possibly I have not read the research thoroughly enough. Also.. I have removed 'peak travel' from the lead because I can see nothing that says that travel is going down, especially if one includes aviation and no claims in the research, but possibly I need to do some more studying on that. Finally, I have left the comparison with peak oil in there for now, but am dubious. Peak oil is not about voluntary reductions in oil use, but on limitation of extraction despite the best endeavors of the people who extract it. I would be happier to adjust or remove the sentence. PeterEastern (talk) 14:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * The Peak Oil mention is because the moniker 'Peak' is obviously derived from Peak Oil, so it makes sense to mention how the name derived so there is no inappropriate comparison made between the two, as you say any such comparison would be incorrect. It's an unfortunate reality that these two have similar names (Peak) so we can make an effort to clarify. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:50, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Agreed. PeterEastern (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * The Stanford paper is about travel miles, not just car usage. Thus the difference between "peak car" and "peak travel". The Stanford paper includes planes and other forms of transport. But it also looks at individuals and not vehicles, so if a car with 4 people travels 10 miles, it would be 40 travel miles, not 10 car miles (I believe that's how they do it). Green Cardamom (talk) 16:50, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Silly me; there is the term 'peak travel' in the title of the paper. Unfortunately, this paper that is not available for free, and even with a academic research pass (it will be 12 month following publication, which is not up yet). We will have to be careful to distinguish correctly between 'vehicle miles', 'private car vehicle miles', 'private car occupant miles' and 'passenger miles regardless of mode' in this article. Also between miles per head of population, or absolute miles. PeterEastern (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Right, probably just follow the studies in question since they take different approaches. There are only three that have ever been published on the topic and no books, the primary sources are pretty slim but that makes it easy to be comprehensive and accurate, and plenty of secondary sources for citation purposes. Green Cardamom (talk) 19:18, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * I have just added a bunch of other articles on the subject in the UK professional transport press, starting with a reference to 'peak car traffic dropping' from 2006. Most of these article do however need a subscription. PeterEastern (talk) 21:54, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Probably the best study is "Have we reached peak travel?" (2010) since it covers 8 nations, but the paper costs $$, fortunately someone has made a copy free online for reference purposes though I don't feel comfortable linking directly to it in the article. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:02, 26 April 2012 (UTC)


 * As for peak car vs peak vehicles, we just have to go with the most common usage, 'peak car' seems to be what most are calling it at the moment. If you include plane/bus/train.etc travel, it's obviously not accurate but for now I think we should go with the common term for the article name. Green Cardamom (talk) 16:50, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Out of curiosity, I have just done this check on trends in the usage of peak car, peak travel and peak oil using Google Ngram and the results are odd. Peak Oil is behaving as expected with a lovely exponential starting in about 2001. Peak car and peak travel are however much more consistent, and I suggest reflect many other composite phrases including the words in that order. For example I have found the following in Google books: "and indeed to deliberately create congestion to restrain off-peak car use" and also "Car + driver (ferry): £63 off-peak, £128 peak Car + driver (fast): £78 off-peak". Neither of which are the right sort of 'peak car' and many the test useless for our purposes. PeterEastern (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Peak car probably won't show up in Google Books too much since thus far it's been a few academic papers and science journalism articles. The whole phenomenon is still evolving. Saw a report the other day that in the US gasoline usage in 2011 was at 1997 levels, gas use peaked in 2007 and has been steeply dropping every month since. It is the first time since WWII this has happened. No one's sure why but there are half dozen contributing factors suggested. It's part of the same phenomenon, though the report never mentioned "peak car". Green Cardamom (talk) 19:18, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

If I may join this conversation, having added some suggested edits and additional references. (I am continuing to work on this and may suggest some more edits in the future). I think the point is that although the topic is a new one, it is growing very swiftly and with much interest. Definitions and sources and indeed interpretations are still rather fluid, with perhaps average annual distance travelled by car per head of the population (or, sometimes, per driver) emerging as the most widely used indicator. However much analysis in the context of policy discussion uses total distance travelled (not per head) as the key measure, since that most closely connects to congestion and environmental impacts. There are some important forums expected over the next few months, especially with a multi-country focus within Europe and I think the evidence base will develop quite quickly. --Hackneycab (talk) 10:54, 28 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Nice work, thanks for adding the references. It seems like a lot of the recent edits have been focused on London. The article is getting complex because there are regional studies mixing with international studies. It may be appropriate at some point to create a sub-section just for UK/London if the amount of material becomes overbalanced. Green Cardamom (talk) 18:09, 28 April 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree that it could be split out, but lets see what additional information there is for other places first. I think it might be interesting to then create sections for notable countries and cities and detail all the relevant research and trends for each place. We should however also highlight those places where traffic is still going up, which I guess may well be every other country in the world? What we must not do is create the impression that the places featured are typical if they are not. PeterEastern (talk) 21:51, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Graphs and charts
In my view, what this article needs now is some pretty graphs showing the peaks themselves. I understand that the figures from Phil Goodwin's papers could be available and have put in an indirect request to him on the subject. Possibly other people may have contact with other relevant researchers? I can also source some charts about the make-up of traffic over the main London road bridges between 2000 and 2010 which all show some dramatic changes. PeterEastern (talk) 21:44, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Need for further improvement
As I expressed above, I still have serious reservations about this article. Despite recent improvements, it looks like an academic paper (meaning primary research, see WP:PRIMARY and the do nots), where pieces of properly sourced material were brought together to support the Australian theory of peak car (see also WP:SYNTHESIS). Since I have been involved in the discussion before, I do not want to judge the article in technical grounds, but I am tagging it requesting an expert to check it. In the mean time, I believe in its current form, the article is completely missing the effects of this economic crisis (and previous ones) in road travel. During any crisis folks have less disposable income, particularly the unemployed, plus you add higher gasoline prices to the recipe, travel shrinks, whether due to model shift (more use of public transit) or just by cutting and optimizing trips. The Brookings paper talks about it but it is not mentioned in the article. Just Google, and you will find plenty about it. Check this one regarding the U.S. (for the sake of NPOV, this fact should have more emphasis). Finally, I strongly urge the regular editors to remove the country section list. As you read the sources provided, the travel reduction takes place at the city or metropolitan area level, not at the country level, so such list does not make sense. Just think of the rural areas or minor cities in those countries.--Mariordo (talk) 17:21, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * You may well have some good points. It is however relevant to this discussion that there has been a recent breakdown in our working relationship, which is most evident on talk:Road pricing, but which also spills over onto a number of related articles. This has resulted in me making a decision to back-off from contributing to any articles where you are active for the time being. I hope that you will be able to work with other contributors to improve this article. PeterEastern (talk) 05:49, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

I have added three references to the article (two research reports from the Australian Government and an excellent article from the Economist) that provide very good material to improve the NPOV of the article, and mainly, the reliability of its technical content. The global study (here) covered 25 countries. There is also a report from VTPI that can contribute with the improvement of this article. I think these edits will take plenty of time, so please any regular editor feel free to go ahead and introduce a summary of these reports. Right now I do not have the required time, but if nobody volunteers, I will do the edits in a few weeks from now. Also, I have read several of the reports and papers in the references, and some cherry picking in the findings needs to be removed or the context expanded.--Mariordo (talk) 02:50, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia model does not succeed by so-called "experts"
Wikipedia, unlike Citizendium, does not depend on experts in transportation, automobile travel, to swoop in and correct us amateurs and set us straight about facts. I doubt anybody has a firm grasp on this subject since it is changing rapidly, depends on many systems and subsystems, and varies considerably by culture and country. And I probably would have a problem if a so-called "expert" (self-appointed or credentialed by a university) rewrote the article, since there is a chance, if they referenced their publications elsewhere, of adding an original research bias to this article; further, there might be a conflict of interest. Rather, articles grow by many divergent non-experts--you and me and all of us--contributing by citing reliable sources, adding and subtracting information. That is Wikipedia's strength. It works better than the Citizendium model. Wikipedia's information is more accurate, verifiable, relevant and helpful. Please remove the "expert needed" tag which has been ineffectually sitting there for almost a year without helping one iota.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:12, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you think the "expert" tag exist for? The content "as it is" needs to be improved, we do not want to convey the wrong information.--Mariordo (talk) 18:59, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe this issue was triggered by a recent edit by User:Mariordo which reinstated an banner he created in May 2012 requesting input from a transport expert. Personally I am baffled his request for an expert given that his complaint above appears to be that this article is too academic in nature. Is this a subject is too complex for the average informed amateur to understand. Personally I have added a 'expert needed' tag to only one article, loading gauge, which was on a very technical subject for which I could find no clear understandable reference. For the record, I would probably be described as transport expert these days. Mariodo, you say that the article needs improving, sure, so lets remove the banner and improve it. PeterEastern (talk) 19:30, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * -Tomwsulcer, I think you are doing a great job improving the article. Once you are finished is OK to remove the tag. In the previous section I explained in detail what the problem with article was, and provided references that can help to deliver a balanced and NPOV of this hypothesis. Cheers.--Mariordo (talk) 20:33, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Far as I see, the experts we need are those whose subject is not so much transport, as future economics. Many consumer durables in the past have had peak production followed by decline; one that is classically used in rhetoric about obsolescence is the buggy whip. Automobiles themselves hit a peak about 1930 that was greatly surpassed after what turned out to be a dip of almost twenty years. Encyclopedia writers during that time would have been unwise to make predictions, but some forward-looking journalists in the middle 1940s were speculating that swarms of private airplanes would soon turn vast, beautiful, empty wilderness areas into sprawling commuter towns of such low density that millions of residents wouldn't see a neighbor's house from their windows. So, I figure the problem with this article is insufficient caution about WP:Crystal ball. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:34, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree, Jim, good idea to have more caution about crystal balls regarding the article. Yes we should watch out, lest swarms of private airplanes cloud our judgment! :) Another thought I had about this article was that it sometimes reads academic-y, like "This study said this" then "That study said that"; but it is not a content issue (I agree this info is important) but rather changing the tone somewhat? So maybe there could be a section devoted to academic research on the subject? Also, the country-specific stuff should possibly be grouped together; wondering if this organizational approach works for people.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:46, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * But it is an academic subject, it's a theory (or theories) published in academic papers. That's all. Our job is merely to report on what the experts say, not to be experts. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 17:14, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes it may have begun as an academic subject, and yes it is a theory, and yes academic research and transport experts have a role here, but I think as a subject it is more than a topic debated in journals but rather it has moved into pop culture, with serious attention in newspapers and with attention by government agencies charged with transportation (eg the FTA? in the USA). What I'm thinking is it should read less academic-y -- just a change in tone that is all -- and that way it might appeal to more of Wikipedia's readers.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 18:16, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It is fine to make it the prose less academic, but the reasons (cause and effect relationship) are being studied by academics and government agencies. Those are the reliable sources, not the speculative or wishful thinking pieces by activists and some members of the press. The original problem with the content was that it tried to highlight the reduction without a fair explanation of the possible variables in play, and in some cases, the content was cherry picked.--Mariordo (talk) 19:17, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree mostly, although I have a preference for WP:SECONDARY sources rather than WP:PRIMARY ones such as academic papers and government reports. Better to have an impartial once-removed analyst, looking at papers and reports, making conclusions that we cite, than for us to go straight to the primary stuff since sometimes that gets us into original research as we know, but of course everything is a judgment call, and using the best of both is probably the best way overall.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 20:14, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Peak car theory and saturation theory
I have reworked the lead and history sections to clarify that the 'peak car' theory is offered as something distinct from a 'saturation' model what might be called a 'pause and the continue rising' theory. The text had previously suggested that there were two variants of the peak car, one based on saturation and an alternative based on a decline. As someone who has followed the debate closely in the UK, I don't believe this to be the case. To declare my interests, I have an academic connection to UWE where Prof Phil Goodwin is based, and have discussed the subject a number of times with him and other policy makers. PeterEastern (talk) 05:58, 16 November 2013 (UTC)