THE CAR AND THE ELEPHANT

On a typical working day in 2004, 27 million journeys were made in the Greater London area. Of this, 42% were by car, 21% on foot, 18% by bus and 10% by underground.1 In the same year 60% of all the households in the Greater London region had access to one or more cars accounting for the 2.4 million cars registered in the city in 2004.2 On the face of these statistics London may well be considered something of a Motopia:3 a city defined by its automobile use. However, statistics can often paint misleading images. Of the 1,069 miles of trunk road in the city, just 37 miles are motorway 4 and average speeds in the central area during 2003 were just 10.6 mph:5 slower than twenty years before and hardly any different from those a century earlier.6 Despite one hundred years of the car, London is still caught in apparent tension between a public which desires a lifestyle based on the automobile and a city that has failed to successfully respond to such demands. The influence of the car on..