The End of Automobile Dependence: How Cities Are Moving Beyond Car-Based Planning
About this book
The End of Automobile Dependence: How Cities Are Moving Beyond Car-Based Planning Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy Island Press, 2015 For most of the twentieth century, the story of urban planning was also the story of the automobile. Cities were shaped — sometimes violently reshaped — to accommodate the car: highways punched through historic neighborhoods, parking lots consuming downtown acreage, sprawling suburbs designed with no purpose other than to be driven through. Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy, two of the world's foremost authorities on urban transportation, spent the better part of four decades documenting this condition and its consequences.
Their landmark 1989 work, Cities and Automobile Dependence, gave the problem its name and established a rigorous empirical framework for understanding it. Their 1999 follow-up, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, pointed toward solutions. This 2015 volume, the third and culminating entry in the trilogy, delivers something unexpected: genuine good news.
The era of automobile dependence, the authors argue, is drawing to a close — and not merely because planners have willed it so, but because measurable, data-driven shifts in urban travel behavior indicate a structural transformation already underway. The book opens with a thorough examination of what the authors call 'peak car use' — the empirical observation that per-capita vehicle travel has plateaued or declined in cities across the developed world, including in the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe, even as populations and incomes have continued to grow. Newman and Kenworthy draw on updated transportation and land use data from 44 global cities to document these patterns.
They identify six interlocking forces driving the shift: the saturation of road capacity making additional car use irrational; rising fuel prices eroding the affordability of car-dependent lifestyles; changing generational preferences as younger urban dwellers increasingly opt out of car ownership; the revival of central cities as desirable places to live and work; substantial investment in rail-based public transit systems around the world; and the broader emergence of a knowledge economy that concentrates activity in dense, walkable urban cores rather than dispersed suburban campuses. A central theoretical contribution of the book is the elaboration of what Newman and Kenworthy call the 'theory of urban fabrics.' Every city, they propose, is not a single, uniform entity but rather a layered composite of three distinct fabrics, each with its own logic, scale, and mobility requirements. The walking fabric — found in historic urban cores, dense inner-city neighborhoods, and traditional town centers — is organized around human-scale movement, with narrow streets, mixed uses, frequent intersections, and densities high enough to support daily life within a short walk.
The transit fabric extends outward along corridors served by rail or rapid bus systems; it clusters activity around stations and can sustain moderate densities across a much larger geographic area. The automobile fabric — the dominant form of twentieth-century suburban development — is organized around the car and functionally incompatible with walking or transit, characterized by wide arterials, cul-de-sacs, separated land uses, and low-density sprawl. The insight is that most cities contain all three fabrics in varying proportions, and that the central challenge of contemporary urban planning is not the replacement of one fabric with another but the strategic reinforcement of walking and transit fabrics in places where they have been suppressed or never allowed to develop.
The book devotes substantial attention to the question of implementation — specifically, why cities that recognize the dysfunction of automobile dependence so often fail to move beyond it. Newman and Kenworthy examine the institutional, political, and financial barriers that entrench car-based planning: transportation modeling tools that project future car demand as a given rather than a variable; highway engineering standards that default to the accommodation of traffic regardless of context; the political economy of road construction contracting; and the difficulty of coordinating land use and transportation decisions across fragmented metropolitan governance structures. They find, however, that these barriers are increasingly being overcome, and they offer case studies from cities on multiple continents — including Copenhagen, Singapore, Bogotá, Curitiba, and various American cities — where deliberate policy choices have catalyzed the rebuilding of walking and transit fabrics.
The book also addresses emerging cities in the developing world, particularly the rapidly urbanizing regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Here the stakes are especially high: the transportation infrastructure decisions made today in cities like Nairobi, Jakarta, or Lagos will shape urban form and mobility patterns for generations. Newman and Kenworthy argue that developing cities have a genuine opportunity to leapfrog the automobile-dependent model that wealthy countries are now struggling to unwind, provided that policy frameworks, financing mechanisms, and professional planning culture can be aligned around transit-oriented development and compact urban form.
In its final chapters, the book confronts the 'troubling prognosis' that some readers might draw from its analysis: that while the trend away from automobile dependence is real, it is also uneven, fragile, and potentially reversible. They argue that the transition requires active stewardship — investment in rail systems, reform of land use regulations, redesign of streets, and a fundamental shift in how transportation planning conceives of its own purpose. The conclusion paints a picture of life after automobile dependence: cities that are denser, more walkable, more equitable, and more resilient, in which the car remains available but is no longer the organizing principle of daily life.
This book is essential reading for urban planners, transportation engineers, policy analysts, sustainability researchers, and anyone seeking to understand the structural forces reshaping cities in the twenty-first century. It is simultaneously a work of empirical scholarship, a theoretical contribution to urban studies, and a practical guide to the planning decisions that will determine the character of urban life for coming generations.