The global demand for motorized mobility

This paper provides a data set of global and regional passenger traffic volumes between 1960 and 1990 for the four major motorized modes of transport—cars, buses, railways, and aircraft—in eleven world regions. Based on these data, global long-term trends in motorized traffic volume and modal split are projected. The underlying constraints, originally employed in urban traffic planning and never before applied to global scenarios, assume that humans invest fixed budgets of money and time for travel on average. The paper also discusses implications of rising travel demand on world passenger transport energy use, on the global automobile motorization rate, and briefly deals with the long-term implications of unlimited mobility growth.