What should the role of electric vehicles (EVs) be in cities today, from both an individual and broader societal perspective? This commentary provides insights into this question using quantitative urban travel data showing the relative role of private motorised transport, public transport and non-motorised modes.
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The first part explains the magnitude of the automobile dependence problem in cities around the world, while the second part reviews the expectations being placed on EVs to help solve this.
Automobile dependence: A wicked urban problem
Vehicle dependence is for most cities a seemingly intransigent problem. This is revealed here for 41 cities through modal splits for cars, motorcycles, public transport, walking and cycling using actual distances travelled by each mode (Person-Kilometres Travelled or PKT), not just the number of trips. PKT represents all people’s travel to meet daily needs (Figure 1).
Examining Figure 1 below shows that even in Copenhagen, the poster child for a cycling city, cars still account for 72 per cent of all travel.
Only Vienna, Prague and Berlin have about 55 to 60 per cent of total personal mobility by car.
Singapore, a compact, dense city with superb public transport, still has around 47% by car and about 55 per cent if motorcycles are added. More than half the cities studied are 80 + per cent. Hong Kong significantly breaks this 50 per cent threshold with only 15% of travel needs by car. It is totally built for non-car access. However, between Hong Kong’s meagre 15 per cent car use and 50 per cent or higher in other cities, there are incalculable opportunities for cities to reduce their need for cars.
In our book The End of Automobile Dependence, Peter Newman and I argued that automobile dependence has been overcome when cities have about 75 per cent car travel-i.e. for a significant amount of travel, residents have convenient other choices besides a car, though they may own one.
Overcoming automobile dependence does not imply that all auto-based problems are overcome. However, it shows that people in such cities can use very good public transport, ride a bike or walk in relative safety and comfort. They are not forced into dependence on cars. However, most industrialised cities are far from overcoming automobile dependence.
The EV silver bullet?
This problem presents an alluring role for EVs. EVs have lower overall energy requirements, potential freedom from liquid or solid hydrocarbons, depending on how electricity is generated, significantly reduced carbon emissions output based on full life cycle accounting (despite higher energy requirements in their production), as well as much reduced traffic noise and local emissions.
But we need to ensure that EVs do not hijack the sustainable transport discourse. Is it sensible for national e-mobility programs to simply aim to replace the age of oil’s huge fleets of petrol and diesel cars and the burdensome driving they do, with electric ones to help solve the climate crisis and other auto-based problems?
One could argue that because it seems hard to reduce the car’s contribution to urban travel, we should just leave it to EVs to solve all the car’s problems. Evidence of the much wider impacts of automobile dependence shows this position untenable. The urban sprawl associated with car dependence, its voracious appetite for road space and parking, traffic congestion and liveability impacts cannot be solved by changing to electric cars.
Cities demonstrate that lowering car use far exceeds the energy, carbon emissions, and other advantages of EVs. There is a world of difference between the sustainability and liveability of cities such as Manchester (88 per cent) and Copenhagen (72 per cent) (Kenworthy, 2025) in terms of car use. The scope and scale of improvements towards lower car ownership and use in cities is immense.
Additionally, it is a much less daunting and manageable task to replace a fraction of today’s car ownership and use with EVs than it is with current fleets. Low auto-dependence can help clean up the public realm, reduce congestion and make cities healthier, greener and more liveable for all.
Furthermore, given the host of social, environmental and economic issues surrounding electric car production, with its demands for many rare earth minerals and other expensive materials, often from places with appalling labour conditions, EVs are not a silver bullet.
EVs are better than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in energy and carbon, as Likeleli Seitlheko demonstrates for Canada. However, the data on cities show that the greatest need is to reduce the role of cars.
Cars and their many negative impacts are much too high for cities to cope with, electric or not. It is foolish to think that we will fundamentally address the problems of automobile dependence simply by substituting all existing cars and their travel with EVs. What we most need to build into cities is as little need for a car as possible, which means exploiting all urban planning and transport policies that reduce car dependence.
Electric vehicles should be seen as more of a “mopping up operation” to undertake the remains of urban car use. And critically, we must avoid rebound effects if people perceive EVs as environmentally safer and/or cheaper, leading to more car driving. Such a rebound effect would be akin to an analogous situation in Singapore. Despite very low car ownership (116/1000 persons), annual travel per car is high (18,486 km per car per annum – Vienna: 10,899 km, Berlin 8665 km, Prague 7025 km) due to the extremely high cost of car ownership – people conclude that “since I paid so much for it, I am going to use it a lot”.
The car can indeed be a very good servant when used strategically – equally, it is a very demanding and destructive master when it becomes an absolute necessity. Small electric cars are a better means of private motorised transport than others for many good reasons, but the fewer EVs we need, the better cities will be.
