Reducing private vehicle use

During the last 30 years, vehicle ownership and use in OECD countries has risen dramatically -- from 258,400 million kilometres travelled in 1970 in passenger cars to a doubling by 1991 to 506,800 million kilometres.

The Flemish town of Hasselt experimented in 1997 with providing free public transport. Eight times as many people used buses during the first six months of the scheme. One in six bus passengers said that they had stopped using their car as a result of the project. The report calculates that around 100,000 car journeys have been cut. Brussels is now considering a similar scheme. Paris recently introduced free transport on the metro for the jobless.