Limits in City Space Constraints Car Population Growth: Implications for Positive Rate of Car Growth in Size-Limited Cities

Abstract

Managing the expectations of city dwellers for cars and the actual car population as well as traffic congestion are key questions for most cities around the world. Does economic and population growth modelling combined with land usage studies posit the possibility of positive rate of growth for cars in cities? Do the facts concur with the postulations? The answer is no. Specifically, each car occupies valuable space in a city, whether on the roads or in carparks in the city. Thus, considering that a city collectively decides to allocate specific amount of space for cars, there exist only a finite car population based on existing carpark space as well as surface area devoted to roads. While road usage is a transient form of car storage for a city, the larger question is the economic cost of allocating land for building carparks to accommodate a rising number of cars in a positive rate of car growth model. Space allocated for cars thus exerts a severe economic externality to economic growth and activities in a city, as it displaces other possible land use such as for industry, commerce, housing, education, and recreation. Hence, given a specified amount of space in a city, positive rate of car growth is fallacious as each car occupies fixed amount of space whether on the roads or in carparks. Enabling car population to grow would only add to the collective economic burden of maintaining the car population such as expanding carparks, widening roads, coping with traffic congestion and the inefficiencies caused, and displacement of other forms of land use such as housing and recreation by carparks and roads.

Keywords: externality, road use, carparks, car population growth, space constraint