The future mobility of the world population

On average a person spends 1.1 h per day traveling and devotes a;predictabl e fraction of income to travel. We show that these time and money budgets a re stable over space and time and can be used for projecting future levels of mobility and transport mode. The fixed travel money budget requires that mobility rises nearly in proportion with income. Covering greater distance s within the same fixed travel time budget requires that travelers shift to faster modes of transport. The choice of future transport modes is also co nstrained by path dependence because transport infrastructures change only slowly. In addition, demand for low-speed public transport is partially det ermined by urban population densities and land-use characteristics. We pres ent a model that incorporates these constraints, which we use for projectin g traffic volume and the share of the major motorized modes of transport - automobiles, buses, trains and high speed transport (mainly aircraft)- for 11 regions and the world through 2050. We project that by 2050 the average world citizen will travel as many kilometers as the average West European i n 1990. The average American's mobility will rise by a factor of 2.6 by 205 0, to 58,000 km/year. The average Indian travels 6000 km/year by 2050, comp arable with West European levels in the early 1970s. Today, world citizens move 23 billion km in total; by 2050 that figure grows to 105 billion. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.