The Economist [unpaywalled]: “Cars can be a nuisance. Just ask anyone stuck on London’s M25 motorway or Houston’s Katy Freeway. More cars create more polluting traffic jams, and the amount of space needed to drive them, park them and re-fuel them could be used for more pleasant purposes, such as parks and recreational areas. It is no wonder, then, that plenty of urban visionaries hype up walkability, or what is sometimes called a “15-minute city”, where residents can fulfill most of their needs without driving. And yet the world can’t seem to kick the driving habit. A study of around 850m people from 794 cities across the world found that more than half of the respondents still commute to work by car every day. Variations in transport tend to follow regional patterns.” “The 100 least active cities in the study are all found in North America.”

• Source study – free to read – Large cities are less efficient for sustainable transport: The ABC of mobility Rafael Prieto-Curiel, Juan P. Ospina. The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts on its population, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce automobile dependency is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here we model the use of different modes of transport in a city by aggregating active mobility (A), public transport (B) and cars (C), thus expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 60 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that outside the US, longer distances experienced in large cities reduce the propensity of active mobility and of cars, but public transport is more prominent. For cities in the US, roughly 90\% of its mobility depends on cars, regardless of city size. Further, income is strongly related to automobile dependency. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37\% more journeys by car.
• The paper has it’s own website with the visualizations – upaywalled: https://citiesmoving.com/visualizations/