All in all, it is unlikely that auto growth will continue at the same pace as experienced in the 1960s. Even discounting the influences mentioned above, it is hard to imagine that households will simply add more and more autos regardless of their size and needs. A saturation point seems more likely, but it will be necessary to follow registration data closely and to examine small-area data over the next few years to make a realistic projection of auto use in the future.
One thing is clear: the growing inequality of income in the Region is evident in patterns of auto ownership. In the core, car-less households have increased over the past ten years. Today one-quarter of the Region’s households have two or three autos (in contrast to about 15 percent in 1960). But one-third of the Region’s households remain without autos - as they did a decade ago.
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