In most developed countries urban mobility and car traffic have stagnated since the early 2000s. In France, various data sources show that the trend can be attributed primarily to people living in large urban areas: trips have become less frequent (with unbroken workdays) and less exclusively taken by car (as more young adults adopt multimodal behaviours), and car ownership is decreasing in denser areas, and to a lesser extent, in suburbs. Does this levelling-off of traffic suggest that the saturation point is near? Is this a structural phenomenon (population ageing, etc.) or a cyclical one linked to rising and volatile fuel prices and the recession? We shall explore these issues in the light of data collected in the Urban Areas of Montreal and Lille, and then move on to a comparison with two Mexican cities, Ciudad Juarez on the northern border of Mexico where the level of motorization is high compared to Puebla, our second Mexican case study, where motorization is still low. To each city we apply demographic based projections models in order to consider the extent to which, and in what timeframe, the trends observed in developed cities could spread southward to the emerging economies.
