At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the automobile is starting to turn out to be surprising also a discomfort, and, almost as serious as this, a discomfort with both economic and environmental costs. Traffic, casualty, pollution (noise, atmospheric, visual or global) and the very space that its presence and use demand in the service of the individual citizen are making it unsustainable and the target of a necessary, perhaps inevitable, obsolescence while mode of transport in urban areas. Are we thus faced with a paradigm shift?

From the international instances in which the problem of climate change to the municipal management of urban space is being debated, today the automobile appears as a pretext for a movement, although perhaps still dispersed and not generalized, in the sense of finding new strategies, techniques or forms of mobility, which are linked to the established model of individual transport, which will inevitably have to be converted – both technologically and in its use regimes. The new conceptions of transport policies for urban spaces are beginning to point to fundamental changes in mobility patterns. But how do the citizens, everyday users of the car, perceive this change? What is your awareness of the problems generated by the daily and indiscriminate use of the car and what are your attitudes towards the changes that are announced?

These questions are the starting point of this study and the timing seems to be particularly timely. In Lisbon and Porto, measures are beginning to emerge, perhaps still disconnected and poorly integrated, but nonetheless they show if not political will, at least awareness of the inevitability of facing the automobile as a source of problems and of promoting the use of public transport – assuming that in this category it ranges from collective mass transport to individual occasional transport (such as taxis or rental cars). Moreover, the creation of the so-called Metropolitan Transport Authorities for these two metropolitan areas does not fail to reveal, at the very least, the awareness that, in terms of local transport policy, at least it is necessary to change scale in the definition and treatment of problems . Also under the commitments under the Kyoto Protocol are new measures to penalize the use of cars and encourage greater use of alternative forms of individual and collective transport.

But the orientation changes that emerge in the transport policy imply social acceptance and an effective change of behavior in the relation as the automobile, mainly on the part of the adults and young people, every day moving, steering wheel in the hands, to arrive at a place of work, study or leisure. Even on the assumption that this change is coherent, exemplary and coherent in the political and organizational spheres, these changes are rarely peaceful or free from the confrontation of diverse interests, desires, alternatives and perceptions. After all, the car plays a specific social function and is deeply rooted in our daily lives and, if its uses become ‘deviant’, in the title of this Project, at the end of the day, citizens’ attitudes and behaviors are the central element of any change that meets the idea of ​​sustainable development.

Surveys such as the ones that were carried out in the Observatoire with a thematic focus on the environmental problem, show that the Portuguese, despite having their favorite means of transport in the car, recognize
the strong impact of its use, not only in the global environment but especially in the urban environment, where it appears as a major responsible for the degradation of the quality of life and daily life in large cities and metropolitan areas. These evidences are already a first sign of the social and symbolic contradictions of an apparently paradoxical relationship, although it can not be said that, in a generalized way, the experience of this relation is thus perceived.

Emphasizing the individual and collective causes and motivations, subjective and objective, for the use or uses that we give the car in a country where the burden of individual transport is a strategic objective of the investigation that this report gives. It is not the specific purpose of this study to
alternative forms of collective mobility, exemplary measures such as the contributory potential of the individual transport sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not beyond our expectations.

In fact, not only are the new environmental challenges, those associated with climate change, but also the more direct problems of the urban environment from which they arise, the tax framework on motor vehicles and even possible initiatives to restrict or localize motor vehicle traffic. At stake must also be an understanding effort that contributes to a more integrated and strategic vision of the problems identified here that adds several dimensions of public policies, so that, as is not uncommon among us, what is restricted or recovers on the one hand is not being promoted or disrupted on the other, for reasons that the logic of the division of political-administrative work does not imply. In any case, this project is not intended to be comprehensive at this point. It is a question of identifying the factors that condition the social and cultural availability for the change in this specific sector of the modern daily life that symbolically denominated as of the “uses and desusos of the individual transport”.

Associated Publications:

O Automóvel – Usos e Desusos (Diapositivos)”

O Automóvel – Usos e Desusos do Transporte Individual (Estudos)“