International Comparisons of Car Ownership

Via Felix Salmon, a helpful dataset that allows me to put together this chart, showing car ownership rates in a few wealthy, sparsely populated countries:

This isn’t like comparing the United States to Denmark or the Netherlands. These are other countries with low population densities and plenty of room for development to sprawl across. But still, the consumption and lifestyle patterns appear to be quite different, with the American model much less ecologically sustainable than what’s happening in Canada or Iceland. Note that Iceland has so few people that there aren’t even any trains. There’s just a decent swathe of the population living in nice walkable communities.