In this post, I’m sharing some data on number of vehicles, their density taking into account the population, and other interesting metrics for a selected number of countries around the world. The visualizations and analysis will take you on a journey of telling the stories and takeaways from the numbers. The selected countries presented here are from Americas, Asia, Europe, and Eurasia.
Data sources: Data were gathered from various reliable sources, including government statistics, industry reports, and academic research such as: APTA, United Nations World Population Prospects, U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics Canada, Office for National Statistics (ONS), OICA (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs Automobiles), AAA, Federation of Automobile Associations of India, World Bank, International Transport Forum and others. All data relate to end of December 2023. Actual numbers vary slightly depending on the sources. The vehicle numbers include cars, trucks, motorcycles, SUVs and other vehicles that are registered and are for the road. Numbers are estimated and are rounded to specific decimal precision based on context.
Let’s first take a look at the raw, sheer number of cars (I’m using the term ‘cars’ loosely for all vehicle types mentioned above) for the selected countries.
China has the most, followed by the USA. However, that doesn’t offer much context on the density of cars as the number of people in China are about 1.42 Billion compared to USA’s 333 Million. The next visualization shows us the population of these countries.
India is the most populous country in the world, followed closely by China. The remaining countries are far less populous. While I won’t go into the human population density in this blog post, it’s worth providing the context of land areas for these countries in relation to each other. Following chart shows the land areas in both square kilometers (blue bars) and square miles (orange bars).
At this junction, you might ask: How many vehicles are there in a given space for each country? In other words, if all the cars were distributed evenly across the available land of a country, how many cars would be there in a square mile of land? The next chart provides the answer to that.
We see that Japan has the highest vehicle density by land area (not by by person, which is tackled below) followed by United Kingdom (Germany’s desnsity is very similar to UK’s). On average, distributed evenly, there would be about 550 cars in Japan within a square mile whereas there would be 81 cars in the same space in China, and about 76 in the USA. This gives us a view to the intersection of land size and vehicle density of a country. We can also visualize the data in a simple line chart as follows:
Let’s now get back to people. Given the population of the countries what is their vehicle density? The next two visualizations answer just that in two different ways: number of cars per person, and number of cars per 1,000 people.
The above chart is telling us the number of cars on average per person in that country. We can now see that although China has the most number of vehicles, and India has most number of people, USA has the highest number of cars per person…not far away from a 1:1 ratio of car:people. And we see despite the most number of cars in China, density of cars is far less, and India has the least (in this list of countries).
Put another way, there are 838 cars per 1,000 people in the USA. There are 36 cars per 1,000 people in India and so on. Despite the smaller population size and much smaller land size compared to others, Japan has the second most vehicle density per person.
We can get express the metric in yet another way to answer the question how many people would have to share a vehicle in these countries? The following chart gives us the answer visually. That would have the same as asking: one vehicle needs to be shared by how many people in that country?
It’s no surprise that the countries with the highest vehicle density also have the lowest number of people who need to share a car. In fact, the order of this visualization is exactly flipped from the one before this (when sorted). In China, there’s a car for every 5 people (4.8) whereas in the USA, there’s a car for almost every person (1.2). Due to the income inequality, a combination of public transportation, and rural lifestyles, despite the population similarity between China and India, there are far fewer cars available for people (1 vehicle per about 28 persons) in India.
When it comes to public transportation, it’s really difficult to quantify that metric as there are many factors that need to be considered: modes of transportation (waterways, tunnels, ferry, air, cable cars, buses, trains), affordability of such, network and infrastructure of such, frequency of services, and crucially, reasonably accurate data for all of these which were hard to find. However, we can confidently assert based on urban data and observation that there generally is a direct, inverse relationship between public transportation density, and private vehicle ownership.
With some cursory digging on public transportation data, I found that in the USA about 34 million people use public transportation per day. Public transportation in the USA is primarily concentrated in urban areas. Amtrak provides inter-city rail services, but the frequency and coverage can vary significantly across regions.
Russia boasts one of the world’s largest railway networks, with over 85,600 kilometers of track. The national railway company, Russian Railways, operates high-speed and intercity trains, as well as commuter rail networks. Cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg have extensive metro systems, bus routes, and tramways. Just Moscow alone has 19 million trips on public transport per day. Approximately 57% of Russians use public transportation regularly due to its affordability, speed, and coverage (that number is very likely higher).
In Japan, there’s a highly developed public transportation system, especially in urban areas.
Italy has extensive public transportation network, particularly in major cities like Rome and Milan.
Canada also has many options in major cities. Canada’s public transportation network is more evenly distributed across urban and rural areas compared to USA.
Germany can boast extensive public transportation network with high ridership rates.
UK has extensive subway (“tube”) and bus network — over 1.3 Billion riders (1.3^9) annually on National Rail alone there.
Brazil’s public transportation varies widely by region. Reliable data was not easily available.
China has an extensive public transportation network with metro systems connecting major cities.
India’s majority of public transport relies on buses, with several cities developing metro systems. In the future, I may do a more thorough analysis on public transportation if data is obtained. Meanwhile, you may also find the related post linked below interesting.
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