Past trends and future scenarios for passenger travel demand in regions of West Germany

The shape and structure of passenger travel observed in regions of West Germany is very diverse as a result of the personal and household characteristics of the travellers, the settlement structure, the topography, the quality of transport supply and various other but less important factors. Besides, conditions in transport have changed a lot with the dissemination of the car in the last 25 years. Thus, since the late nineteen sixties, planning and policy strategies have been aimed at controlling the growth of inner‐city car use and thereby mitigating the negative safety and environmental impacts of automotive transport. But the prevailing promotion of both public and private transport has not provided long‐term solutions to traffic‐related problems. This paper will first look at some general trends in transport demand and will then focus on urban areas, describing, with a few examples, the results that transport policies have been able to achieve. The second part of the paper will present two studies that have been used to forecast future transport demand under different transport policy scenarios. These studies were undertaken for the city of West Berlin and the state of North Rhine‐Westphalia and used considerably different sets of policy measures. They show the transport policy strategies derived under the specific local conditions and the results which were estimated for shifts in transport demand.