THE BEST YEAR EVER:

Wheels come off an American romance: Is America beginning to fall out of love with the automobile (Geoffrey Lean, 1 Jan 2010, Daily Telegraph)

[N]ext week a new study will report that the number of US cars actually dropped last year, after a century of apparently unstoppable growth.

The Washington-based Earth Policy Institute – a small think tank with a knack of spotting new trends – will announce that the US passenger-vehicle fleet fell from 250 million to 246 million in 2009. Nothing on this scale has happened before; it stagnated in 1998 and fell slightly during the 1991 recession, but otherwise has been growing by an average of 3.69 million annually since 1960.