Half the people of cities living in New York, Toronto and London do not own cars, and the heyday of the car is now past, it is claimed.

Yet the private car is still destroying cities, turning streets into kill-zones for the vulnerable, polluting the air and burning up increasingly scarce fossil fuels, according to Canadian author Taras Grescoe.

North America is the worst example of car mania and the statistics are truly shocking, according to his book Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile.

In the US – “the most extravagantly motorised nation in the history of the world” – vehicles now outnumber drivers by five to four.

Los Angeles, once hailed as an “autopia”, is now the most congested city in the US with drivers wasting 72 hours a year stuck in traffic jams.

Americans now spend nine years of their lives sitting in their cars, and the pollution they produce kills 30,000 US citizens each year.

But change is in the air. In 2009, the total number of cars in the US declined.

Trams, which used to be the main mode of public transport in American cities, are being reintroduced in such unlikely places as Houston and Denver.

Many young Americans are moving from car-dominated suburbia into the cities.

Many are also choosing not to learn to drive but are instead relying on bicycles and public transport.

New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, uses the train a couple of times a week but is taken to the subway stop by chauffeured SUV, the inaptly named “sports utility vehicle”.

London is only mentioned in passing for its “criminally expensive” Tube tickets, the failed experiment of privatisation in 2003 and the lack of air conditioning which is “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Moscow is criticised for its choked roads and “traffic hell” although its palatial Metro, built in the 1930s, is “designed to ennoble and uplift the long-suffering straphangers of the world”. In the Russian capital it’s the only way to travel.

The “fantastic clockwork” of Tokyo’s transport system is “the world’s best example of a transit metropolis … a city built, and now kept running, by its trains”.

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of the Colombian capital of Bogota, said: “I believe a city is more civilised not when it has highways but when a child on a tricycle is able to move about everywhere with ease and safety.”

By contrast, public transport is a democratic and a social experience. “To use public transport is to know how to cooperate with other people, how to behave in a public space.”

Good public transport is essential to the success of any world city.

Information from PD Smith’s article in The Observer 8 September 2012.

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
by Taras Grescoe
320pp, Times Books, £16.99