While personal travel seems to be growing inexorably, along with car ownership, other transport parameters are invariant: average travel time, trip rate, and the proportion of household income spent on travel. Past growth in personal travel may, therefore, be attributed to longer trips carried out at higher speeds and made possible by higher expenditure. For the future, the need to limit environmental detriments associated with the transport system requires the diversion of growing personal expenditure, from further increasing the quantity of travel to enhancing the quality of the journey. Policies and technologies to achieve this objective are discussed, including discriminatory road pricing. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.