Ecomento.com: Are cities outgrowing the automobile? Gilles Vesco, the visionary politician who introduced the Velo’v bike sharing program to the French city of Lyon a decade ago certainly thinks so. Today, he talks about “the new mobility” and envisions cities where people no longer rely on private cars but rather on public transport, shared cars, and bicycles.
Thanks to the paradigm shift brought on by our ability to access data in real time on our smart phones, Vesco anticipates a revolution that will transform not just transportation but cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says.
In Vesco’s cities of the future, “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress. It will be a more walkable city.” He says, “Digital information is the fuel of mobility. Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone.”
Today in Lyon, 20% fewer cars enter the city every day. Even though the population is expected to increase, Vesco thinks that number will drop by another 20% in the next 10 years. Parking areas that used to line the river have been replaced with bike paths and green space. He expects that trend to continue.
Lyon is hardly alone. Phrases like “multi-modal” and “interconnectivity” are popular with urban planners in cities around the world. In Birmingham, England – long ground zero for the British auto industry – the Birmingham Connected program is exploring ways of reducing the number of cars in the city.
City planners in Munich, Germany anticipate that city residents will not need cars at all in the future. They foresee a city where bicycles and more efficient public transport will be the norm and residents who need to make occasional trips out of the city will hire a car, use Uber, or join a car club.
London is moving boldly into the future with plans to install a bicycle superhighway along the banks of the Thames that will let people cycle to work in less time than it takes to drive or ride the subway.
Everywhere, attitudes are changing, if slowly. Marshall McLuhan once said, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” The automobile as a tool of social mobility had a powerful influence on societies by encouraging the rise of suburban living. Today, people would rather do without a car that without a smart phone.
Those new digital tools will slowly supplant the culture of the automobile and shape the urban civilizations of the future. For those in the business of manufacturing automobiles, there are storm clouds gathering on the horizon and a lot of worried faces in corporate boardrooms.
