The Post-Motordom World: Arriving soon to a city near you?

Cities around the world are coming to the same conclusion: they’d be better off with far fewer cars. So what’s behind this seismic shift in our urban lifestyles? Stephen Moss goes on an epic (car-free) journey to find out.

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Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. …

Vesco, the politician responsible for sustainable transport in Lyon, played a leading role in introducing the city’s Vélo’v bike-sharing scheme a decade ago. It has since been replicated in cities all over the world. Now, though, he is convinced that digital technology has changed the rules of the game, and will make possible the move away from cars that was unimaginable when Vélo’v launched in May 2005. “Digital information is the fuel of mobility,” he says. “Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone.” …

The Vélo’v scheme is being extended, car clubs that use electric vehicles are being encouraged, and what Vesco calls a “collaborative platform” has been built to encourage ride-sharing by matching drivers with people seeking lifts. There is, he says, no longer any need for residents of Lyon to own a car. And he practises what he preaches – he doesn’t own one himself. …

This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted wisdom across the developed world. “The height [of buildings] is going up; density is going up; borough policies and London plan policies are all about intensification and densification of land uses,” explains Ben Kennedy, Hackney’s principal transport planner. “We’re probably going the way of Manhattan. People live very close and they don’t travel at all because everything is on their doorstep; the population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you could ever want. We’re slowly going in that direction in London.” …

Generation Y, the so-called millennials now in their 20s and early 30s who have come of age in the digital era, seem less wedded to possessions than their baby boomer predecessors. Surveys show that the one object that is prized is the smartphone, and the future of transport is likely to be based not on individually owned cars but on “mobility as a service” – a phrase supposedly coined by another Finn, Sampo Hietanen, chief executive of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Finland. Consumers will, so the theory goes, use their smartphones to check ultra-detailed travel news, locate car-club cars or bikes, check for parking spaces,call up Uber drivers, and arrange shared rides. Who needs a personally owned car? …

Stephen Bayley, who has written several books on car design, is convinced the age of the car is coming to an end. “It’s five minutes to midnight for the private car,” he says. “It’s no longer rational to use cars in cities like London.” Cars were invented as agents of freedom, but to drive (and, worse, to have to park) one in a city is tantamount to punishment.

Bayley also believes the arrival of driverless cars will further undermine the driving experience. Sex, beauty, status, freedom – all the words which advertisers have tried to associate with cars over the past 50 years – have been replaced by mere functionality. …

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Peak car. This is a phrase I hear again and again. The question of whether there is now an irreversible move away from cars towards other forms of transport is central to the cars-in-cities debate. Glenn Lyons, founder of the Centre for Transport and Society at the University of the West of England, is in no doubt that something fundamental is happening. “For the past decade, predating the global economic downturn, car traffic has been flatlining. This is true not only of the UK but of a number of other developed economies around the world.” …

Holding out against what is rapidly becoming the orthodoxy is Stephen Glaister, former professor of transport at Imperial College and about to retire as director of the Royal Automobile Club Foundation: “Until the 2008 recession, broadly speaking there was continued growth [in car travel],” he insists. “Then the young age group were very badly hit economically, so it’s not surprising their take-up of driving licences is falling. To what extent that’s also to do with some fundamental change in attitudes remains to be seen. Let’s see what happens when they get to 30 and have a family.”

Glaister points out that the Department for Transport is still assuming an overall increase in traffic of more than 25% by 2040. “You can make different assumptions about oil prices and demographic effects,” he says, “but whichever way you look at it, you’re going to get substantial traffic growth.” Stephen Joseph, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport, counters that the DfT is hooked on out-of-date thinking: “What we are still battling with is a bunch of policies, design manuals and ways of thinking that are driven by 1989; that where we’re going to end up is Los Angeles and that’s the natural order of things. But that’s not true. It’s not even true worldwide: there are examples, particularly in parts of Latin America, of cities that have been built around buses rather than cars. The idea that the natural end of development is Los Angeles – even Los Angeles doesn’t think that now.” …

Disruption is coming – especially if Google and Apple bring their experiments with driverless cars to fruition – and there are sure to be casualties, but for the moment the manufacturers are citing the old adage that every crisis is an opportunity. No one wants to be left behind – Autolib’ is poised to come into London with a fleet of electric cars, and will also take over the running of the charging infrastructure in the capital – but eventually consolidation in the car-club market seems inevitable, with a few national players dominating, as with mobile phones. This is an industry in which scale will be everything.

“We’re going to see a very different state of play over the next couple of decades,” says Richard Brown, manager of Ford’s advanced product group, “and the car is clearly going to be part of the internet of things that everybody is talking about. You have to be prepared to embrace the potential disruption and be excited by the challenges that lie ahead. We’ve seen over the past five or 10 years a number of companies that didn’t recognise the changes that were happening around them – and they don’t exist any more. Look at the Kodaks and Nokias of this world. We don’t want to allow ourselves to become a Nokia.”

But what’s the timescale? Dan Hill, executive director of futures and best practice at Futures Cities Catapult offers a qualified answer. “It depends on the city. Cities like Helsinki, Copenhagen, Zurich, those small cores with a 2 million exterior [population]; in the next five years I think we’ll be seeing really coherent mobility-as-service offers. They’re already halfway there – they’ve got Zipcar and Uber, really good public transport systems, are very walkable and bikeable, and have a strong public policy on carbon emissions and making a safer city. So I can’t see why in five years we wouldn’t have reached a significant transition point.”

Those, though, are the easy ones. “With somewhere like London, which is 15 Copenhagens in size, it’s really difficult to say. It depends on the decisions that Transport for London makes, and on manufacturers like Ford and BMW extending their mobility experiments. Then with cities like Sydney and San Diego, you are maybe talking 20 or 30 years before you get significant modal shift from private car ownership.

“Once you’ve built all those highways and car parks, it takes a lot of money and time to unpick them. They placed a big bet on cars in the late-1950s, and it’s a long time before you get a chance to make another bet. A city like London, which is a couple of thousand years old and contains many different histories, ends up with a tapestry of multiple side-bets rather than one overweening vision. That’s actually more interesting and more malleable.”

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Full article, with analysis of many different cities, here.