I have a thing about cars – old cars mostly but a nerdy obsession nonetheless. I can tell you the cylinder capacity of most 1980s BMWs, I can tell you who has designed every engine in any Ferrari road car, I can set up and tune a weber carburettor and I can identify almost every British car of the last 50 years just by looking at their rear quarter panel. Like I said nerdy in the extreme…but I am no longer the owner of an everyday car.
So for the first time since I was 17 years old I no longer have access to a car that I can use anytime. I sold the last one and I have just joined the CityCarClub. I have had a bit of an epiphany. Cars are becoming obsolete in their current form for anyone who lives in a city or even a suburb and technology is currently available that could see cars disappear off our streets but be available to all at a minutes notice and it starts with schemes such as the citycarclub.
I have always had a serious dislike of anti-car ideology. Groups such as Reclaim The Streets, cycling zealots and many others who want to banish cars from cities and eradicate cars altogether for purely ideological reasons. The automobile was one of the greatest and most socially liberating inventions of the 20th century and the one invention that had the most profound effect on society, architecture and town planning. Not all of the effects were good as any of Corbusier’s sketched examples of town planning will testify. However cars are mass public transport – i.e. transport that moves the population en-masse. Crucially cars are public transport that suits our needs as individuals and it is when we ignore the extremely potent effects of individuality we risk disaster. Again look back at Corbusier and the Modern Movement and their insistence that we all live in things that look exactly the same – an utter failure of an idea that has decimated the respect that architects were once held in. Individualism means that we don’t all work in one single building and live in another single building therefore getting a bus from building A to building B is never going to be a viable form of public transport. Cities are and always will be gloriously chaotic yet interlinked and strangely efficient. They cannot and should not be solely designed around transportation of any one kind. We all participate in multi-destination journeys on a very regular basis – some short range journeys, some long range journeys and mostly a combination of the two.
The solution to these complex journeys for the past 50 or so years has been lots and lots of little painted metal and glass boxes cluttering up our streets being driven from point a to point b parking for a few hours at point b, driving to point c and parking there for a few hours etc etc. So we naturally have congestion and parking problems blighting every city. However what if all cars were available to all? By that I mean you just took the nearest one and left it where you stopped using it and it became immediately available for someone else to jump in and use. Then streets would not need to be lined with miles of parked cars doing nothing. Cars could easily drive themselves to centralise locations for fuelling and servicing or merely to ensure that they were distributed more evenly and not all clustered around the pub on a Saturday morning! Self driving cars have been around for a few years now and it is only the consumer’s wariness of the concept that is stopping manufacturers rolling them out. You can buy a Ford Focus now that parks itself. Also CityCarClub (other services are also available) uses a simple online booking and monthly subscription service that means you can locate one with your phone, book it on a whim and it will always start, always have fuel in it and always be insured, taxed and have decent tyres on it.
What this means in terms of urbanism and architecture is the almost utopian idea of urban design; not having to consider car parking with every proposal. If cars took themselves off to a central location after use to be used only on demand then we could reclaim the streets without any militant shouting or enforced tofu eating. Think of an on-demand, personalised, driver-less taxi for a monthly fee.
So then imagine a world where you step out your door to see no parked cars, no congestion (because computers don’t park in daft places, have road rage fits or drive in bus lanes!) and transport on demand. Its one of those utopian ideals that has advantages at every angle. Much less fuels needed, much less raw materials required, much less (or possibly) no road deaths. Its everything banning cars from city centres would achieve with none of the serious consequences of such a luddite retrograde move.
As I book my citycarclub Prius for next week it is becoming apparent that this is not some delusional vision of the future but will become a reality sooner than most people think. We’ll all pay a monthly subscription to use cars and large centralised organisations will concern themselves with the operational needs of the vehicles – we’ll just use them. This concept is probably terrifying most motor manufacturers and fuel companies but as ever it is the market that will win over on this. Conspiracy theories of BigOil controlling technology to keep us hooked on petrochemicals is just fantasy – remember at one point Microsoft were the biggest, richest, most powerful company on earth; where did that get them? Apple came along with more desirable products and Google popped up with cloud computing and now Microsoft is heading the same way that IBM did – bound for the history books of obsolete companies. Exxon Mobil will go the same way. Where does that leave people’s attachment to their cars?
Most people don’t have an emotional attachment to their cars, plenty do but most don’t. I have noticed a growing trend amongst friends to being totally indifferent to most forms of car. However the UK
Everyone reading this who is thinking I am turning my back on noisy old bangers fear not! I’m just about to begin my daily trawl of carandclassic to see if there is a decent Alfa Montreal available in the UK
The CityCarClub Prius is for transport – the bellowing V8 for the occasional Sunday afternoon. The car is dead! Long live the car.
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