Ideas about a trial opening of Shepparton’s Maude St Mall to motor traffic are contrary to where the future lies.
The motor car is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a good life and that is not the view only of academics and environmentalists for even the executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford, says we’re heading for “global gridlock.
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| It's driverless vehicles such as this that should be the only "cars" we see in Shepparton's Maude St Mall. |
Personal mobility is an inherent good and people have resorted to many modes to fulfil that need, but the motor vehicle has stolen the march on them all.
Our towns and cities have evolved around the idea of the car, as has most everything else in modern life, and so here we are now hostage to a machine of our making and from which escape will need the dexterity of Houdini.
Technology, however, has handed us that agility and the world, and naturally Shepparton, stands on the cusp of society free from a life living as the motor car demands.
The demise of the traditional privately-owned fossil fuelled motor vehicle is upon us and within a decade or so, the on-demand electric vehicle will be scurrying around our roads.
Roads will not be roads as we understand them, rather small paths dedicated to electric vehicles, driverless, controlled by satellite navigation and responding to smart phone-like requests to ferry people, and goods, around the city.
Shepparton will not be isolated from this paradigm shift and rather than bow to ideas rooted in the 20th Century, councillors need to illustrate courage, avoid the intrusion of short-termism of those wanting cars back in the city’s mall and map out a plan allowing Shepparton to embrace 21st Century transportation.
Most people have an innate resistance to change, but this, unlike a different shade of colour on your living room wall, this is tectonic, and as such disruptive.
Rather than trialling the idea of putting conventional cars back in our mall, council should be using our money, and the city’s resources, to trial an on-demand, driverless electric vehicle, just as they are doing in other cities around the world.
Just a few days ago a report from Stanford University economist Tony Seba, entitled “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030”, went viral in green circles and caused spasms of anxiety in the established industries.
Seba’s report said people would stop driving altogether, switching en masse to autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles.
He predicted petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks would not be sold anywhere in the world within eight years, with the shift, according to Seba, being driven by technology, not climate policies.
Climate policies will, of course, benefit but so will Shepparton generally, especially if the council can opt for the city becoming a place to trial the autonomous vehicle and take us beyond the anachronism of putting cars back in the mall.
