The future is not where many people think it is

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.

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.

Mall's problems will not be answered by a 'silver bullet' solution

Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Answers to what ails Shepparton’s Maude St Mall are not to be found in a silver bullet solution.

No one thing will unravel the mosaic of matters that demand a whole of community response; a cocktail of measures must be implemented to confront the evolving dilemmas of the 21^st Century and so see the mall become a sustainable and bustling social space.

Answers proffered by many consider the mall in isolation and so looked at and applied through that prism they might have some immediate positive impact, but no long-term value.

To take the mall so out of context is unfair both to it and the greater Shepparton community.

An architect friend, who was not talking about the mall, said his contemporaries failed when they simply drew lines around projects and created something that misunderstood its social context, had no sympathy its environment and so did not “talk” with its surrounds.

The mall should not be considered in isolation, rather as is an integral part of Greater Shepparton and by implication the wider world.

Everything and every idea around which the 20^th Century was built is changing, those ideas are slipping away, and fast.

Now it gets tough. Energy scarcity; changes to our weather systems and different social and commercial wants and needs will force a fresh way of living upon us; the city needs densification for as oil become prohibitively expensive, to find, extract and buy, transport will become human powered (cycling, walking) and public rather than private; an increasingly hot city is going to need green oases, such as the beginnings of what have now in our mall; business is morphing from market driven capitalism to a peer-to-peer collaborative process that will need near zero-cost social spaces such the mall where people can gather, share and participate in their community.

A recent discussion in Brisbane about the proliferation of enclosed shopping centres throughout Australia, and around the world, brought praise for what they are, but it was pointed out that although entry was free, they effectively barred low-income people for they had little value beyond shopping, that is spending money.

Deepening the confusion, the much lauded private shopping centres are just that; they are private and so are generally out of bounds to public gatherings that are not about adding to the centre’s growth and profit-based agenda.

Malls, such as that in Shepparton, have a different dynamic in that they are public, they are not enclosed and are wonderful places for the social milieu that is the springboard for the richness that is community.

Shepparton needs to preserve and protect its pedestrian mall; expand and build on what exists; create active pedestrian links to the city’s railway station in preparation for a dearth of energy; look “up-river”, consider how the world is changing and where Shepparton needs to be in 2050.

The council of the City of Greater Shepparton, to its credit has looked “up-river” through its Commercial Activity Centres Strategy, but has failed to understand that the Shepparton of the 21^st Century cannot be built from the ideas of last century.

Judgement is irresponsible folly until you understand and accept the realities

It is both impossible and irresponsible to make a judgement about something until you understand the circumstances that gave rise to and sustain that “something”.

Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Emotional responses to and judgements about anything are always suspect and “facts” are about as reliable as the question, who asked it and for what reason.

Beyond that, tip into the equation realities presently engulfing our world that left unattended will leave our built environment and social landscapes in disarray and unrecognisable, and the outcome is then decidedly uncertain.

Further, there are parochial contemporary troubles that appear resolvable with a quick fix that take no account of those overarching and unfolding changes.

Shepparton’s Maude St Mall has long been the heart of the city, at least in a business sense, but commercial development has, in the last decade or so, aided by compliant Local Government decisions made in a vacuum of an understanding or recognition of a changing world, leaked from the city centre.

Rather than attack the symptoms by re-opening the mall to road traffic, the city council should be looking beyond this finite issue and working to create a city that will be both viable and resilient in a world which will be different from what exists as a blink is to a wink.

When the mall was established in the ‘80s, most thought oil was plentiful and the intent was to spread out, using motor vehicles to cement communities.

Creation of Shepparton’s mall was part of a nation-wide trend that was in fact socially correct, but suffered because of powerful commercial drives and the largely unaccountable, but strangely predictable, behaviour or people

Oil and water shortages, aligned with the wild uncertainties of the world’s changing climate, say to us “Don’t re-open the mall to road traffic, rather restructure the city’s rating arrangements to allow for and encourage mixed used in areas such as the mall (that’s living and light commercial) along with a vastly better local public transit scheme linking to an enriched intra-town/city public transport system”.

Historical and contemporary evidence points to the vitality of closely settled towns and cities, producing communities that are “fine-grained”, multi-use and socially rich.

The emphasis should be on re-shaping and re-designing Shepparton to ensure that human energy, walking or cycling, is the principal method of movement, meaning that everything important on a day-to-day sense was within a 10-minute walk.

Should that be considered utopian or impracticable, consider for a moment the difficulties of maintaining the status quo with severe restrictions on oil, scant water supplies and wrestling with a damaged climate delivering both wild and unpredictable weather.

The solution is in the recognition and acceptance of the facts, and in leaving our pedestrian mall alone.