On track, at last...

In May 2009, I posted a column that included the paragraph: Just as we have been through the age of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human, the roads will no longer be dominated by hordes of bog-standard vehicles, but instead a mix of bicycles and ‘intelligent’ cars, attuned to specialist and special needs. Redundant plant and surplus labour can redeployed in one of the new ‘green’ industries, e.g., solar panel manufacturing. It is all easy to say, of course, but we have to face the future, and that future might just be now.
At the time, I was laughed from here to Tokyo. Now, newspaper columnist Alex Rayner has written: the golden age of motoring may indeed be over. (On the road to nowhere, Guardian Newspaper, 26 September, 2011) There will always be vehicles on the roads, of course. We have to get about, after all. But it is this ‘motorist as king thing’, that dates from roughly the 1950s, that is fading. For example, the percentage of 17 to 20 year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35%, last year. Apparently, possession of a licence is less cool of late, young people wanting to be defined by an ipad or smartphone, rather than a snazzy vehicle. However, it could also be a technology at play.
Already in Britain, there are a number of motor ownership and rental schemes in place; Streetcar, Zipcar and Whipcar, where, in place of buying a vehicle outright, you pay a sum of money to Toyota or BMW to buy ‘motoring time’. You can swap vehicles to suit your needs at the time; home removal van, family car for a holiday, or even hire a motor or bicycle. However, with these schemes, you will still need a driving licence, so roll out the ULTra system, driverless, electric ‘pods’ that run on guideways to specific locations, not unlike the Docklands Light Railway.
It will take time, planning and political will before this technology moves out of futuristic novels and into our everyday lives. Rayner quotes German entrepreneur, Stefan Liske: Cities such as London will, in ten years (have these vehicles) going along autonomously and you can hop in and out of them.
I can’t wait, really I can’t. Rayner fills the remainder of the feature with statistics that demonstrates how the wealthier among don’t necessarily want to travel more, but travel better – and ditto for the rest of us. This makes sense. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Time is too short to live it on wheels. Contemporary society has long needed a range of travel and commuting alternatives ranged between the poles of ground-shakingly expensive, private car ownership, and almost as expensive, inefficient and overcrowded public trains and buses. Let’s get it going – it could be the underpinning of the economy, after all.