The end of the car

I don't sense that the future of urban transportation has been a hugely pressing issue on this site up until now - but here are some thoughts on the topic anyway.

I read something a few weeks ago where it was suggested that we are coming to the end of the era of mass private car ownership. The argument was that with the growth of electric powered and driverless cars there will be less of a need for all of us to own a private car. In future when we need to get somewhere by car we will pre-book a shared driverless vehicle and pick it up from the nearest charging point, returning it when we are done. Or perhaps it will come to pick us up then return itself to its docking station when we are done with it?

It is probably my generation that will find this most difficult, being as we are the most car obsessed of all groups, the ones that felt we had to learn to drive and acquire a car as soon as physically and financially possible. Of course what this also means is that it is my generation that are largely responsible for the environmental catastrophe that the internal combustion engine has created - the CO2 emissions, the poisonous exhaust fumes, the road deaths and the congestion that reduces quality of life in the cities just for starters.

I hope that for me the end of the private car will have little impact. I live in a city with relatively easy access to public transportation - unreliable though it often is. When I was unable to drive (because of illness) for a couple of months it made hardly any difference to my life at all. It also seems to me that many young people are less concerned about owning a car. None of my children own one - they walk or cycle around the city and use trains and planes for longer distance travel.

The end of private car ownership will not necessarily be a bad thing but where it is bound to have a major impact is on our popular culture - it will mean the end of the road trip movie as we have come to love it, and all those old teenage car crash death songs will be meaningless to future generations. On a more immediate level, young men's status will no longer centre on the performance of their cars and those endless office conversations about the best vehicle to transport kids, dogs and camping equipment will cease.

There are, of course those who will never accept the change. Even in the small and densely built up UK that I live in there will be those who insist that their remote location or personal needs make private car ownership essential and what is more an inalienable right, so maybe it is this minority group that will need to rely on to keep the private car alive in popular culture in the future.