After the Car

Citation

Lik Meng, L. (2010), "After the Car", Foresight, Vol. 12 No. 5, pp. 92-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636681011075731

Imagine the year 2050. The inconvenient truth stares at you as you look out the window from the 50th floor of your downtown apartment while you eat breakfast straight from the box. In the horizon, you can enjoy a panoramic view of the blue ocean. Your heart sinks when you reminisce about the weekends you used to spend tracking through wooded coastal parks now submerged in 2 metres of water. We were too late to stop climate change. You look straight down and see the streets are full of people – not cars. You cannot go anywhere if you cannot walk. The hybrid‐car you bought one year ago sits in the car park because gasoline has become scarce and expensive and it has become illegal to use precious gas in private vehicles. The technology had not evolved beyond the hybrids.

Or perhaps we did face the truth head on. It is 2050 and as you look out the window you can hardly make out the outline of the coast in the distance – just like you remembered it ten years earlier. We halted global warming. When you look down, you see a huge sea of people walking but the wide streets are gone and so is the traffic grid‐lock. You become momentarily absorbed and fascinated at the caterpillar‐like contraptions snaking its way along the street. Occasionally, a part of its body seems to break away, stop by the roadside and a person steps out. The rest of the caterpillar's body rejoins and moves on uninterrupted. Sometimes someone is waiting and steps right into the detached body and within seconds it attaches to the end of another passing caterpillar. Driving has been outlawed. Smart devices get you where you want to go, on demand, on time and at zero risk to you or by‐standers. The concept of ownership has become outdated, not just for “cars” but all products. Sustainability is now deep‐rooted in out ethic. You are too young to remember the car but you love to visit the old racetrack converted into a theme park where you can take these antiques for a spin, after paying a hefty carbon tax and exorbitant prices for gasoline. The car has become an indulgence for the rich, again.

In none of these scenarios does the car persist. Not in the form that we are familiar with now. Do you ever imagine a world without cars? Whether you love or hate the car, you must read After the Car. It does not tell you when you can expect to see the death of the car or that it will even fade away. In fact, Dennis and Urry tries very hard to tell you that the future is just not predictable.

The car has only been around for about 100 years and in that time it has become indispensable. Many of us cannot imagine life without the car. Our lives depend on it. But there is no doubt that the internal combustion engine at the heart of the car is the worst invention of the Industrial Revolution still in existence. It burns rapidly depleting fossil fuel and in the process pollutes the air which reduces air quality in cities and is a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. It is the most inefficient machine lingering from the Industrial Era because most of the energy is lost as heat and used to move the one‐ton weight of the iron‐clad body instead of moving the passengers. It maims and kills hundreds of thousands of drivers, passengers and innocent by‐standers every year and added to the lost from massive grid‐lock the car costs society billions of dollars in compensation, repairs, rehabilitation, grief and lost man‐hours. In many affluent communities the car is a symbol of luxurious excess while in impoverished countries the old beat‐up jalopy is a vital means of transport to seek a livelihood. The car has also almost single‐handedly shaped the unsustainable lifestyle associated with suburban sprawl.

What made the car so dominant today? Cars were initially the toys of rich industrialists but became socialised as a means of transport for the ordinary people. Dennis and Urry provide a comprehensive account of the intrigues and conspiracies that made the car a cultural phenomenon in the previous century. Even though the electric car was invented before the internal combustion engine and was acknowledged to be more efficient and non‐polluting, it was the latter which became locked in as the preferred technology when it consistently out‐performed the electric car in terms of speed, winning all the major races. When car manufacturers started mass‐producing cars with internal combustion engine, there was no turning back. But the industrialists did not just sit back and waited for customers. They formed alliances (with oil companies and others) to buy up tram companies and other forms of public transport and then proceeded to dismantle and close them down in order to create a market for the convenience and independence offered by the automobile. Governments, especially in USA and Europe played a big role by building extensive road networks so that car owners now have somewhere to go. City planners and designers played a major role too, redesigning the street and intersections to provide minimal hindrance and to ensure high speed of travel for the car.

What is the problem with the car today? Why do we even need to have a book written about how this love affair will pan out? Like it or not, fossil fuel will eventually run out or become so scarce it will be too precious to burn in a contraption which uses only 1 percent of the expanded energy to move the driver. When will the oil wells start to run dry out is the billion dollar question. Some analysts claim we have already reached peak oil. The petroleum companies are more optimistic about their reserves without revealing their secret stash even as they invest in the search for alternative green energy. Going green and sustainable living will be a major social driver of change and in concert with a myriad of other initiatives could tip the future pathway of the car in various directions. Development of new materials, smart technology, digitalisation, disruptive innovations, government policies and other forces would interact in the larger system to converge and create a post‐car future. A black swan could emerge to provoke an unanticipated event but no single event or action will be able to determine the future outcome.

After the Car has avoided discussion of the methodologies, techniques or methods used in generating the scenarios. This is deliberate to focus the reader on the stories so that they could visualise how the numerous changes (already happening or which could happen) might in the future change the entire system which makes the car so dominant today. What we should expect is not an abrupt end to the car in the near future but a sustained long‐term series of events and actions occurring over several decades eventually reaching a tipping point which to the casual observer seems to happen overnight (much like the world‐wide web and the mobile phone). The discussion is so detailed in some instances that the reader might be bewildered about how it has anything to do with the car and that is exactly the point. We will only in hindsight be able to make clearer connections of the inter‐relations that will shift the fortunes of the car.

Leading from the preceding analysis, Dennis and Urry offered three scenarios:

1. 1.

   local sustainability;

2. 2.

   regional warlordism; and

3. 3.

   digital networks of control.

In the first scenario, the authors visualised a “small is beautiful” world in which communities will be redesigned along principles of sustainable new urbanism where long‐distance travel will be frown upon and communities will choose to live close together to reduce their eco‐footprint and to enhance social relations. Life will slow down from the hectic world of privileged consumerism. The bad news is that the authors do not think this scenario is probable, only possible. The second scenario has a “barbaric” theme characterised by the collapse of the infrastructural system with cars and trucks rusting in the deserts. The gated communities would become massive fortresses reminiscent of the walled‐cities of medieval age. Millions of climate change refugees will come from the poor south while the rich north will turn nasty and brutish. Not all is lost as this crisis would provide a clean slate to create a new world order. The third scenario thus sees a digital network of controls with “multiple, dense forms of movement of small, ultra‐light, smart, probably battery or hydrogen‐based, deprivatized ‘vehicles’” (micro‐cars) providing flexible and personalized transportation. Bikes, hybrid vehicles, pedestrians and mass transport would still share the landscape but much of the physical travel would be replaced with virtual access in part because carbon would be individually rationed, priced and monitored. This new world is far from being a certainty and will be very costly and difficult to build even for first world countries. It will be intrusive and contested but the threat and shock from climate change may tip societies to embrace the “digitalized networks” much as our forefathers had embraced the noisy, inefficient and highly polluting internal combustion engine more than a century ago.

The analysis in the book is comprehensive and exhaustive but certainly not complete. My wishful thinking was for some outrageous story‐telling about the alternative to the car as a personal means of transport to spur our imagination. Perhaps teleportation? But that would be going into the realm of sci‐fi rather than scenario planning.