Mobility is liberating and empowering. But you can have too much of a good thing. The growth in the numbers of people exercising their freedom and power is fouling the planet and jamming its arteries.
Prodigious technological efforts are being made to solve the problems of congestion and pollution caused by increased motorised mobility. Let us suppose for a moment that they succeed. Imagine that scientists invent something close to a pollution-free perpetual motion engine. Imagine further, that they succeed in developing the ultimate, intelligent transport system-a computerised traffic control system which will hugely increase the capacity of existing roads, rails and airports. Finally, imagine a world in which computers are universally affordable and access to the internet is too cheap to meter; pollution-free virtual mobility is vigorously promoted as an important part of the solution to the problems caused by too much physical mobility.
At present, the lion’s share of time, money and regulatory energies applied to the pursuit of solutions to the problems caused by motorised travel is being spent on such “technical fixes.” If successful, there will be further large increases in physical mobility. Cleaner and more efficient engines will weaken existing constraints on the growth of travel-either by making it cheaper, or by removing environmental reasons for restricting it. Intelligent highway systems promise to reduce greatly the time cost of travel by eliminating much of the time now lost to congestion. And virtual mobility, while capable of substituting for many physical journeys, is more likely to serve as a net stimulus to travel: by freeing tele-workers from the daily commute, it liberates them to join the exodus to the suburbs, where most journeys-to shop, to school, to doctor, to library, to post office and to friends-are longer and, mostly, infeasible by public transport.
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