Future Workshop on Car Traffic, an exercise in my lecture “Business Ethics and Sustainability” within the university’s MBA program.
Imagine you live in a small country that is – let’s say – the size of a small town with 20,000 inhabitants. There are no cars in the country yet. They now have the task of introducing car traffic.
The following are taken into account:
✳️ There are only a few parking spaces but a central parking garage in the middle of the country, which can be reached within a few kilometers for every inhabitant.
✳️ The navigation systems are state-of-the-art and also equipped with AI.
✳️ Autonomous driving is being considered as a possibility.
✳️ Low-emission driving is taken into account, both in terms of the type of drive and the emissions that are generated to produce the required number of vehicles.
What will the traffic look like from your point of view?
Here’s a typical solution:
➡️ The country’s inhabitants no longer buy cars, but only car rides. There is an app for that. If necessary, the car journey is ordered for a certain time and for a certain duration (+/- one hour).
➡️ There are 4,000 vehicles in the countrywide parking garage, i.e. about 20% car per inhabitant. With a typical vehicle idle time today, this will be enough for the demand, even to cover peak times.
➡️ Upon request, the vehicle is brought from the central parking garage to the place of need by autonomous driving and picked up again from the destination accordingly. Fully automatic at the touch of an app button, so to speak.
➡️ The car traffic itself is controlled congestion-free via the built-in navigation systems and correlates with the traffic lights of the country.
➡️ There is a charging station for the e-cars in the central parking garage. They use replaceable batteries. If necessary, a replacement battery can also be ordered. The range of the 10-kilogram battery is now 900 kilometres.
How beautiful this country looks:
No parked cars in the city center, no garage courtyards in the suburbs, no gas stations except for occasional battery change machines, pedestrian zones and street cafes instead of parking lots.
How long will it take for this or a similar vision of the future to become reality? In any case, I no longer buy a car today, but only lease it so that I can remain flexible for this future within a time frame of two to three years. Because I’m already looking forward to this app.
