THE FOLLOWING INEQUALITY
Eduardo Cadaval
A few months ago in The streets make no sense I wrote about the inappropriateness of the massive use of the car as a means of urban transport and how this anomaly will sooner or later be corrected.
I wrote that text in the middle of the academic semester of one of the urban planning courses that I teach at the Barcelona School of Architecture, in which we have been working with the street for many years; this and its possible configurations are studied as one of the primary elements of the urban structure and a powerful tool to transform the city. In that particular course we studied Barcelona’s Avenida Sarria: a street well known by all students for its proximity to the UPC campus and a road of special relevance for journeys in the “sea-mountain” direction and therefore essential. importance for the city’s circulatory system.
Despite knowing well the road dynamics of Barcelona and therefore the repercussions on vehicular traffic that any intervention on this road would mean for the rest of the city, none of my students opted to give priority to the use of the car, and frankly it was difficult to find arguments to convince them otherwise. Some students directly vetoed it and gave priority to a public transport system based on very clear criteria of ecological sustainability, while others fragmented the road and limited vehicular access in some sectors for the exclusive use of neighbors and residents of the area. Many others opted for mixed configurations that allowed the use of the car but applied rigid restrictions that gave priority to other mobility models. All of them assumed that their proposals were reviewable; that they only applied for a certain period of time, and that in the medium or long term the use of the car as we know it until now would end up having no place within the urban structure of the central city.
It is well known that the lifestyle of the new generations has stopped giving value to many of the things that the generations that preceded them did. The Millennial generation or also called “Generation Y” has the automotive industry in check for the minimal interest they show in acquiring a car for private use. What was once an object of desire and an element of ostentatious status is now in many cases perceived as an inefficient and costly means of transportation whose ownership many people prefer to avoid. Technological advances (which allow, for example, unlocking the doors or activating the engine of a car remotely) and the advancement of applications for mobile phones stimulate the birth of companies based on collaborative economies such as Uber or Blablacar and promote others of shared cars such as Zip Car, Entrerprise or many others that will ultimately result in the reduction of the vehicle fleet that cities have had to assume in recent years.
Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, predicts that in 20 years no one will have their own car; It even goes further and estimates that if someone has a child now, that child will never learn to drive. Only time will allow us to verify whether these projections are exaggerated, but what seems certain is that generations change and the new ones not only have other consumption habits but also have another way of understanding and living the city. The key question is whether all cities will have the same capacity to adapt to new and more efficient forms of use. The problem will lie in those that, due to their structure or lack of planning, cannot adapt with the necessary speed. In the near future, productivity and inequality in the quality of life of cities will drastically differentiate between those that manage to reduce their dependence on the car and those that do not. The development of strategies to mitigate these inequalities begins today.
Link
