It is interesting how the “vice mayor of urban development” only talks about getting rid of “private cars”.
While train, bus and bike can get your quite far, in large enough cities it will still be a challenge to get to and from many places. Not in the city center, but in the outer areas where people commute to and from.
I live in Hamburg (Germany) where we have a subway, S-Bahn (similar) and a quite good bus network. Still, three big car sharing companies are successfully operating: Car2Go (by Daimler), DriveNow (by BMW) and Miles (private startup). They _do_ fill a need.
Another experiment will be started in April by the company I work for, MOIA (by VW): They provide ride sharing with a completely electric van (based on the VW Crafter) with 6 seats and permanently employed drivers. The focus is on the commuters who don't have a train-/subway-station nearby.
I think there are two lessons here: Just removing all cars will probably not work, we need at least intermediate solutions to slowly move people from owning a private car to shared solutions. And second, many of these mobility on demand/mobility as a service-solutions would be very hard to pull off without mobile phones and uniquitous mobile internet access.
While train, bus and bike can get your quite far, in large enough cities it will still be a challenge to get to and from many places. Not in the city center, but in the outer areas where people commute to and from.
I live in Hamburg (Germany) where we have a subway, S-Bahn (similar) and a quite good bus network. Still, three big car sharing companies are successfully operating: Car2Go (by Daimler), DriveNow (by BMW) and Miles (private startup). They _do_ fill a need.
Another experiment will be started in April by the company I work for, MOIA (by VW): They provide ride sharing with a completely electric van (based on the VW Crafter) with 6 seats and permanently employed drivers. The focus is on the commuters who don't have a train-/subway-station nearby.
I think there are two lessons here: Just removing all cars will probably not work, we need at least intermediate solutions to slowly move people from owning a private car to shared solutions. And second, many of these mobility on demand/mobility as a service-solutions would be very hard to pull off without mobile phones and uniquitous mobile internet access.