Maintaining the highway network is a huge expense.
When the next time you move in the middle of busy car traffic or on the outskirts, imagine how that same landscape could look like without cars. Could being car-free be the key to something that uplifts all of humanity?
When I was slipping through the streets of Turku, I realized how the passenger car traffic of unreasonable space and service level is rampant in our everyday life. Because of the slipperiness, the most vulnerable pedestrians had even stayed at home. The streets were safe only for cars, including those parked on the side of the street.
How about if the setting were upside down in the future? The roads would be reserved for people. Cars should be left at home or in the travel centers that are springing up on the outskirts of cities, where you could switch to public transport. The streets of the city itself could be varied depending on the weather, whether by bike or on foot. One would move with a wheelchair, another with a kick sled and the third with an electric scooter. The widest avenues could even accommodate skiing, children and young people to play. All of this would be possible because the urban space would have been distributed more equally than before.
Perhaps emergency calls, goods transport and cabin trips will still require cars in the future, but our daily movement would still be revolutionized. We spend an absurd amount of work on inefficient plowing and sandblasting, which mainly benefits motorists. At the same time, slippery sidewalks are and will remain. The maintenance of the entire highway network is a huge expense anyway. The result is still only an accelerating need to move more, always more congested. As a byproduct, a browning landscape and a rocky home planet.
I feel it, that there are bigger threats hidden in the passenger car ethos, as if the background rhythms that explain our anxiety. The non-stop stream of cars in the embrace of asphalt and concrete structures looks grim, even angry. Its frenzy infects the whole society like a fever or a virus rushing through the veins.
Carlessness is already becoming a growing trend in Europe's big cities. Let's jump into the same development in Finland in time, before strategies start to rely on the illusion of the bliss of mammoth-sized electric cars. A world that continues the supremacy of passenger cars is not worth striving for.
Harry Carlson
librarian, Turku
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