Thinking about the air quality again – i’m wondering what our world would look like without cars.
Cars are ingrained in the Belgian way of life. Most of us go to work with our cars, we get our bulk shopping once a week in a supermarket, we visit friends all over Belgium and abroad.
Imagine we had to go without. Personal cars, i mean – if we want to keep on living, in our densely populated country, we’ll still need the delivery trucks. So no personal cars, just public transport, delivery traffic, and of course emergency vehicles.
First off, all the ugly malls at the edge of town would die a mercifully fast death. Back to the small neighbourhood grocery shop, 5 minutes away.
Everyone would buy bikes, because without the threat of cars, bikes are actually a great way to go from A to B.
If we worked far away, we would all cram in trains, trams and buses. Hopefully they would come at a greater frequency, and at least they would not be stuck in traffic jams.
Since that still wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a good time, company activity would be reorganized in a distributed fashion, with local centra communicating by VOIP and videoconferencing. Or just by plain teleworking, though i’m not a believer in 100% teleworking.
Big companies could organize something like a school bus, dropping off all people in the same neighbourhood.
We would need to reconfigure our friendships: going to visit friends out in the far reaches of Limburg would become an ordeal – we would do that twice a year. We’d need to find company and soul mates in the more immediate neighbourhood (in the old-fashioned way). Actually, we might stand a better chance of keeping close ties with a friend in London than with a friend in Abbaye-La-Vieille.
Every village would need a plumber, an electrician, a physician, a dentist, a school, and i’m probably forgetting a few. That might be a problem.
The city would be very, very quiet.
(btw: i don’t know if anyone noticed, but bioethanol or biomass are used in combustion engines. Hence, they don’t solve anything about global warming, the exhaust still qualifies as only slightly less bad. They only have an effect on our dependence on oil – we’ll need something else eventually. I hate it when media try to confuse issues).
(and i still don’t know what i’m gonna do/say/contribute at barcamp. eek.)