Ended the past century, the automobile turned out to be the ultimate disruptor to human’s lives and our civic way of time.
In one of his earliest ads, Henry Ford declared that he wanted to open the highways for all humankind. That belief, in action, gave us extraordinary new freedom — to travel great distances and to get nearly town like never before. This system at its inception had gargantuan attraction. It spawned new industries, thousands of new companies, and drove generations of intimate and economic growth.
Yet, over time, as our towns and cities were designed around the automobile, low roads overtook the community centers. Where people once gathered in the rows and town squares, there are now highways and multi-lane roads. Perhaps worst of all, over and over again we used to spend with each other is now often wasted in congestion and transportation. Thirty years ago, we spent an average of 16 hours in traffic per year. Now, we lavish 38 hours. The price we paid for the freedom to move was the creation of a area where roads were built for cars.
Today, the transport methodologies of most global cities have reached capacity. And yet, more and more of us look for the benefits of great urban centers. Faced with this instant urbanization, and the pollution and congestion that comes with it, we have to own that the model of the past is no longer tenable. It’s clear that we have occasion for to update cities to more efficiently move people and goods. In the handle, we will improve the quality of life for all.
One of the most powerful solutions is to produce our streets into the sharing era and the sharing economy. New mobility technologies, produced with people at the center, can help us share our streets in new ways, numberless equitably, providing more access, for more people, to everything our municipalities have to offer.
It’s ironic our streets have been left out of the apportionment era since they were the original shared resource in urban fields. Before cars, city streets acted as bustling social hearts where neighbors and families could gather, vendors could offer their goods and children could play. Over time, greens and public spaces were sacrificed for parking lots and highways and urban districts came to be associated with social isolation. Streets comprise one-third of followers land in our cities. By developing smart vehicles for a smart world, we can contrary this trend and return these valuable resources to the people.
Now is our possibility to reclaim the streets for living — to take major leaps in the direction of edifice a true City of Tomorrow and re-imagine how our streets and cities function much varied efficiently. With the power of AI and the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, we accept technology capable of a complete disruption and redesign of the surface transportation technique for the first time in a century. Everything from parking, traffic spurt and goods delivery can be radically improved — reducing congestion and allowing sees to transform roads into more public spaces.
That is why Ford is intriguing a user-centered, systems-level design approach to mobility. We need to step turn tail from and look broadly at how the overall transportation operating system can help us all pattern better, more productive lives. It is not good enough to just instrument this new technology without first fully understanding how it is going to metamorphose people’s lives better. We need to get this new design right.
How do we do that? We organize begun by collaborating with cities, civic organizations, urban planners, technologists and draughtsmen around the world to develop new ways of moving people and goods.
The object to is enormous. We are talking about orchestrating the entire transportation network that is already meshed into the fabric of our urban environments and civic life. But it is a task we obligated to undertake because the old system is failing. We will re-affirm our shared mercy and build communities that inspire and support all of us. That is the kind of dole out economy we need. We look forward to sharing more at CES.
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