We don’t often think about it, but the design or our cities reflect the technologies of the day. Right now the way we live is built around the motor vehicle, but are we moving into a new era?
After a visit to Ford Australia’s Centre of Excellence For Design and Engineering, Neerav Bhatt has some thoughts on the role of the motor car in an era where people don’t have to travel to their workplaces.
One of Neerav’s points is that car use is falling among younger workers, a trend that’s happening across the western world.
Much of this is put down to the generations of Millennials and Gen-Ys being more interested in technology purchases rather than cars along with changing work patterns.
A more fundamental reason could be that we’re reaching the end of the motor car era.
If there is one technology that represents the Twentieth Century it is the motor car; the automobile has shaped our cities, our lifestyles and our culture.
However we are now in the Twenty-First Century.
The three eras of motoring
Roughly speaking, we could break the Twentieth Century’s love affair with the motor car into three phases; development, consolidation and dependency.
In the first period, the automotive industry was developing with thousands of manufacturers experimenting with the technology and production methods. At the same time governments were beginning to build road networks and communities were demanding improved links.
By the beginning of World War II, the motor car was an important part of life but ownership was largely restricted to affluent households and business.
Following World War II governments made huge investments in road networks and automobiles became cheaper to own.
This gave a generation a new taste of freedom as you could go anywhere with a tank of gas. It also changed the layout of our suburbs as people could now travel further to work, allowing them to move into bigger houses on the fringe of town.
As government investment was focused on road building, passenger train and tram networks were starved of capital with many cities abandoning their transit systems altogether.
Suburbs built in the early to mid Twentieth Century had evolved around trams and the legacy of that can still be seen today. However customers no longer wanted to fight for parking spots on crowded streets designed for horse drawn carriages and trams.
Responding to this developers started building supermarkets and shopping malls which became popular largely because they offered easier parking. Cheaper goods made available by improved logistics systems – another effect of the motor car – was the other main reason.
The beginning of dependency
With the advent of the 1970s oil shock, the role of the motor car turned from being a tool of liberation into one of dependency. The suburbs of the 1960s and 70s had been built around the assumption of universal car ownership and cheap fuel. When fuel ceased being cheap, then households budgets were affected.
Not coincidentally after the oil shock the reversal of ‘white flight’ – the movement of the middle classes to outer suburbs – started with the gentrification of inner suburbs that had been abandoned by the working class.
Through the 1970s and 80s the cost of owning a motor car became more expensive as governments stopped externalising the costs of maintaining roads and saw car use and petrol taxes as a revenue source.
At the same time the obvious effects of saturating society motor cars became obvious as roads increasingly became choked and planners began to realise that building more roads only attracted more traffic.
Times of decline
By the turn of the Twenty-first Century technology had also started to move away from centralised offices and factories. Today technologies like the internet and increasingly 3D printing mean that workers don’t have to commute vast distances. Automation also means many levels of management are no longer necessary.
Changing work patterns is also affecting incomes, with car ownership being expensive many employees – particularly young workers – don’t want to buy automobiles.
This all means that the era of the motor car is coming to an end, it’s not going to vanish quickly but the decline has started.
For business, this means the post World War II assumptions that saw the rise of the supermarket, shopping mall and big box discount store are no longer valid.
Some managers, most notably those of doomed department stores, won’t learn these lessons and will pass into history like the stagecoach companies.
Just as the end of the horse and carriage era saw the demise of buggy whip makers and blacksmiths, the rise of the motor car saw an unprecedented rise in wealth, employment and productivity. Not only were the lost jobs created elsewhere, but many more were created.
While the motor car isn’t going to disappear overnight, the decline has started and our society is adapting. For business and government leaders, the task is to understand those changes and adapt.
Image courtesy of a Norwegian motorway by Ayla87 through SXC
