– The Economist, 29 April 1995. The figure is now much greater.
I am hurrying through the city streets to pick up a car. It’s a typically turbulent spring day in 2027, the weather far less calm and predictable than in the twentieth century. No vehicles are standing kerbside, not even in the suburbs: few people own cars now, as fuel has become too expensive and we cannot afford the space to park them. I come to a CarPool. It offers two choices. One is a nifty two-seater, even smaller than the abbreviated carlets which appeared twenty years ago, driving around town as if their rear ends have been chopped off. The other choice is a six-seater with ample carrying space for family or goods. I take out a smart card-actually an electronic prong (a Hypertel) attached to my mobile phone-which registers both my account and my sobriety. The card opens the car and automatically charges my bank, and off I go.
The traffic is slight. Most commuters now take mass transit. I am driving because I want to go somewhere not served by buses or trains, to make a few detours and end up in Canberra, where I’ll simply leave my carlet in another CarPool and walk away. This system has several advantages. The vehicles have 92 per cent usage (instead of the 97 per cent idleness of old); they are well maintained and run on state-of-the-art alcohol batteries weighing a trifle. Parking fees are nonexistent, and my only other direct cost is the road charge, now automatic and universal and graded electronically from expensive motorways to cheaper suburban streets.
Few miss the cars they used to own. It just became too difficult to run them and to put up with the ever-increasing restrictions. Now, in 2027, if we do want to drive occasionally, we have all the luxury of a hire car with the accessories of our choice (GPS, pods, child seats). CarPools are as abundant as post offices once were.
Fantasy? Of course! Would Australians (or Americans, or the newly affluent Chinese) put up with no car ownership? Not unless some shock makes us reassess our mad, 50-year-old affair with the private car. My parents did not own one (not so unusual in the mid-twentieth century), and in 2005 between 20 per cent and 24 per cent of households in Sydney and Melbourne did without. Only about three generations have taken car dependence for granted, so it would not be strange to see some change as circumstances alter-as they must.
The car is an odd piece of engineering. Unlike the bicycle, which converts energy into momentum with 95 per cent efficiency, with the car, as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute likes to point out, ‘only 13 per cent of its fuel energy even reaches the wheels’. Most energy disappears in the form of heat or noise, or is dissipated by accessories like airconditioning and windscreen wipers. After warming the tyres, says Lovins, ‘just 6 per cent of the fuel energy actually accelerates the car’. Nearly two tonnes of machinery to shift less than 0.08 tonnes of you.
The possibilities for improvement of my carlets are enormous. Polymers will make much lighter bodies; hydrogen fuel cells and long-awaited lithium-ion batteries will offer independence from oil. All will combine to make the hypercar Lovins has been enthusing about for the past decade a real possibility.
Electric cars are already performing mechanical miracles, as Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered recently when he drove the monster from Tesla Motors in California. ‘Faster than a Ferrari’, it reaches 100 kph ‘in just four seconds’; travels 400 km after being charged from your wall socket and, according to the Economist, is greener than a petrol-powered car.
Tesla’s electric sports car has lithium-ion batteries and a carbon-fibre body and is about four times more efficient in terms of fuel equivalence than the average American vehicle. With such a performance standard in 2007, it should not be hard to make it even more impressive by 2027.
But what about the downside of cars? They will kill two people every minute, worldwide, by 2027 if present trends continue; they already kill five people in Australia every day. A study done by Professor Barry Bloom of Harvard University and WHO (the World Health Organization) shows that, by 2020, ‘road traffic accidents would be the third biggest cause of death or permanent injury in the world’. Already they are the second biggest cause of deaths of young men after AIDS! Bigger than warfare.
They eat up 40 per cent of the surface of cities such as Sydney and Los Angeles and produce 8 per cent of our greenhouse gases. ‘Transportation consumes 70 per cent of US oil and generates a third of its carbon emissions,’ notes Lovins in Scientific American. And, to add one of my favourite horror statistics: traffic jams cost America $US100 billion per annum ($A13.8 billion for Australia), which rises to $US170 billion if you add the cost of accidents.
The odd thing about the car, as the British conservative magazine The Spectator once pointed out in an editorial, is that it is the last bastion of socialism. While masquerading as the ultimate symbol of free-enterprise individualism, it requires a colossal subsidy from taxes in the form of infrastructure (about $6.2 billion a year in Australia). Congestion charges in cities and widespread electronically tagged prices for using roads must follow, and will drastically diminish freelance motoring.
But will nations such as China catch up with our own bad example? Not yet, says Professor Peter Newman, of Murdoch University in Perth. He calculates that ‘the 200 million Chinese who moved into cities over the last ten years use around 2 gigajoules of transport per person’. This compares with 30 GJ for a Sydney dweller and 103 GJ for someone in Atlanta (USA). ‘Thus the 200 million Chinese use less fuel than one Atlanta or four Sydneys.’ This despite each of these two cities boasting only around four million people!
What is the secret? One obvious factor is that the Chinese are opting to live in high-rise towers while the Atlantans spread themselves over the lowest urban density in the world, courtesy of cars. Yet the average car trip in Australia (over 55 per cent of them) is less than 5 km- which, as Sally Campbell, of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Sustainability Institute, notes, is a bike ride of about twenty minutes, just the amount recommended to keep the typical Australian fit and healthy.
But there is another side to the Chinese ‘miracle’. Here is Kirsty Needham in her book, A Season in Red: My great leap forward into the new China : ‘One of the most confronting aspects of daily life was the complete disregard for rules, or human mortality, on the roads. A nation of novice drivers had been let loose en masse as car ownership suddenly became within reach of the middle class.’ On one bus trip she passed three ‘horrific accidents as brake failures sent coaches smashing into cars… When we finally passed the crumpled shell of the bus, it was a sickening sight. The bodies of the dead were trapped inside… I saw a woman who looked like she was sleeping, but with the eyes open, slumped against the window. An empty face staring through the glass.’
Red lights in Beijing are ignored, even on pedestrian crossings. ‘Humans were expected to leap out of the way’ And she gives figures for the experiment with car ownership in China that we can expect to see matched across Asia: ‘Traffic was now the leading cause of death for Chinese aged fifteen to forty-five. The WHO estimated 45,000 people were maimed and 600 died every day on the roads in China. Thousands were caught driving without licences or driving drunk in Beijing each year. In Shanghai, a third of traffic accidents were found to be caused by newly licensed drivers.’