The No-Car Idea

I picked through Focus news pieces today, and this one interesting article came up....'Mobility Scenario 2035'.

If you hang around Germany much, watch the public forums, and sort through all the news items.....you will find oddball white-papers which get presented by political forums or agenda groups....which challenge your perception of things.

So, Greenpeace put out this radical plan for Germany and its future, under this 'Mobility Scenario 2035'.

Their vision is that from 2025 on....ONLY electric cars will be allowed to exist.  Then they have this curious idea....from 2035 on....private car ownership will be pushed down in scale.  All of this driven by new innovation and government control, naturally.

Their scheme is that of every 1,000 Germans....only 20-percent would be allowed a car.  I should note...by Focus numbers, currently around 548 of every thousand Germans....own a car.

The key thrust of this discussion?  Mostly around innovation, government directives, and car-sharing concepts.

I should note....various European countries are hyped up and enthusiastic about electric cars and the future (say the next twenty years).  So far, it's hard to find the population group which are making this switch.  It's safe to say that a lot of this hype is merely talk and lots of people simply don't see the magic moment where battery-cars are acceptable.

If you use the 548 number (Germans owning cars), then it generally means that 452 Germans are car-less.  It's a fairly true number.  You see a fair number of Germans who find some point after age sixty-five to give up on the car ownership deal (either they can't afford it, or they have limiting problems in driving).  In urbanized areas like Berlin, Hamburg, or Frankfurt....you also find a trend where people have become attached to their urbanized lifestyle and simply don't see a need for a car.

Car-sharing?  It exists but in limited numbers.  The plus-side is that there is a guaranteed parking spot for the car, and if you only need one for four hours....it makes more sense than a full-rental place.

The odds of this paper being openly discussed on public chat forums via German public TV?  I'd say that it'll get brought up occasionally and hyped-up by either the moderators or some political figure.

Forcing Germans to detach themselves from car ownership?  Here's the simple problem to this idea.  Out of the eighty-two million Germans....I'd take a guess and say that two-thirds of them live in highly urbanized areas (Hamburg, Essen, Munich, Stuttgart, Dresden, Frankfurt, etc) or their shadow communities.  But the other twenty-million Germans aren't as fortunate and laugh when public transportation comes up.

I watched a short news report a week ago which laid out this problem of a young guy on an apprentice deal.  He lived in a village of 1,000 people, and had a marginal amount of bus-traffic to pick him up and transport him to the regional train-station.  By the time, you had leg number one, the train-trip, and leg number two by bus....just one-way, you were talking about a 90-minute trip.  The mayor of the village and school authorities shake their heads because it's been that way for decades and they can't really find any method to fix this....unless you lower the driving age and find ways to get the kids to vehicle ownership (something that isn't very normal in Germany).  By car, I got the impression that the kid could have drive the whole way in 40 minutes.

These Greenpeace guys often see the world through urbanized-glasses and envision everyone living in the shadow of Heidelberg, Mainz, or Koln.

The sad thing is that you might end up with some political idiots who put enough tax on vehicles....hopping to force the zero car ownership idea down a path, and harm the economy with the hopeless trend.