Look down any residential street and there is one guarantee; you will see infrastructure for cars. Cars are now embedded in society. But what if there was an alternative?
From 2035, Great Britain will introduce new laws to reduce pollution levels. This new law will ban the sale of new diesel, petrol and hybrid cars. During 2019, these sales represented 93% of all new car sales in Great Britain. With the alternative fuel type being electric cars, this is likely to have a knock-on effect on the number of new car sales. The most popular electric car in Great Britain starts at £26,000 for the basic model. While Great Britain’s average annual salary is £30,420, large parts of the market could well be squeezed out.
This gives a significant opportunity to make material change by 2035. Whether this is as a result of being priced out of the electric car market or simply lifestyle changes, the need for roads and parking will reduce.
In Great Britain, there are roughly 250,000 miles of road networks and 5,000 parking facilities. This is an unnecessary burden for a small island but with changing appetite in a coronavirus world this opportunity could be realised. Parking facilities typically are multi-storied and open planned. Therefore, re-purposing these could be done quickly and in the interest of the community in which they are located. This might even be a solution to the 2020 question of how to educate students while maintaining social distance.
Lessons can even be learned from the United States where in New York they have been taking a proactive approach for a number of years on their disused parking lots. Owners of such garages found that repurposing these buildings not only gave a larger sense of community but also offer more financial gains. Such garages now serve as bars, arcades, art galleries and restaurants in the city centre.
However, parking facilities need not only be for profit. Great Britain has a housing problem that has a long way to be solved. First time buyers are struggling to get on the housing ladder and aging individuals finding themselves needing domiciliary care. This could give Great Britain an opportunity to build the first purpose built multi-generational home. Were grandparents, parents and children all under one spacious roof, this could reduce the burden of childcare and social care.
There are also opportunities to rethink the road layouts currently in operation. No longer would drivers make the heart stopping right turn into busy two-way traffic. But instead, roads could be planned and linked based on today's use, with unused roads being given back to communities and nature. This would inevitably result larger proportions of society engaging in cycling and walking as they feel safer to do so. With only 33% of men and 40% of women in Great Britain at a healthy weight perhaps this could offer an improvement in health also.
The alternatives might appear quite radical at first glance, but with increasing numbers of the workforce working from home, now poses an opportunity to tear up the rule book. If we do not, change will be forced in 2035 on an unprepared society.
Charlotte Aguilar-Millan
© The European Futures Observatory 2020
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