Tokyo’s model mobility, for cities large and small: Part 3 of ‘And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile’
Part three of a three-part series exploring how cities around the world are snapping out of autopilot and moving beyond the automobile.
Ed. Previously, in Par Two of ‘And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile’, I looked at how cities are beginning to unpick themselves from the tangle of car-dominated 20th century urban planning. Part three closes by looking at Tokyo as a model for cities large and small.
This—“Which do we want?”—is a political question. At least political with a small ‘p’. Purely market-led solutions don’t deliver coherent mobility. Instead, the untrammeled market produces a torrid convergence of the tyranny of choice and the tragedy of the commons, such as with the vast numbers of e-scooters and ‘floating’ bikes that wash up on our streets when uncoordinated, or more problematically again, the appalling dominance of the car on most of our cities. Tech cannot simply solve these problems by blitzscaling its way through problems, despite the hubris surrounding the sector.
Elon Musk, who ought to know a little more about mobility than most in the tech…
