TIROLER ZEITUNG "Editorial" from May 16, 2023 by Anita Heubacher "The end of a status symbol is near"

2023-05-15 20:01:11

Innsbruck (OTS) – Bigger, heavier, wider – that was the be-all and end-all for car manufacturers and fans. In the meantime, more and more consumers do not associate the car with freedom, but with traffic jams. We will share to be able to ride more fluidly.

An international conference on mobility, energy and digitization will take place in Tyrol next week. The venue is well chosen, after all Tyrol is a traffic-plagued country. For a long time, state politics has been concerned with truck transit traffic, first half-heartedly because they wanted to protect local entrepreneurs and the economy, then more intensively because the displeasure of the population was growing. Traffic became a visible burden. The trip to the beloved Lake Garda came to a standstill, whole valley communities can leave their cars at the weekend because a car avalanche prevents progress.
Tyrol’s traffic arteries are blocked. More and more consumers do not associate the car with freedom, but with traffic jams.
Irrespective of how cars will be powered in the future, which technology will prevail, no matter how many bypasses the traffic arteries can have, hopefully people will not want to build more roads. We’ve already sacrificed enough space in cities to ensure cars can do what they do 90 percent of the time, which is stand and park. Tyrol’s buildable areas are very limited and yet a good part of them have been sacrificed to transport routes. Anyone who builds everywhere and takes care of smelting must also concrete a road everywhere. The screwed up spatial planning policy means that a lot of greenery is sealed and those who live scattered in the country are dependent on the car.
Despite all the impassability, we will have to rethink mobility. In the city and in the country. In both cases, digitization will help us and a rethinking: away from ownership, sharing traffic, avoiding traffic and shifting traffic to bicycles and rail. Sharing cars is becoming easier with digitization because we can collect more easily who needs mobility at the moment. Instead of transporting everyone individually from A to B, routes are bundled and several customers are transported in one car. Drive on demand, i.e. on call.
As in so many areas of life, the market will overtake politics. The tighter the elections are, they will continue to orient themselves towards where they think they can best meet their clientele, and thus further abolish themselves. Meanwhile, those for whom the car is a status symbol of yesteryear hope that the app will organize trips and artificial intelligence will do the driving, so that all you have to do is get in.