The future resident of Helsinki will not own a car

Headline is taken from Helsinki Times article.

Ten years from now, transportation in Helsinki may operate very differently from the current system.

The service will be run by transportation operators, through which the regular citizen can buy all they want with a click. This does not only entail public transportation within the city, but also carpool, taxi, a train ticket to Tampere or parking fees in the city centre.

Few want to own their own car in future, when everything can be shared. If one wishes to travel from Puotila to Pukinmäki, the "route planner" of 2025 will provide information on where to change the city bike for a car due to impending rain, in addition to information on the fastest connection.

The City of Helsinki believes in the model so strongly that it plans to test it at the turn of the year with a few major employers in Vallila.

Smart transport solutions create more efficient travel- and logistics chains and an overview of the status of the transport system in real-time. The idea is that the travellers will be able to select several service options and to easily combine them into suitable travel chains: private car, on foot, bicycle, bus, taxi, demand responsive transport, carpooling, car and transport joint use, tram, metro, train or aeroplane. This would lead to a reduced need for car ownership or for the construction of parking spaces and streets. The crux of the idea is to achieve an increase in the fluency, ease of use and accessibility of travel chains. Service accessibility also covers safe and trouble-free payment,"

The Guardian explained how it would work: "Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility." One's departures and arrivals would be in the hands, ideally, of a well-run utility.

The model itself is thought-provoking enough, especially with daily news headlines in other parts of the world of new transportation upstarts competing with traditional transport and treated as problems rather than as solutions, components that could be integrated within existing transport modes. Also gaining attention is the notion, that if the plan were to fly, so to speak, private cars could be made obsolete.

www.helsinkitimes.fi...
phys.org...
phys.org...

I have not spoken any Finnish yet on how the idea is seen locally, although I personally do love the idea. Living in a city with a very functional and cost-free public transport, there already is not much need of a personal car, unless you live in the suburban areas of the city. I have a car personally, but I use it very rarely, once every couple of months. A system described in the article, is not far from perfect in what I believe in and Finns are one of the few nations I believe could pull it off. Transportation would be faster as well as easier, more convinient as well as taking far less resources in total. Everything depends on how it will be implemented tho, but personally thumbs up on this one, hopefully it will become a model project for the world.

As long as it isn't mandatory I see no problem with giving this a try. I wouldn't want to have my freedom of movement restricted to a website and potentially monitored by the PTB, but to each their own.

U.N. Agenda 21?

/a little offtopic but

This may be seen as a very convenient idea in big cities (Big city in Finland, >100k inhab.) but the problem in Finland with this kind of endeavors is the thinking that whole Finland should support the idea.

Private car owning is already taxed to the teeth and made as costly as it could be, supporting this kind of progress.

The problem is, there are LOTS of people living in areas where private car is your only chance to travel cost-efficiently.

For instance, i live about 20km out of Pori (the Jazz-festival city) and for my family (wife and 3 kids) to travel to the city and back with public transport costs me about 40-45 euros. It really is too much for one trip with public bus.

That is utterly insane to think that people would give up their cars, anywhere but in the core of Helsinki.

I'm inclined to think that many Helsinki residents will support the idea, it sounds good to me, but not for any other city.

Those people, and politicans in Helsinki should remember that theres lots of Finns outside the borders of our capital city.