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Gridlock a good idea
April 20th, 2007 at 01:00
Despite Gridlock’s terrible, terrible premise, or cars being stuck on a motorway for years, it has actually given me an excellent idea about how we could improve the country’s transport infrastructure and save the environment simultaneously. Bear with me, it’s a bit radical.
It’s basically co-operative peer-to-peer motoring – there’s probably a programming analogy that could explain it well.
What if no one had their own car? What if to get from A to B, they had to essentially hitch-hike? We should nationalise cars and ban the private ownership of motor vehicles, but at the same time, leave all of the cars on the road and make them free to drive for anyone who needs them… but with one key caveat: a motorist is obliged to give a lift to anyone wanting to go to the same place. Basically, I’m proposing a nationwide system of car sharing.
You find a car parked up somewhere unused, you can take it, drive it to where you need to be, and park it again for someone else to take. When you need to get home, you can simply find any other parked car and use that. Who knows, in the same day you might drive a Rolls Royce, a chav mobile and a milk float?
We can use modern technology to track the cars, to match up people who are travelling to and from the same place, as well as keep an eye on the distribution of cars (government monitors may need to drive cars to places where cars are needed).
Car sharing can be encouraged by creating fast speed limit car pool lanes that require three or more people (just like Doctor Who).
So for example, say I want to get to London, I can put this information into a website, or mobile phone applet or whatever, and it will randomly pair me with someone else who is heading to London, meaning fuel is saved and I can get to more or less where I need to be without needing my own car.
The key to this system is cooperation. Giving lifts to people who don’t drive can still be doable, by offering some sort of tax break or monetary incentive for giving lifts to these people – fellow motorists will be able to get lifts for free because they will be expected to reciprocated in the driving agreement. Similarly, motorists who give lifts to more people could build up some sort of points system, which would give them extra weight when the car allocation systems are matching people up, leading to quicker access to cars. (As you can tell, I’ve really thought this through).
Car crime will become a thing of the past too, as everyone will be able to take cars anyway. I suppose there’s always the risk of getting into a car with a nutter, but, all cars would be tracked by a central government system, so it’d be hard to murder someone in one and get away with it.
Thinking this through, this is quite a Soviet idea, what with the nationalisation and close surveillance of people. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea after all?
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