Car Free Cities

Podcast Episode: 0233
Can we live without the need for cars?

      Could our cities thrive without personal vehicles, relying instead on innovative mobility solutions? Join AutoLooks, as we challenge the conventional car-centric urban model by exploring Toyota's groundbreaking Woven City project. Despite being an automobile giant, Toyota

​is crafting a vision where diverse, interconnected transit systems take precedence, transforming urban life into a seamless tapestry of movement and accessibility. From the history of car-driven urban sprawl to the ingenious ways Japan moves people in limited spaces, we examine both the promises and hurdles of car-free cities. As someone who loves cars yet lives outside the reach of public transit, I navigate the complexities and potential of this transformative urban shift.

         It seemed a little weird a couple years ago when, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Toyota showcased something new that they were working on in their home city. They were working on a brand-new city called the Woven City, but the odd thing about this is there were no cars. Toyota, a car company, working on a city free of automobiles Well, in all sense, not 100% free of automobiles, but 100% free of personal use mobility units, or, as we call it, the automobile of today. Toyota is looking at a city of the future where there are no cars. We don't own cars, we don't park cars, we don't need space for cars. There are still mobility units, but there are a multitude of different ways to get around. Woven City is what they're building and they're going to showcase to the world that, even though they're a car company, they're looking at personal transportation for the future in a city not connected by the automobile. Today, AutoLooks is taking a look at car-free cities. 

      Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by. Check it out. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe and we will be making adjustments to this page come 2025. We know we've been falling a little behind the eight ball on getting some new companies on and updating our website. It is coming online. Just give us some time. The auto looks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you would like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. 

          ​To look at, sit in in the beginning, the woven city. It's essentially a car-free city for the future. But why would a car company like Toyota look at a car-free city? That's odd. Like your whole business is building cars, why would you take them out of the equation of a city for the future? Well, Japan’s always looking for ways to move people around and do it within a small space. Hell, it's the birthplace of key cars tiny little vehicles utilized on small little footprints to get in and around cities. So, Toyota and Japan are always looking at how to fit more people in such a small space and still move them around. We get it. 

        Over a hundred years ago, the automobile made it so that we can go out and see the world. We were no longer confined to where railways went. We can go anywhere we want to do. Freedom was within grasp of your everyday person. Anyone who could afford a vehicle and some of the people who couldn't even afford it still had the ability to go out and enjoy the world that they didn't know. 

     If you're like myself and you've actually had to walk to school as a child, you understand this. I literally had to walk nearly two and a half kilometers from my house to my high school and I know what a lot of you are saying oh yeah, uphill both ways in my dad's pajamas no, trust me, I don't wear pajamas, so that's not an issue for me. But I did go uphill both ways. But in a sense, I also went downhill both ways, because I went up and over a hill Not huge, but big enough, but it was still two and a half kilometers. Myself and my friend who lived two doors down from me were actually the only two people on our road who were supposed to take the bus, but we didn't. We walked to school because we didn't want to get to school too early. So, by walking we realized how long it takes to walk two and a half kilometers, and even at the beginning of high school it took me 30 minutes. By the time I graduated I had dropped that time to 17 minutes. So, 17 minutes and two and a half kilometers, that's pretty quick. That's quicker than the standard human can walk. So, I was moving at a faster rate. But if I could do it in an automobile, I could get to school in five minutes. If I could teleport myself there, I can get myself there in just a matter of seconds. 

        By the time I graduated high school, I was able to drive, occasionally getting use of my dad's vehicles, and you know, with or without his permission Sorry, dad, but I was still able to get to school. It's only a short drive away and if I managed to make the green light and get straight there, I can make it there in as little as three and a half minutes, which means I had even more time at my disposal. And that's what transportation and the ability to go out and do whatever we want with the advent of the automobile gave us. It gave us more free time. We no longer had to wait for a streetcar or a train to take us somewhere. We didn't have to live right next door to where we were, just to make it so we can get there on time in case something happened. We were able to live further out and still get to work. 

​           The rise of the suburban landscape in the 1950s showcased to us that we can live far from the major cities, have all the amenities within a quick drive away. But as more and more of us moved to the suburbs, the suburbs became more and more crowded. We needed more roads to get us in, so we built more roads. But as we built more roads, but as we built more roads, more people thought they could move even further out from the city, thus causing mass urban sprawl to an area that was only serviced by the automobile. Now, being a person who loves his automobile and being a person that actually lives outside of the conforms of standard public transit not to say I'm not close to one I do have a 15-minute walk where I can get a bus, but I am at the very end of the bus route and I'm very limited on where I can work. If I had to take the bus, so that would limit to where I can live.
 
           This Toyota woven city is making it so that everybody can live within the confines of small city centers. They can work and live and play in one generalized area. See, before, when we built cities, we built them on the premise of office blocks and living blocks. Industries were always kept outside to the edge and the industrial workers lived in the small, secluded suburban areas. They didn't have good healthcare, because that was in town. They didn't have all the good shops, because a lot of those were in town. So, the people in town had a lot more. The woven city gives us what the city centers always had, and now, with a lot of industries becoming greener and being able to sustain themselves within the environment of a residential neighborhood, we now have the ability to move more of these into the interior of the city and with that we can move ourselves away from the need of the automobile. Not to say that the automobile is going to become dormant and completely disappear from society, similar to that of the horse buggy of the turn of the last century. No, the automobile is still going to be present for decades to come.
 
         You have to remember we got into chariots and then carriages. We had those for hundreds of years before the horseless buggy came to replace them and essentially the horseless buggy just replaced our mode of transportation before. But we also had other transportation systems added in to help build these car-free cities. Before cars were there, trains made it so that we can go and visit our families in the outlining areas. We could do it quicker than having to walk or take a horse and buggy. Trains were our first ability to cross vast nations in a shorter amount of time. From there we realized the train system to build tram systems within cities. My home city used to have two tram systems that I know of One that went to the outlining town where the main copper refinery was to be able to bring people from the industry town into the main hub city so they could do their shopping and go to all the great things that we had in the city. You can go to the theater and see a show. You can go dance the night away at a bar. It had everything in the major urban center. As I said, we had the industrialized towns outside, but these trams brought us into the cities.
 
         Now trams today have slowly been making a comeback, but they're both track trams and trackless trams, new age bus systems being able to utilize the roads that are underneath of us, to move a mass quantity of people between spaces. We've now created these road trains, or, as we call them, the trackless trams. They can have dedicated routes or they can utilize the roadways that are around us. Canada's capital is famous for these Ottawa. Ontario actually has dedicated bus routes. Instead of building a light rail system, they utilized the roads that were pre-existing in their downtown cores and as the city expanded out, they built dedicated bus routes so essentially a tram system, but utilizing city buses. And as they grew, they managed to get articulating buses, dual systems that allowed people from the outskirts to come into the city. Now the city of Ottawa is adding in light rail systems similar to that of the city of Toronto and Montreal. LRT lines have now become the new track systems to bring people from outlining areas into the central hub of the city, where highways once did this, where people can now no longer afford the automobile, whereas a vehicle under $20,000 price range no longer exists in the North American climate and, hell, most European markets. We now have to get these people from the outer lining areas into the central cores. 

​          The central cores of a city always have all major amenities. That's where all your big main hospitals are the office buildings and the stock exchange that run the cities. Hell, it's where City Hall is. Most government offices, everything but manufacturing industries are within the confines of the central hub, and that's what the woven city from Toyota is showcasing to us is they're trying to create not just one central hub, but a multitude of mini central hubs, and now, by utilizing things like trams, maglevs, high-speed trains, vertical lift vehicles, hyperloops, autonomous loop systems, hell, even e-bikes and single-use mobility units, they're showcasing to us that we can all live in our own dedicated central core system. We don't have to have one main downtown. We can have a multitude of different downtowns all being connected by one centralized transportation system. Whereas before, trains are what connected each central city to each other, they can again become the central core system.
 
        Carless, cities are going to survive with the use of both a train system and flight Autonomous flying vehicles. EVTOL’s are going to be part of a futurized system. Hyundai has looked into this for years, creating centralized hubs, or as they call them, hives, where tons of these vehicles can all come in from outer lining areas. Hell, they can even be used to transport amongst major areas. So, each one of these little woven cities. You can utilize an autonomous loop system for either trackless or tracked system for autonomous vehicles to move you around the main cores. Within the centralized area. You can use single-use vehicles like e-bikes, single-use mobility units or in some cases they'll even allow for personalized pods. It's similar to that of our automobiles today Single-use pods can be your own vehicle. You could separate yourself out from everyone else. 

         But as Lynk & Co. from Geely proved to us that, being part of a system within a multitude of different cities across the world, we can help decrease the need for unusable vehicles, Lynk & Co. pioneered sharing. Now they're not the first company in the world that gave us car share systems. No, commune Auto from Quebec in Canada helped pioneer that and they've been doing it since the 1970s. Car sharing was a big thing, but when we have no need for a multitude of mass quantities of vehicles, the car sharing system Lincoln Company had been within a corporate entity. You have free use to any vehicle from that corporation on their system in any major city. So, when I go from New York to Tokyo, as long as I have a vehicle from that corporation on their system in any major city. So, when I go from New York to Tokyo. As long as I have a vehicle from that company and I pay into their services when I go to Tokyo, I can utilize an underutilized vehicle while I'm there.
 
         Personal use vehicles these are for the people that still like to have control of where they go. See where General Motors and their cruise division, which recently shut down, was giving us the autonomous bus. Lincoln Company wasn't giving us autonomous vehicles, but they were giving us hybrids, electrics and standard ICE engines. They were giving us the ability to go from one city to another and always have free use of a vehicle without having to rent. We don't have to go up to a counter, we just have to state we are leaving through an app and when we are getting back, so our vehicle goes in the pool for anyone else to use. So, these car sharing systems allowed us to have personal use mobility units wherever we went.
 
         That is something that is not going to disappear from the world of the automobile for decades to come. And why? Because, no matter how many people listening to this podcast who live in major cities, who say well, you know, I use subways, I use cabs, I've never owned a vehicle and I'm in my 50s. Yeah, I get it. I get your point, but you still have to remember there is still a mass quantity of the population around the world that still lives in both rural and suburban areas that still have a need for personal use automobiles. So, car-free cities will not apply to those select areas. Personal use mobility units are still going to be around, but within the confines of something like the Woven City, the Hyundai Hives and our personal use mobility units will be highly used when we enter a major city. 

          We will now park our cars outside of the city and utilize transportation infrastructure provided by urban centers to get us into the cities. Where cities like London have pioneered car-free zones and have even started charging people entering the city core to reduce congestion, this makes it so more people are inclined to park their vehicle outside of the downtown core and use public transportation systems. They park at a dedicated parking zone. If they're part of a car sharing network, their vehicle could stay there and go into the pool for somebody else to use, even if they're only going into town for a couple hours. It'll give the ability of your vehicle being utilized for somebody else Instead of just parking there and taking up space. Car-free cities are meant to take the wasted space of the automobile out of the picture, and that is where Toyota is trying to go. They're trying to showcase to us that we don't need to waste all of this space on storing vehicles for a limited amount of usage.
 
        You can park and walk a few blocks. Now, myself living in Canada, there are times of the year that I don't want to park my car and walk four blocks to go somewhere because, trust me, the weather is not favorable. But some cities have found ways around this. The city of Edmonton, Alberta, has a mass number of skyways and underground walkways, similar to that of the entire downtown core of Montreal, having a subterranean tunnel system. I've actually walked quite a bit of it and we were able to walk nearly all of downtown Montreal in the system. In Edmonton, where you get these Chinook winters, minus 40 temperatures at some points, it'll be minus 40 on Monday and then it'll be plus four on Friday, but on a Monday, you don't want to walk from building to building, even though it's just across the street. They build these skyways so you can walk amongst them. Now, if we had electric autonomous vehicles into the mix and we allow personal mobility units similar to that of Segway's and the hoverboards that you've once seen now into the mix, we can now move amongst all of these downtown cores more freely and more quickly.
 
       Like I said, when I went from 30 minutes going two and a half kilometers to 17 minutes walking two and a half kilometers, I was able to catch a little bit more on much music. Yeah, I was watching music videos in the morning. I could watch an extra two or three music videos, I could finish the TV show I was watching or I could catch a few more minutes of sleep, just like if you live in the outskirts and you take a train into the central court to work. You can do some work while on the train with wi-fi now. So, as our cities become more and more connected to each other, we start integrating these woven cities, a concept that is not new. Woven cities have existed for centuries, hell, a millennia, where, if you look at old cities like Rome, you will see that there are areas where people can live, work, play and get their food All within one central area. They're little mini cities within a major city. That's what's happening. That's where Toyota is going. They want to bring back the concept of people living together in harmony, kind of like John Lennon said, imagine all the people living for today. Like seriously, we're all interconnected in one major city.
 
       So, when I leave my condo, I go to the elevator, I go all the way to the basement. It's the middle of winter. There's an underground tunnel. I hop aboard my personal mobility unit from, let's say, Segway. I take the tunnel three blocks up to go see a movie. While I'm at the movie I can go a block over and get some supper. During the week. I'm only four or five blocks away from where I work.
 
        In the middle of summer. I can walk, I can take a bike. If I want to go a little bit further out, I can take the tram systems or autonomous vehicles. I don't need a vehicle. When I go and visit my parents outside of the major hub of the central core. I fly, I take the train to the outside edge where I filled out my information to do my car sharing, pick up my vehicle to drive on clear and free highways out of the city to the rural points. 

​         Suburbanized areas where tons of people live in houses with tons more space can still have everything delivered to their house through autonomous vehicles. Being able to work from home allows us to live in our house in peace and have everything delivered to us through either drones or autonomous pods. When we choose to go out into the city, we can still live in these suburban areas, pick a time and, with the help of companies like Uber and Lyft have brought us, we could book a time for us to go into town. We could still live on the outskirts without the use of an automobile. The automobile becomes a personal joy unit.
 
          The future of the automobile is not in everyday life. Within the next 50 to 60 years, you're going to start to see a change in how we utilize automobiles, and you've already started to see it now with the introduction of electric vehicles, where people are now learning that electric vehicles have a completely different driving mentality than to internal combustion engine vehicles, all due to how long they take to charge and where the charging ports are at. You have to completely rework how you drive to own them and with a very limited amount of fuel cell, it's even harder to get into that avenue. But while utilizing all of this new technology for the future, we're slowly going to start moving away from the automobile being a part of our family. The core family for the past hundred years has been the standard core family unit, our house and at least 2.1 vehicles. We have seen an increase in moving back to the three-car driveway now, but as more autonomy comes into play and these more interconnected cities start appearing, our use for the automobile on everyday purposes is going to dwindle. 

​            When I first had kids, my wife and I needed two vehicles and we needed two vehicles all the time, and even as they got older, we still needed one for traveling and we needed one each to get back and forth to work. We're now getting to a point that we have two good, decent vehicles and the only reason why we have a third is because it's just too good to get rid of. But once it goes, that's it. We're down to two cars. Unless we want fun, we're not going to have anything else.
 
          Car-free cities are going to bring us back to where we once were, where we all lived in harmony at one major urban center, in a multitude of many urban centers merging together to make one mega city. Between each one of these urban centers, we can now go through tunnels right above the ground or even fly above the ground. Drone technology is going to make it so we can go from one major urban center to the other major urban center a lot quicker, a lot easier. Hyperloop is going to make it so we can go from one major city to the next without having to even get into an airplane. Simplify the way we travel. The Hyperloop system that the province of Alberta is now looking into to put between the cities of both Calgary and Edmonton, with one stop over in the center in Red Deer, Alberta, makes it so that you can now go between two cities without having to wait for an airplane to land. With air traffic getting more and more congested and having more and more delays, systems like Hyperloops are to become more of a necessity for our car-free city connections. And this is not something that's new. Pneumatic air systems for the travel of human occupants have been around since the 1800s, so it's nothing new. It's just being reinvented for the world of today.
 
           Our car-free cities can happen, and even with the way we have developed cities in the past and have them built right now, the connection points required to build and adapt our current structure to a world of car-free cities for the future is right in front of us. Bike lanes were one of the first steps into creating low-speed mobility lanes for autonomous vehicles. Some cities may not allow this, like the city of Toronto and Ottawa in Ontario, who have both stated that autonomous vehicles can't ride in those lanes, which is very stupid, because what you want them out on the sidewalk with people or you want them out on the road going super slow with the vehicles, like pick one. These lanes have been put in place for future technology. More sidewalk space has been put in for more mobility of people. Where we once walked across this earth from place to place, we're a lot healthier, a lot more outgoing and got more oxygen.
 
         A car-free city is what we require to move our species into the next evolutionary phase. AutoLooks is not saying that the life of the automobile is over, oh no, we're just at the evolutionary point where vehicles are going to be taking that next leap into the future. And even though vehicles that hover and fly above the ground are not here, we don't live in a world like Star Wars with speeders. We're not there yet. But to get us through that next evolutionary phase, we need things like drones, we need things like Hyperloop, we need things like autonomous transportation units to connect all of us in our car-free cities and to bring us out into the freedom of tomorrow. 

          The automobile will slowly turn back into what it once was at the beginning of its life. It's not just going to be made for the rich, though. The automobile was originally created for the rich to go out and have fun and explore the world and do whatever it slowly seems like that's where it's going now, but no. With companies like Uber, Lyft, car2go, commune Auto, allowing us to share our automobiles with each other, the ability for everyone to enjoy going out and exploring the world is still there. For us, it's just like, as Doc said at Back to the Future 3. 

           Nobody runs or jumps anymore. Well, we do. We do it for recreation, we do it for fun. The future of tomorrow, in the year 2100, we might be saying that about the automobile? What? Nobody drives and owns cars anymore? Well, we do. We do it for recreation, we do it for fun. We take cars out on a weekend to go and explore the backwoods. We take cars out on the weekend to go down to Home Depot, get some stuff to build a deck at our house, because we don't need to own those trucks to bring everything around and to be completely empty all the time. We can rent them out to people we know, and multi-use vehicles are where this segment is really going to survive. If you've taken a look at a Italdesign Airbus pop-up hell even Audi did one where the centralized pod unit and a vertical lift vehicle can attach to a mobility unit on the bottom, we can now turn drone vehicles into personalized used vehicles as well. Mercedes-Benz showed us years ago and Toyota with its e-palette. Being able to use a skateboard platform to allow us to put anything on it also gives us more versatility in what we can drive and what we can have at our disposal for the fun. But when we're not having fun on a weekend, that vehicle could be utilized to deliver our goods to our house. 

           The future is really in car-free cities and as the world becomes more urbanized, car-free cities are going to become a bigger part of it. And if you take a look at Saudi Arabia's line and take a real look at it, you can see that autonomous travel is the only way you're going to move around. Personal use vehicles are only for when you're outside of the line. When you're inside the line, public transportation is the only way to get around, next to drones. So, unless you're flying, you're taking an autonomous vehicle, and this is the development of a car-free city, a place where we're not stuck in congestion staring at the taillights of the guy in front of us. We're freely flowing from the office to our condo, no matter how much we love cars and how much our love affair with cars is here. 

           The woven city from Toyota is a step forward in the evolution of transportation. We need these car-free cities for the future and without the infrastructure put in place for public transportation of the future, we're just doomed to sit in congestion forever. And if the premier of my province is listening to this, building a giant tunnel under the 401 is not going to reduce congestion in the city of Toronto. The car-free city, a mega city of a multitude of smaller cities all connected with autonomous travel resources, is how you're going to move Toronto into the future, not grabbing from its past to try and build into its future. Evolving into the future is how we're going to make it happen. It's a car-free cities. What do you think of them and do you see yourself living in them in the future? Let us know at the bottom.
 
           And if you like this podcast, please like, share or comment on any major social feeds or streaming sites that you have found the Outlooks podcast on, from Spotify to iTunes. We are there across over 50 streaming sites across the globe. You can find the AutoLooks podcast and the AutoLooks.net website, all from the Ecomm Entertainment Group, and if you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. And after you've done that, stop by the website. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Check out our help pages for some cool, fun facts and fun little tidbit websites that you never even thought of. Hell. There are some interesting products out there that we have found that essentially are part of the automobile evolution for the future. We have displayed them on the AutoLooks.net website. So, take a stop by. So, check them out and you'll love it.
 
         And after you do that, send this podcast out to your friends, your family and click the like button at the bottom, right down there. Right down there at the bottom. And click the like button at the bottom, right down there. Right down there at the bottom. Click the like button to follow us for more information about future car-free cities and future technology from the automotive world Coming to you from a doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay himself. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. The AutoLooks Podcast is hosted by the one and only Everett Jay and put together, created and mixed by himself, Everett Jay and Ecomm Entertainment Group. So, for myself, the AutoLooks.net website and everyone at Ecomm Entertainment Group, strap yourself in for this one fun, interesting ride as we move into a future of car-free cities. 

Everett J.
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