Many call it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in
which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared
cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. Many anticipate a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities
themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for
people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it
will be a more walkable city.” Scandinavians doing just like that these days starting from a while back
The future resident of Helsinki will not own a car.”
Rikhard Manninen is another man with a plan – a very large plan, which is laid out on a table in his office in the centre of Helsinki. Manninen is director of the city’s strategic urban planning division. The project is a vision of how the city will look in 2050. It will have a lot more people – the population is projected to rise by 50% – but with much less dependence on cars. The city’s population density will be increased; many of the new high-rise apartment blocks will not have residents’ car parking; key arteries into the city will be replaced by boulevards; more and more space will be given over to cycle lanes. A report on the plan in the Helsinki Times last year confidently predicted: “The future resident of Helsinki will not own a car.”
“Agglomeration” is the buzzword that planners such as Manninen like to use, and the benefits which derive from it are driving the vision of a new city. “When you are located quite close, businesses can interact more easily; people can walk to work and use public transport. It’s more efficient.”
In many cities, the era of the suburban commuter, along with the era of the car, is drawing to a close. Manninen no longer wants a city with a single centre; he envisages a multi-polar city with half-a-dozen hubs where people live, work, shop and play. This will reduce transport congestion and generate a series of vibrant, efficiently organised, semi-autonomous units – that’s the plan, anyway.
Though Finland is seen as a pioneer in sustainable transport, the reality is rather different. Because the country came late to urbanisation and there was a huge amount of development in the 1950s and 60s, commuting by car is more entrenched than in some older cities. Finns have tended to live in the suburbs, driving to the centre of Helsinki to work and to their beloved country cottages at weekends. But Manninen echoes Vesco in Lyon in his view that attitudes are changing: “The younger generation are no longer car dependent. They are less likely to have a driving licence than previous generations.”
Generation Y, the so-called millennials now in their 20s and early 30s who have come of age in the digital era, seem less wedded to possessions than their baby boomer predecessors. Surveys show that the one object that is prized is the smartphone, and the future of transport is likely to be based not on individually owned cars but on “mobility as a service” – a phrase supposedly coined by another Finn, Sampo Hietanen, chief executive of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) Finland. Consumers will, so the theory goes, use their smartphones to check ultra-detailed travel news, locate car-club cars or bikes, check for parking spaces, call up Uber drivers, and arrange shared rides. Who needs a personally owned car?
While in Helsinki, I meet a delegation from the city’s Regional TransportAuthority. I’m struck not just by their commitment to sustainable transport, but their willingness to engage with the public. They send staff into schools and workplaces to try to win converts to walking, cycling and public transport, and take their message to older people, who are usually the most resistant to abandoning their cars.
One of the initiatives they are proudest of is their Kutsuplus (“Call plus”) bus service – a fleet of nine-seater minibuses whose routes are determined by the bookings they get on any given day. It’s a great idea, and I book a bus to take me from their offices into town. It arrives quickly, picks me up at a bus stop just 100 metres away, and costs €5 for the two-mile trip. The problem is that, so far, Helsinki only has 15 buses, and doesn’t have the funding for any more. Like many of the schemes currently under way, it’s at the pilot stage. There’s a revolution coming, but revolutions cost money.
“We are not making a car-free Helsinki – that is not possible,” says Reetta Putkonen, director of the transport and traffic planning division, who I meet for lunch at an exhibition space devoted to the city’s vision of the future. “But we are going to take control of where the cars are and how they are used, so that we will have places where it’s really nice to walk, it’s very fast and easy to bike, and public transport is highly efficient. Walkers will be the kings, and the cyclists will have their own paths. We will still have cars – people need them for carrying goods – but their speeds will be very low and there won’t be so many of them. Our planning shouldn’t be based on cars and on parking. It will be a balanced system.”
After lunch, I meet another Reetta – not all Finnish women are called Reetta, they assure me. Reetta Keisanen is the city’s cycling coordinator, and she has brought two of the department’s pool bikes for us to undertake a tour of the city. She takes me first along a cycle path that used to be a rail track, linking the town centre with the harbour. Halfway along the route, there is an electronic register counting the cycles as they pass – I am the 54,672nd so far this year. Reetta II tells me that 96% of the residents of Helsinki are pro-cycling, though Reetta I had cautioned that the figure might be lower if motorists realised how much of their road space was being eaten into.
There are only three gears on the bike and I am not dressed for this sudden spasm of activity – instead of shorts, I am wearing thick trousers and jacket – so it is a struggle, especially on the gritty areas near the seafront. It is, though, pleasant when we eventually get there, and sit in the spring sunshine in the garden of the Regatta, a tiny wooden café which is one of Helsinki’s best-loved attractions.
Keisanen, who is in her mid-20s and committed to the sustainability cause, is convinced a major change is afoot. “We’ve got lots of work to do because many Finns still own cars,” she says, “but in cities it is now possible to live without a car, and young people are buying fewer cars than older people.” Cycling in Helsinki has doubled since 1997, and Keisanen predicts further increases as the cycling network expands. I suggest to her that not all cyclists behave well – I am thinking of the ones I see in London who whizz along pavements and go in the wrong direction down one-way streets – but she has a good answer. “Cities get the cyclists they deserve. If you have good infrastructure, you will get good cyclists. It’s the same with drivers and pedestrians.”
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