World-renowned marketing expert Rory Sutherland has suggested that the advent of smaller EVs might go some way to solving London’s burgeoning transport issues.
In a typically lengthy, wide-ranging and entertaining article in the Daily Telegraph, he promotes the practice of considering the inverse of any decision, citing electric vehicles as a perfect example.
In Sutherland’s parallel universe of inverse thinking “Most of the electric vehicles in London would not be cars or buses at all. They would be much, much smaller. In a place like London, where much of the time it’s now verboten to drive above a funereal 20 miles an hour, and the mileage of the typical journey is in the low single digits, the conventional car is needlessly large. Don’t even get me started on buses, which for most of the day fitfully transport four hapless passengers around in something the size of a family house. No, for Londoners the real promise of electrification is not just cleaner but smaller vehicles.
A few things give a glimpse of what the typical London vehicle might look like 20 years hence. The Heathrow Pod is magnificent and deserves much wider adoption. I recently drove the Microlino, a tiny Swiss-built electric bubble car which is narrow enough to drive in bicycle lanes. But what is needed above all is not more mass transit, but more micro transit: Transport for London (TfL) needs to stop fetishising rails and start licencing small independent vehicles that can carry Londoners for the “last mile” between the Tube station and their ultimate destination. Something conceptually halfway between a taxi and a bus, but much smaller than either. And certainly cheaper than a taxi. In fact, it would be completely free.”
“In London,” he continues, “where it is apparently perfectly legal for a simpering tourist couple to be ferried about in a pink, furry pedicab blasting out power ballads, and where it is equally legal for 12 drunk Norwegians to pedal down Oxford Street on something resembling a giant bedstead, it should be relatively easy to licence a trial of this new form of transportation. It would also make cycle and bus lanes useful at all times of day.
“The problem is that before this can happen, regulators and management consultants will get involved, and immediately engage in the bureaucratic equivalent of tantric sex: where the preliminary stages last for ages but no-one ever consummates anything.”
(Pic: JCT)
