You guessed it! The automobile has to go, away, far away, zap! But, what do we do for an encore?
My suggestion is that we build trains again, but ones that can go around corners with shorter carriages and more modular in design to fit in almost anywhere, and to run on electricity. We can rethink our town centers to make them castles of commercial and social activity. By so doing, we will acknowledge that the world of the automobile is a dead duck!
With the present automobile, our problem is the need for petrol/gas and plenty of parking space. Big shopping centers tend to be on the outskirts of population areas rather than in the town centers, which as a result die from lack of patronage. Our challenge with cars is backup space, as with any port. Think of a city center as a port, or port of call. What it needs is arrival and departure areas that feed into the rest of the commercial community as well as providing the system for getting people to and from home, or to and from work.
These days, we tend to think of efficiency in terms of fast travel, but we forget efficiency in terms of getting people to points where they would like to be. If we were to redesign our towns around the community station, we would really be able to get into a more efficient class of design for our travel systems. By building trains that can go almost anywhere we can replace the motor vehicle almost completely while saving money and energy in the longer term. Even if our trains were to run on roads, we could start the process of change our concept of what a train is to build around light-weight curvilinear rather than heavy-weight rectilinear design.
During the next twenty five years we need to redesign our transport systems for small communities and create commercial castles around the ports of arrival and departure. If we think of new designs for small train stations surrounded by activities that people can get to easily by foot after travelling by rail, we can begin to chip away at the dominance of the motor car in our collective preference functions.
To do any engineering redesign on the scale I have in mind would require that we let go our aging love for the automobile. Honestly, the car is not where it should be at. We can invent an automobile heaven and recycle our gas/petrol guzzling vehicles into efficient clean electrical transporters of a myriad of future designs. Face it, the age of gas and petrol is not where its at. We need to think ahead and build for the future by redesigning our town centers and our trains.