Good or Bad publicity????

[bobthebilda]

Not often you get a Chairman coming out and saying the very products his company makes has the potential to take away peoples human rights.

HENRY Ford created the modern auto industry with his mass-produced Model T. Now, a century later, his great grandson is worried about "global gridlock" from too many cars.
Ford Motor chairman Bill Ford says the worldwide fleet of cars and trucks could grow by the middle of this century to at least 2 billion, and up to 4bn vehicles, from 800 million vehicles now.

“Where are these people going to go? Where are those cars going to go?” Mr Ford asked in an interview today at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:Nomics conference in Santa Barbara, California.

Already, he says, daily commutes in Beijing can last five hours - and that’s when motorists don’t bog down in multi-day traffic jams as they did last summer.

“People in Los Angeles and New York think they’re in gridlock,” Mr Ford says. “It’s nothing like what they have seen already in other parts of the world.”

“This is going to be a real drag on global growth unless we solve it,” he says.

It’s more than a matter of inconvenience, Mr Ford says. “It’s really a human rights issue. How are you going to move food in gridlock? How do you move to health care?”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...-1226015824541

[Jim Goose]

Could be guilt? Sounds odd for him to make those comments, maybe he has some humanity in him and is simply worried where we are headed?

[prydey]

whats gridlock got to do with how many cars are sold. you can only drive 1 at a time, so if there is more cars, its more to do with rising population, not rising car sales. car sales are just a result of population growth.

like populations though, old cars are going to their graves while the new ones are being bought so just becuase x amount of new cars sell, doesn't mean the total number of cars on the road has gone up by that amount.

[TZENU]

Corporate Social Responsibility - There is a lot more emphasis on it these days!

[mcnamg]

I think the issue of Gridlock is something that Town Planners need to look at not Car Manufacturers. The state and size of the roads here and in other countries is ridiculous. If they provide more capacity on the roads then Gridlock would be reduced. China is a great example 20 years ago virtually nobody had a car and now every man and his dog has one and the road system cant keep up with the huge explosion in the number of road users

[Smoke Pursuit]

Don't places like japan distroy cars after 7 - 8 years??

[fmc351]

Multi day gridlock?

Yeah, bugger that.

[BigBlue]

Originally Posted by mcnamg

I think the issue of Gridlock is something that Town Planners need to look at not Car Manufacturers. The state and size of the roads here and in other countries is ridiculous. If they provide more capacity on the roads then Gridlock would be reduced. China is a great example 20 years ago virtually nobody had a car and now every man and his dog has one and the road system cant keep up with the huge explosion in the number of road users

Forward planing and adequate infrastructure development is the solution here as ncnamg pointed out.

When you have politicians as we had not too long ago proudly stating "peak hour congestion is the sign of a growing economy" however , then realistically there is a limited reason for optimism in my opinion.

Peter.

[bobthebilda]

Originally Posted by prydey

whats gridlock got to do with how many cars are sold. you can only drive 1 at a time, so if there is more cars, its more to do with rising population, not rising car sales. car sales are just a result of population growth. like populations though, old cars are going to their graves while the new ones are being bought so just becuase x amount of new cars sell, doesn't mean the total number of cars on the road has gone up by that amount
.

Well we know thats not true. Chinas population hasnt been growing all that fast over the last 30 years or so, but their car ownership has boomed many times than population growth just in the last 5 years. So much so that cities like Beijing are starting to limit via lottery the amount of cars that can be bought each year. Japan and singapore do similar things to limit car ownership. wealth creates car ownership, not population.

The article states Mr Ford expects car ownership in the World to go from 800 million now, to approx 2 billion (maybe 4 billion), Its hardly a 1 for 1 replacement.

I dont know what the situation is like now, but I remember living in Fitzroy (vic) 10 years ago, and just trying to go anywhere during peakhour was a nightmare. I often found that a 30 minute walk to the supermarket got me there just as quickly as my car did. I understand it would be impossible to get twice as busy as peak hour (in terms of traffic), but just imagine a 4 hour peak hour.

Even freeways like the western ring road or the south eastern are car parks during peak hour. Just imagine if we caved into all those who want to increase our population to 50 million people.