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Ethical Business and Female Power
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Patricia Mokhtarian - We still need handshakes
According to Patricia Moktharian in Ericsson 2020 Shaping Ideas technology makes us travel more, not less. She predicts that there will be more cars in the world by 2020.
Extract from Patricia Mokhtarian on We still need handshakes
Patricia Mokhtarian: Patricia Mokhtarian
Patricia Mokhtarian: When I first started looking at the impacts of telecommunications, technology on travel my assumption was that it was going to be a substitute. That was certainly the hope of the regional planning agency who hired me in part to look into this. We were in Los Angeles and trying to find a way to reduce congestion and improve air quality in the metropolitan area. As Patricia Mokhtarian studied it more and more though she became more and more convinced that in fact the net impact of telecommunications on travel is to increase it. To generate more of it rather than to reduce it. If you think about what the Internet allows you to do, suddenly we have access to anything in the world. In terms of information about activities, places, people. We're seeing things, meeting people that we never in this world would have done otherwise without the Internet. And so, it's opening literally a whole new world to us. And the more we see of that world out there the more we thirst to take part in it in a more engaged way. It's clear that telecommunications can replace travel. We see it with telecommuting, with e-shopping, with teleconferencing. But what's going on at the same time is that it's stimulating additional travel. Teleconferencing of course can replace a business meeting. And so you now don't have to travel to company headquarters every month to get your update. You can do it by video conferencing. Great, so you've saved that routine travel but what are you going to do with that time you've saved? Well, you need still to meet new clients. You need to establish new business connections and so forth. That's not done very well with telecommunications. You need to be there. We still need that hand shake. We still need that look in the eye, that trust building. All of those things that take place face to face. That are still not substitutable by information technologies. At least not in the beginning relationship building stages. So you're going to use the time you've saved by making those routine trips replaced with telecommunications. You'll use it to make more trips. 2020 is likely to be characterized by more of everything that we see now. With the exception of the gasoline engine most likely. We're going to see more public transportation, we need it. We need to improve it. We need to make it more appealing to more people. But we're also going to see more cars. Let's face it, personal transportation cannot be beat in terms of its superior service for most people under most circumstances. So, as soon as we can afford a car, we're going to get one. Precisely because it increases our mobility so dramatically. But at the same time we will also be making the existing capacity used more efficiently. Patricia Mokhtarian thinks we may reduce the size of vehicles for example so that we can put more of them into the same amount of space. We'll certainly need to reduce their emissions and their green house gas pollution effects. So we'll be working at as many different angles as we can to ameliorate the effects. But the demand is increasing as economic prosperity world wide continues to increase.
Patricia Mokhtarian: Patricia Mokhtarian