Among the different possibilities that humanity is contemplating to guarantee mobility in the large cities that continue to grow at accelerated rates, and in which an increasing part of the planet’s population is concentrated, are those proposals that seek to reduce polluting emissions from private vehicles, replacing them with a growing number of platforms that offer the possibility of sharing transportation and reducing, if used at maximum capacity, up to three or four times the number of cars that enter or circulate through our streets and avenues.
These shared service models, in which a user makes his vehicle available to several people who make similar journeys, dividing the costs of the trip and thus achieving that, instead of four cars, only one circulates, will become “fashionable” as the price of oil continues to rise, or as the local governments of many cities impose greater restrictions on the use of private vehicles in the center of the same or, directly, deny entry to those cars that pollute more than allowed because they are diesel, too old or do not have a minimum of eco-sustainable features.
When this measure is adopted and its effectiveness is seen, it will be good news for all the inhabitants of any city to see that a part of the space is recovered for public use and common transport, and our streets are freed from a large amount of traffic jams and agglomerations, although there are still several years to go before the impact of this possible measure is really felt, since now we are only seeing timid advances in this sense. The point is that, in order to strengthen the sharing of private means of transport, while trying to encourage the use of public transport, we still have to change our idea of what private transport means.
A personal object and possession
On the one hand, taking our car to get around gives us a certain freedom and limits the dependence on external schedules that a bus or streetcar service can offer. This idea is only partially true, since, in most big cities, the subway runs every few minutes and the bus follows a regular and continuous schedule as well. It is a psychological issue that induces us to get in the car, where we will generally go alone, more relaxed, without the discomfort of, in a certain way, half an hour of being crowded if the subway is crowded or the bus has no place to sit down.
This psychological issue is also the one that in a certain way prevents that part of our trips, which could be shared, we do them with other people we do not know. In general, there are still many private car owners who do not take kindly to letting strangers get into their car, sharing a route of a certain duration with them and having to maintain a minimum of friendly conversation along the way. There is also, of course, the polar opposite, those who are perfectly open to the possibility that your vehicle is for common use, help you pay for gas and meet interesting people, or not, on the way to the office. However, the latter group of people is not yet as numerous as the former, and for that reason, among others, the implementation of car-sharing based transportation models is going to take years to penetrate deeply into society.
We are tremendously individualistic people, most human beings. We are certainly protective of our possessions and the private vehicle, in a large part of the world, is perceived as a symbol of social status, as well as a simple means of transportation. In the car you usually carry personal things, perhaps items and objects that are always there in case you need them throughout the day, or perhaps you have your own decoration on the dashboard. Therefore, allowing entry into your “private” mobility space, for some people, can be just as uncomfortable as sharing your home with strangers to spend some time relaxing when they cross the street where you live.
Sharing a personal space
As long as the psychological and cultural aspects associated with the “car” element do not change, it will be difficult to massively adopt car sharing in order to reduce the number of vehicles on the streets, It would be easier to encourage the use of public transport on a massive scale by making it easier for users to leave their “precious object” in the garage than to insist on ridesharing between three or four strangers, who do not always trust that the other people on the journey are people with whom they would really go for a coffee, if they had the opportunity to do so.
This is where another factor comes into play. Fear. Fear understood as the reluctance to get into a vehicle that is not ours, with whom we do not know and perhaps thinking that it may result in an uncomfortable experience. For the passenger, who does not have his own vehicle and joins the offer of a driver who does have it and makes it available to others, the perception is different from that of the owner. If on the one hand, I who own a vehicle do not usually want to share it because it is something personal and my own and I do not want to see strangers who could damage it, dirty it or cause any inconvenience to it, on the other hand, the passenger, who is the one who decides to get into someone else’s vehicle, also subconsciously activates the reluctance to do so because he does not know who he will meet, whether they will let them listen to music and look at their cell phone without having to make conversation with the driver, or whether they will simply be able to have a quiet trip without any of the other passengers pestering them with personal questions or attempts to make the trip friendlier. And there’s nothing scarier than silence in a space where no one knows each other, and if you’re trying to break the ice there’s nothing scarier than having to answer questions or make small talk just to make it seem like we’re comfortable in it.
We are weird, humans, in that respect. We tend to shy away from anything that does not guarantee us a minimum of security because we do not know what will happen, and, on the other hand, we do not open ourselves to experience new situations with people we do not know, allowing new opportunities to learn something or exchange ideas, anecdotes or knowledge with other individuals. And all, mainly, because we are so focused on our comfort zone.
Our own safety bubble
The comfort zone is a concept that most people understand, but do not know its origin. It is based on mental parameters, let’s call it that, through which we limit the radius of action of our activities and experiences to what is already known to us, because we have in our memory databanks previous results and experiences that can help us navigate the world knowing what to expect from it. When we are not sure how something may turn out, what may happen, if we will like it or not, if it will be positive or not, if it will cause us discomfort, problems or inconveniences, these same “programs” and conditioning factors of the human psyche often subconsciously discourage us from daring and launching ourselves into these new micro opportunities that may arise, simply by sharing a 20-minute ride in a private vehicle with other people who go to work in the same direction or close to where you are going.
By maintaining such a restricted comfort zone, most people have a hard time getting more open social dynamics to interact more easily with the rest of society, and thus promote a city more open to the model of human relations and less to the model of a “cold” city and simply a place to pass through, work or shop, but not so much of cultural, social or personal “experience” with the rest of the inhabitants of the city.
While transportation is just one example of this, other areas of life are also suffering from this dynamic of isolation of the person in their particular and more closed world due to the feeling that interacting with others, in general, besides requiring an effort in social behavior that we may not have the need or desire to carry out, can give us the impression that we are wasting time when we could be answering emails, reading the newspaper for information or doing any other task that does not involve social relationships with others. This individualistic model of society is growing in recent years and will continue to do so, and it is not that it has to be bad or negative per se, but it is true that it prevents a number of experiences that can only be obtained through human relationships with one another from coming into our lives.
Every trip, a surprise
In any case, little by little as urban mobility and traffic regulations become more and more restrictive, there will be a change in the perception of this type of shared transport because, in that case, priority is given to getting to work on time and in a car that can go faster or more direct than a bus to where we want to get to, and, therefore, we assume the possible inconveniences that may arise from the experience with other people during the same. On the other hand, it may happen that the same drivers and passengers, if their first experiences are positive, repeat again and take the initiative to share their own vehicles with third parties, increasing the popularity of this means of reducing road traffic and helping to reduce pollution in cities.
Like everything else, each trip is a completely different experience, since each person is a world unto themselves and can bring, for better or worse, something completely different to those they come across in their daily routine of moving around the city. Cab drivers know this well, they are accustomed to taking on many different customer profiles per day, to allowing them to share their private work space, which is their car, to endure conversations they may not feel like having or to force others to make the trip more pleasant. For this group, that is their job and those are the rules to comply with, however, the private user does not have to see it that way, and therefore, will not always realize that on each trip, with each person, there is an opportunity to receive something that can be useful, informative, beneficial or interesting, and then tell, learn or pass it on to another person on the next trip we will make when we get back in a shared car with new people, new conversations and new experiences.
