Global Gridlock
Bill Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, speaks at TED.
Memorable quotes:
“It never occurred to me that my love for cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. And that was true until I got to college.”
“I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching. When I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings were not embraced by my own company. There were some within Ford who thought that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear, and that I needed to stop hanging out with ‘environmental wackos’. I was considered a radical. And I’ll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists.”
"There are about 800 million cars on the road today. That will grow to 2-4 billion cars by mid century. This will cause the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before.”
“Today the average American spends a week a year stuck in traffic jams. That’s a huge waste of time and resources, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. And last summer, there was hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China.”
“The mobility model we have today simply will not work tomorrow.”
“Global gridlock will stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and healthcare particularly to people who live in city centers.”
“We have come a long way. Before the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime.”
Notably absent from his proposed remedies - telecommuting.