- One of the problems with urban planning
is that change is difficult.
Most towns are built around cars.
Many of them want to switch
to something that's more transit-friendly and walkable,
but it's a very slow and difficult process.
But what if the car never arrived?
What if your town was so inaccessible for so long
that, by the time it became possible for cars to drive in,
the people decided they didn't want them?
This is Zermatt, a ski resort in the Alps in southern Switzerland,
and this is the end of the valley.
There's no easy way past those mountains.
You can't drive in here.
There is a road, but it's narrow and twisting,
and only open if you get special permission
and pay quite a large fee.
And even then, you can't get into the town proper.
Instead, the next town over has a lot of parking
and a train to shuttle tourists back and forth.
It used to be that the only vehicles here
were horse-drawn carriages.
But in the 1980s, Zermatt modernized,
jumping straight past petrol cars and internal combustion engines,
and going fully electric,
with some very specific requirements.
- We don't have private cars.
The hoteliers and all the builders and all the taxis of course,
can't go just by bicycle, so they ask.
The local government makes the decision.
The business people have to send us the paper:
"Why you need a vehicle?"
And then, we have this checklist.
We give them permission, maybe for three years.
And if the business is running, he can keep it.
But if you are a person like... Tom Scott, why'd you need one?
"Yeah, I live up here. It's very difficult to go up there."
Then we would say, "Sorry, you can take a taxi."
And all the deliverers, they have a car,
but not the shops, also not the restaurants.
We are really strict that, since 20 years, we have around 520 vehicles.
- If you grew up in Britain around the same time as I did,
you might be thinking, "Those are milk floats".
And yes, it's basically the same technology:
a battery electric vehicle with a very long service life,
designed for decades of low speed use,
to be fixed easily if it breaks,
and to make a minimum of noise.
In the 20th century, British dairies used fleets of vehicles like that
for delivering bottles of milk to millions of homes every morning.
Which seems weird these days, but then,
so does a lot of the 20th century.
Zermatt here used these vehicles for everything.
Taxis are the most obvious one, but buses, trucks, the police car;
they all looked like that,
and many of them were designed and built locally
by a company just over there
that started out with horse-drawn taxis.
- It took me a while to notice something as I walked around Zermatt.
In every city, in every town,
there is a constant quiet roar of traffic noise from somewhere,
even if it's off in the distance.
And here, there just isn't. It's missing.
And that's really obvious at night,
but right now, of course, that's very difficult
to demonstrate because there's construction,
there's the rush of the river
that's really audible from this vantage point;
it's carrying all the glacier-melt water down the valley.
There are helicopters and trains,
but at night when everything's calm,
there's no traffic noise.
And while I know it's a one-off,
and I know it only works because
this is a small, rich and very expensive ski resort with a weird history
that's outsourced its parking to the next town over...!
I can't help thinking that it'd be nice
if more towns and cities sounded like that.
- Everybody knows the rules.
The children grow up with this.
"Can I have a car?" "Are you crazy?"
So, it's in the mind from the locals.
When I tell people from Switzerland,
"We are living in a town without petrol cars,"
they say, "How you manage?"
"By bicycle, or by foot, or by bus?" "Ah. Huh."
So, they can't believe it.
But if you are in this system, then it's so normal.