- 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.
