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The number of tourists visiting the EU has grown significantly over the past fifteen years. In 2000, 331 million international tourists visited the EU compared to 478 million in the year of 2015. Worldwide this trend continues: during the same period tourism grew from 674 million to 1.2 billion globally.

 

This increased tourism is one of the main contributors of the higher population density within most cities. The majority of the large cities within Europe have a hard time dealing with the increased infrastructural challenges. Most cities are therefore embracing a more sharing focused network within the city in order to create more space and solve congestion problems.

 

The increase in amount of sharing has its impact on tourism in both a positive and negative way. First of all, one can say that with the increase of online sharing platforms the barriers to participate in the sharing network of a country have decreased. It is for tourists nowadays a lot easier to participate in for example the shared bike system of a city. In other words, tourists can get easier access to convenient services within a city or country. In addition, density within the city will decrease as more goods will be shared. Tourists that would have normally booked a hotel room will now make use of an otherwise empty apartment through Airbnb. This previous example leads to an obvious downside of the sharing economy on tourism: tax avoidance. As the sharing platforms are usually not registered within the concerning city, it is difficult for cities to gather tourist taxes. Furthermore, an increase in sharing of products could potentially lead to a loss in jobs in the tourist sector. For example, a decrease in taxi drivers due to the increased usage of Uber within a city.

 

As sharing platforms are becoming more popular, each city should thoroughly think about policies regarding sharing platforms. If managed in a good way, sharing platforms can become a solution to many yet unsolved problems.

Sources:

–Europarlement, 2017 : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/595897/EPRS_BRI(2017)595897_EN.pdf

 

–The guardian 2016 : https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/12/urban-sprawl-how-cities-grow-change-sustainability-urban-age

 

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“Our vision is that by 2020 no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new volvo car” (CEO Volvo, 2017)

Nearly every car manufacturing company does it: developing smart driving assistances to make the road a safer place. But questions arise whether these systems actually make cars nowadays safer or if they are just experiments towards the road of autonomous driving?

Not that long ago, a report was published by the head of the Dutch automotive monitoring sector indicating that cars with ‘smart’ driving assistance options have a higher chance of ending up with damage. As a matter of fact, a car without ‘smart’ driving assistance has a chance of 14% to end up in an accident whereas a car with the assistance has a chance of 23%.

There are two explanations why cars with ‘smart’ driving assistance options have a higher probability of ending up with damage compared to ‘regular’ cars. First of all, many new functions that are supposed to help the driver drive more safely are pulling away the attention of the driver from the road. Secondly, when drivers have ‘smart’ driving assistance options in their car, they start to rely on these options more intensively and as a consequence paying less attention to their immediate surroundings.

The above made argument is of course still not generalizable to all ‘smart’ driving options, and the quality of these options differ per car manufacturing company: some companies are simply further than others. Personally, I think that the development of autonomous cars is an exciting process where the technology is an excellent solution to reduce severe accidents on the road. We are however, not yet at the stage where we can bring fully autonomous vehicles to the market and I do believe that we should remain critical regarding the development of autonomous cars.

Sources:
https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-stories/vision-2020

‘Auto’s met slimme hulpsystemen rijden vaker schade’