Ken Greenberg
Among those views will be those shared by car sharing expert Ken Greenberg who has a vision of cities that are more pedestrian and bike friendly and offer more mass transit. Cars are a small part of his picture — unless they are shared.
“Not to say that cars are going to disappear — they certainly won’t — but we will use them differently,” adds Greenberg, Principal of Greenberg Consultants and former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto.
But Greenberg says his vision might not be warmly embraced by the automotive dealers at the 2015 CADA Summit held in Toronto on Feb.11, 2015, but it will make for an interesting discussion nonetheless.
Joining him on stage for a Q&A session on car sharing and the urban landscape will be Niel Hiscox, publisher of Canadian auto dealer.
Although his message might be tough to hear, Greenberg says dealers are still curious to learn more about how this new approach to city planning will affect them, and how they can adapt accordingly.
Many dealers are already starting to adapt, says Greenberg, with their focus moving towards green energy vehicles and the ways dealers could provide self-driving cars as a service to consumers. Ultimately, Greenberg says the focus has to shift towards car sharing and move away from ownership.
He says dealers are already starting to deviate from the post-World War II suburban North American style of planning when it comes to building dealerships, a time period that was car-centric and characterized by big parking lots, drive-in movies and three-car garages.
Now, Greenberg is seeing more compact buildings sprouting up in the retail space that are more in line with his approach to city planning. Retail giant Wal-Mart, for example, is moving its new stores below ground level in many U.S. cities and is eliminating the bigger parking lots it once had.
The same holds true for some automobile dealerships. Greenberg cites the new Downtown Toronto Honda dealership on Eastern Ave. as a prime example of the new wave of urban dealerships that are multi-story and fit into the street scene, taking up a much smaller footprint than they did before.
Apart from car sharing and the impact of the urban landscape, delegates can expect to learn more about other issues surrounding connectivity at the upcoming summit.
Last week, Canadian auto dealer spoke with Richard Wallace, Transportation Systems Analysis, Center for Automotive Research (CAR), and the moderator of a panel on connected cars and the opportunities and challenges dealers face in that space.
Other notable keynote speakers in the lineup include Google Global Automotive Lead Joe Maciariello, and Mike Jackson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AutoNation, to name a couple.
Visit: www.cadasummit.ca for full details and to register.
