The year is 2026. While DARS and government buildings are still sweating with excitement over the drawing of a third lane on the Styrian motorway and dreaming of hectoliters of new asphalt on the same route, which has already been dug up a hundred times, I have the unpleasant feeling that I am watching a repeat of a very bad historical drama. This national enthusiasm of ours for the expansion of the motorway at a time when technology is redefining the very essence of movement is exactly as if in 2007, just a day after Steve Jobs showed the world the first iPhone, the Nokia board of directors had called a crisis meeting, at which they would have decided with all seriousness and strategic enthusiasm how to squeeze two additional keys onto the physical keyboard for faster typing. A completely missed point that will serve as an example of expensive myopia in economics textbooks. The third lane of the motorway is a way back in time. Let me explain why!
My people, things are simpler, as they seem to the officialsThe car of the future is not "better horse", which needs a wider road. The car of the future is a server on wheels, a robot that doesn't need a wider cable, but a better protocol. And it certainly doesn't need a 3-lane highway.
The reason for our traffic jams was never the narrowness of the road, but the fact that Man is the weakest link in the transport chainWe have traffic jams because Jože is reading messages in the left lane. SMSbecause Micka is terrified of the truck and brakes at 80 km/h and because no one knows how to drive smoothly"We are the bug in the code, we are the ones"glitch", which makes the system crash. The moment when cars will fully communicate with each other – and in 2026 we are just before this turning point – this same, poor Slovenian asphalt will “devour” three times as much traffic. No braking, v silent convoys, at 150 km/h and z safety distance 20 centimeters, which would give a driving instructor a heart attack today. The third belt, which we are forging into the stars today as salvation, will then became the most expensive and unnecessary runway in history, a concrete monument to our inability to see beyond the next election.
In the future it will definitely be at least one third (1/3) less vehicle fleetThe first reason is certainly electrification and inability to charge in older apartment buildingsThe second reason is that Owning a car in the city will not be profitableWhen people get on cheap mobility and free, efficient public transport, the city center of the 21st century happens, which has much less traffic than our beloved Ljubljana, which doesn't even get a normal Uber service.
If we walked through cities today that actually understood the concept of living in the 21st century, say after Tallinn, Estonia, would experience a culture shock, because there before You won't see a sea of metal in residential neighborhoods. There they realized economy of space and the absurdity of owning a ton of iron that does nothing 95 percent of the time. And here we still build mansions and We are concrete paving hectares in front of shopping centersso that our the trashy status symbol sleeps there for eight hours per day, while we work on leasing it. This is economic frenzy, because in the city of the future, the car drops you off and goes to work, not demanding a parking space under your window. A city without parking spaces means parks, playgrounds and much-needed housing for young people, and yet we are still planning the world as if every Slovenian will need two diesels and three parking spaces until they die.
To make no mistake, Slovenia urgently needs asphalt, because we are a logistical country and our geographical location is our "oil", but it's a shame that we're laying it on the wrong endsInstead of spreading clogged aorta in Brezovica, we should to build new veins, which would pull the regions out of isolation and allow logistics to breathe. Carinthia's third development axis still sounds like a mythological creature, a connection Novo mesto–Metlika remains on paper, the southern bypass of Ljubljana through Barje (Vrhnika–Lavrica), which would be the only solution to the capital's traffic congestion, is science fiction. The same applies to essential connections, such as Lukovica–Vodice, Prebold–Trbovlje or Celje–Krsko, which would actually increase the mobility of citizens and the fluidity of the economy. What we are doing now is not the infrastructure policy of the future, rather archaeology in the making, as we build an open-air museum for a disappearing world. When this famous third belt is finished, it will probably only be driven by nostalgic fans of driving "hands-on" in their ancient people, while it will The rest of the world rushed by in autonomous capsules along logistics corridors that we haven't even begun to draw, and for which we will probably pay an even more expensive vignette.
