I wrote recently about European cities considering a complete ban on private cars by 2050, and I said that didn’t sound so ambitious. Well, according to The Guardian, Helsinki has a plan “to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.”

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

Now, that’s ambitious! I love the vision. It’s not just about transportation – imagine, if all these transit vehicles are in motion, they won’t be parked. When they do park, they can do it in small, out-of-the-way spaces. If they are autonomous, they won’t need so much space to maneuver around each other and around people. If this is the city of the future, what are we going to do with all the extra space?

So it looks like the race to develop the most sustainable transportation vision is a race to the Finnish! Sorry.