Katja Diehl during her keynote at Boye Aarhus 26: “Everyone should have the right to enjoy a good life without owning a car.”

In Germany, a child is injured or killed by car traffic every 20 minutes.
If Deutsche Bahn did the same, it would be forbidden.

Last week, I delivered my keynote speech in Aarhus on a conference organized by Boye & Company - Janus Boye.

Here are some facts from the talk:

Less than half of German children play outside every day.
Our children have grown up learning to live in boxes: the car box, the kindergarten box and the home box.
One third of people in Germany cannot drive. These include children, people without a licence, people in poverty and disabled people. They don’t have a lobby because they are many small groups that have never connected.
Millions of miles are driven by robotaxis around the world. Not one is wheelchair accessible.
The ability to “go green” in terms of mobility is a privilege: a black mother told me that she experiences racism the moment she boards a bus with her children.

None of this is a technological problem. It’s a mindset issue. Helsinki went years without a traffic death by protecting the so-called ‘weak’ first.

The most important sentence I heard came from a wheelchair user I met who fights for accessible trains:
Plan for everyone. When we start planning, everyone who will use the trains should be in the room.

This is true of trains. It is true for AI. It is true for everything we build next.

The full keynote is on my blog at Medium: Plan for Everyone.