The world is rapidly changing. As a ‘derived demand’, transport is especially susceptible to ongoing developments in areas ranging from big data and AI, to automation, climate change, shifting cultural and political attitudes and changing demographics. Such developments threaten to transform society, but also present us with exciting opportunities to revolutionise the movement of people and goods.
The role of transport researchers and educators is to provide advice to practitioners and policy makers. Unfortunately, however, given the worsening congestion, poor local emissions and rising carbon levels generated by transport, either we are not providing sufficiently good advice, or we are not being listened to. In part, this failure might be due to our focus on short-term operational questions around how transport would change given set conditions, and medium-term planning and policy concerns about how transport should perhaps change. Obviously, these are both areas of important work, but they also serve to reinforce the dominance of the current hypermobile society paradigm. On the other hand, we are much less exercised with longer-term strategic matters of how transport could change. Yet surely this 20-year-plus time horizon is where our contributions would have the most impact?
To influence that future meaningfully, we need to rethink how and why we engage with long-term visions and explore how transport could evolve beyond today’s narrow assumptions.
Why we struggle to think long term
Future gazing is important. The sparking of mass participation political movements and revival of democracy during the 18th century was influenced by the belief that the future was open and that (some) people had the time and capacity to look ahead. By contrast, democracy suffers during instances of temporal claustrophobia – the focus of insecure people is on the present. This is partly because uncertainty translates into risk for decision makers charged with navigating the medium and long term on behalf of society. Hence the high value placed on fortune tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers, prognosticators, prophets, augurs, diviners, soothsayers, oracles and seers throughout history, and more recently on futurists and forecasters. Nowadays, systematic approaches by governments, companies and other organisations through ‘future studies’, ‘futures research’ or ‘futurology’ aim to master ‘change rampant, change unguided and unrestrained’ and ‘gently guide our evolutionary destiny… [towards] a humane future’ (Toffler, 1970). In other words, they are designed to help us learn and prepare ourselves to make long-term decisions (5–50 years). Importantly, they are not expected to forecast or predict the future with any degree of certainty.
Two contrasting approaches of looking to the future are calculated and imagined. The calculated or ‘predictive’ approach considers tightly defined and abstract futures, often relying on quantitative data and geared towards precision. It is technocratic and draws mainly on expert opinions. Meanwhile, imagined or ‘speculative’ futures are much more broadly drawn, make use of qualitative data, and focus on values, interests, needs and identities. They are more democratic and inclusive.
So how have these been applied to transport?
Time to get bold: dreaming up new transport futures
Predict and provide
Traditionally, transport practitioners (initially road/railway builders and later traffic engineers, economists and geographers) have adopted a ‘predict and provide’ rationale, which is very much a calculated approach. New transport facilities or services were delivered based on the predicted need for transport, subject to resources being available. Investments were justified largely on economic grounds to increase network connectivity and reliability, with the demand for transport assumed to be largely independent of the supply of transport. In the UK context, the 1989 Roads for Prosperity, ‘the largest road building programme since the Romans’, was a high point of this approach. Largely superseded for larger-scale and longer-term investment projects since the late 1990s (see next sub-section), ‘predict and provide’ methods that use machine learning are now enjoying a renaissance, forecasting near-term, operational futures for road traffic and bus passengers, for example.
Decide and provide
Curiously, in the UK it was the publication on the same day (18 May 1989) of the basis for Roads for Prosperity – the 1988 National Road Traffic Forecasts – which eventually led to the replacement of ‘predict and provide’ in the 1998 government white paper ‘A new deal for transport: Better for everyone’ with a demand-management oriented process. Subsequently, rhetorically at least, UK transport policy is now guided by a ‘decide and provide’ approach, whereby decision makers set out the desired policy objectives – i.e. what should be, not what would be, given x, y and z, as before – and the transport solutions are designed to deliver these. This is a significant step forward. Though more participatory in theory, it still relies heavily on narrow, expert-driven methods.
Dream and scheme?
There are many good reasons for relying on experts, established solutions and quantitative methods to inform future transport decisions, particularly in the short and medium term. For the longer term, however, while ‘decide and provide’ is an improvement on ‘predict and provide’, a further step change is required if transport is ever to deliver current policy goals around increasing economic productivity, Net Zero and Vision Zero.
In my view, this is because the policy solutions generated within the current toolbox are highly constrained by a largely self-imposed assumption that any developments are likely to be incremental. These limitations might make sense in a 5–10-year investment window, but much less so beyond. Even in studies with 20–30-year time horizons with which I was involved (namely the Public Transport 2045 project, and the Future of Mobility study – both well-specified, ambitious and rigorously researched), I always felt an underlying (albeit unarticulated) pressure to conform within ‘reasonable’ boundaries. In other words, there was no space for any of the more radical ideas proposed to make the final cut – in practice, we self-censored ourselves to avoid our work not being taken seriously.
Accordingly, I believe we need to explicitly decide to adopt a much more speculative stage for longer-term visioning. What could be named ‘dream and scheme’, ‘diagnose and transpose’ or ‘describe and prescribe’ could actively engage with the public to better identify their issues, understand their preferences and then co-create through workshops and online collaboration platforms to open our minds to how transport might evolve in entirely different ways. This would not replace the existing approach but would supplement it, providing a much broader basis from which ‘decide and provide’ could then draw.
In scoping what the ‘dream and scheme’ step might look like, I decided to write a book that attempted to engage both academics and the public in thinking much more broadly about the type of transport future we want to live in. Roads Not Yet Travelled, presents a series of eight short speculative fiction stories, each set in a different vaguely plausible but perhaps unlikely scenario for the year 2050, and accompanied by a (loose) ‘technical commentary’.
So what’s stopping us? And how do we fix it?
Such a transition will be challenging to enact. There are significant structural barriers. The main one is people’s mindsets. For instance, persuading built environment undergraduates to imagine any type of radical future even during their second week at university is incredibly difficult, and that’s before our indoctrination process has actually begun! Later, ‘experience’, common sense and professional reputation become yet more embedded. One potential way forward is for transport practitioners to work in partnership with creatives – artists, writers, designers and dramatists.
As a sector, we’re very good at establishing what transport would be (given x, y and z); we’re very involved in debating what it should be; but we’re not really thinking about what it could be. Yet if transport is to be ‘solved’, then much more radical solutions are needed. One route is to collaborate with creative professionals.
To make a real difference as transport practitioners, we need to think much more imaginatively. We need to be much more proactive in giving professionals, politicians and the public alternative visions of what transport could be. If not us, then who?
Professor Marcus Enoch is Professor of Transport Strategy at Loughborough University.
Roads Not Yet Travelled by Marcus Enochis available on Bristol University Press. Order here for £27.99.
You can also access the book on Bristol University Press Digital via your institution’s library.
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