Tag Archives: future mobility

Thinking Transport Resolutions

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My research related thoughts at the moment are still flitting around the subject discussed in my last blog post and have yet to land, so I thought for this January blog post, I might turn to a tried and tested topic – New Year’s Resolutions.

Many people will have made some New Year’s Resolutions over the past couple weeks, and a fair few are likely to have transport implications. For example:

Reducing plastic became a hot button issue in 2018, as not just tree huggers, but even avowed materialist consumers considering trying to make a few changes. This could be great news for our global environment, but I suggest a moment of reflection before you resolve to shop plastic-free for your dry-goods, when the nearest such outlet is miles away. Scientists agree that global warming and climate change is an even bigger problem than plastic pollution in our oceans, and transport, mainly airplanes and private motor vehicles, is overtaking other sectors as the biggest carbon emitter on the planet. So think carefully about whether you can make a resolution that reduces both plastic and mileage, whether yours, the product’s or both.

Speaking of mileage, as mentioned, air transport remains a big problem in terms of carbon emissions, with no near-term technical solutions. But another thing people often do at the turn of the year is book their next overseas holiday. Some might resolve to travel more slowly or have a stay-cation, but for those who are unwilling or unable to give up flying, when was the last time you considered carbon offsetting? It’s rarely given as an option anymore when you purchase your flights because airlines and other commercial actors are doing it for you, but surely every extra contribution helps. Not sure where to give? Find out what the big players are doing. For example, I was fascinated to read that the UK’s busiest airport, Heathrow, is investing in restoring peat bogs, which are important ecosystems in some parts of the UK and excellent carbon sinks. Perhaps more could be restored with your charitable donations? There are plenty of websites which can help decide to whom and how much to give.

Perhaps though, you’ve gone for a more traditional resolution, say to exercise more. Then I would put in a plug for switching some of or part of your regular daily trips to active travel modes – walking, cycling, scooting. Even if it’s simply parking a bit further away from where you’re going or getting off the bus a stop or two earlier, you’re much more likely to maintain your resolve if exercise is part of your daily routine than if you take up a sport or try to force yourself to the gym on a dark, cold night after work. And you’re helping more than yourself. Getting out of the car for even part of your journey reduces local air pollution, injects more vitality into the local community, and sets a good example!

So my proposition to all New Year’s resolvers is to think about whether you can make your resolution go further, and contribute to a better transport future.

Merry moving and a Happy New Year!

 

Slow down, you move too fast…

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As children head back to school, the weather changes, and Jewish people look forward to celebrating their new year, it feels as if life is speeding up again after the long, (and even in the UK!) hot days of summer. Transport policy, with its tendency to assume sleek new technology will solve all our transport problems, also seems to assume that speeding up is inherently a good thing. That shared, electric, autonomous, and motorised mobility plus immediate information available anywhere will increase road safety, reduce emissions, free up road space, and help move the growing population of elderly and disabled around more easily.

And yet, does the population, elderly or otherwise, actually want to always move faster and further? It seems to me that the Future of Mobility call for evidence, whilst acknowledging that people are travelling less, commuting less, and driving less, only considers how information and communication technologies are changing attitudes to transport information and accessibility. Yet the high-tech accessibility of information is changing not just attitudes, but accessibility itself – how we obtain goods and services, how we participate in activities and opportunities. The consultation document mentions telecommuting, but not online shopping, which is likely one reason van traffic is growing so fast, nor does it consider the advent of other tele-services, such as tele-healthcare.

My point is that technology can mean faster and further and more frequent OR it could mean fewer, more flexible trips. It could push us all to operate like machines or it could serve to help us keep things human. There could be accessibility as a service instead of mobility as a service, meeting people’s needs by meeting them halfway. The sharing economy could be finding groups of families to share the school run between busy parents, whilst still enabling their kids to walk to school. Or perhaps technology can match not passengers, but patients who will can share the walk to the doctor’s office to improve their own health by not only increasing physical activity, but reducing loneliness and fear.

Maybe that vision is idealistic, but surely it’s more appealing than the transport-tech-optimism that seems to suggest we should be shaping our cities to accommodate driverless, and perhaps empty, vehicles, rather than living, breathing people. Besides, once we stop valuing speed of travel over quality of life, we may have a better chance of making these new technologies work for people and places, rather than as ends in themselves.

My New Year’s resolutions this year are all about making the moment last.1 I aim to be more patient, to default less to that overused excuse of being ‘stressed’, to savour the change and growth this new year promises to bring to my family and to me. Oh, I’m sure we’ll all be doing lots of different activities, getting work done, moving around. And some of that movement will require covering long distances quickly. But day to day, we will often be walking, interacting with each other and the environment, thinking and learning.

In my own small way, as a representative of transport professionals and a researcher into the opportunities technology may bring for future mobility and accessibility in a changing climate, some of the thinking and learning I will be doing when I am taking it slow will be about a future vision of technology and travel that supports quality of life. And that might mean the technology offers ways to slow down.

 

1The title of this blog and this line are from Simon and Garfunkel’s Feeling Groovy.

Smarter Future Choices

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Did Smarter Choices programmes make us smarter? Did personalised travel planning change personal travel behaviour? Did pilots, challenges, and temporary designations leave a lasting impression? These were the sort of questions my fellow transport professional @jamesgleave1 was asking in his blog of mid-March. His answer was, over time, a qualified not quite, a methodologically minimal.

One of the reasons he gave for his scepticism included the impossibility of disentangling any results from other changes to the accessibility offer. One of the reasons for moderating his response was the valuable discovery of links between travel behaviour choices and changes in other aspects of life, even if the presence of such links further diminished the attribution of impacts to Smarter Choices programmes themselves. Yet this got me thinking that if the debate around Smarter Choices is due to an inability to isolate its impacts, especially longer term, maybe we should start embracing its interactions. Surely Smarter Choices can build on existing trends, encourage any seeds of sustainability to grow without trying to plant them in the first place.

More people are living in cities with access to frequent public transport. Younger generational cohorts are delaying licence holding and car ownership, and are making fewer trips per capita. Surely these are trends on which we could build a Smarter Choices extension, focusing our information and incentives on younger, more urban audiences. Indeed, if younger people are spending their precious disposable income on devices instead of driving, all the more reason to put all that information and those incentives into mobile apps that integrate accessibility planning (including remote and virtual options!), real time information and alerts, fitness tracking, gamification… and perhaps booking and payment as well. The latter brings us to Mobility as a Service, which could be the next Smarter Choices, and indeed, most of the list in the last sentence is already available in one form or another, but is it integrated? Is it being developed to achieve Smarter Future Choices?

Another trend is that more and more jobs and occupations are becoming temporally and spatially independent from traditional workplaces, and the links between commuting distances or cost and residential location choice is weakening. So from travel planning to journey planning, we need to incorporate the geography of ICT supply and demand, and build on the ever-increasing flexibility of the modern economy and the potential for improving resilience that comes from such flexibility. In other words, there are ever more people working from home 1-2 days per week, so transport planners should nourish the trend. Surely Smarter Future Choices are being made if the proportion of car commuters who work from home once a week increases by 20%. Such a target would be easier to achieve than a 20% switch of car commuters to a sustainable mode of travel to work. In fact, previous rounds of Smarter Choices programmes may well have had such an impact, but this trend is poorly monitored by long-term surveys. Tracking this flexibility will be key to judging the success of such Smarter Future Choices.

Finally, Smarter Future Choices could offer daily flexibility via the technology at which younger generations are so adept, and increase awareness of the options urban places can offer. If done properly, this approach could result in so much more than a one-off intervention. It could result in the ability of travellers to decide daily what will not only be their most sustainable option, but also their most convenient, resilient, and productive option, no matter the day of the week, time of the day, weather or season – the smartest option is theirs to take.