Transport planners must embrace changing social attitudes and adopt new professional practices in the face of electrification and automation, argues Mott MacDonald professor of future mobility Glenn Lyons.
Some of us are connected – to work or social networks – from the moment we wake up. Through ubiquitous ICT there is a sense of seamlessness in life these days, and transport systems are starting to catch up. Transport is moving from the simple task of getting people from A to B to something more complex. It’s increasingly about connectivity. Looking at how people use their time while travelling debunks the idea that we have activities on one hand, and travel on the other, because the two have been brought together.
I’ve been referred to as a transport sociologist but once was a civil engineer. Travel demand derives from people’s lifestyles, goals and activities. Transport planners need to understand society, people’s social practices. It’s about placing transport in its social context.
Now that many countries have announced a future ban on the sale of petrol or diesel cars, society is primed for a technological breakthrough: the move from internal combustion to electric vehicles. We’re still at the very early stages of that transition, but motor manufacturers are geared up for it.
Potentially a burning issue is how EVs and autonomous vehicles (AVs) are going to fit into the existing infrastructure. With EVs, I can reflect on my own experience, living near a sleepy market town where charging points are emerging within the car parking infrastructure. They’re retrofitted and unobtrusive and one can easily imagine that there will be an ongoing permeation of charging infrastructure into the built environment over time as people’s engagement with the EV agenda increases. The transport industry is already talking about contactless charging, and charging on the move.
A much bigger question is around AVs. All the motor manufacturers are chasing automation — they can’t afford not to. But there are many questions to be asked about how far and how fast we are to be swept into an AV future. Some pundits predict urban and interurban infrastructures will be dominated by AVs in the near future.
But it’s likely we are still some decades away from AVs being transformative in their penetration into the fleet. If we’re talking about Level 4 autonomy — fully autonomous in some but not all circumstances – you will still have a steering wheel and vehicles which are humanly controlled at some point in the system. If this is the case, a radical transformation of infrastructure won’t be practical.
Of course, if we’re moving to fully autonomous (Level 5) vehicles then infrastructure can be rethought. AVs offer the prospect of empowering significant parts of the population, currently unserved by conventional private vehicles: teenagers with no driving licence and those (young or old) with mobility impairments.
In urban areas changes to the way people travel and connect are happening without EVs and AVs. On a normal day in London, it’s remarkable how many bikes pass by. It makes you realise that comparatively low-tech solutions can have big impacts. Meanwhile, in Cornwall or Devon reliance on individualised car-based transport exists and may endure.