Planning for the unknowable
Don’t get carried away with transport technology. Planning for future mobility needs to envisage the society we want to live in, and then find the right mix of physical transport, land use planning and digital connectivity to enable that – with plenty of room for change, write Paul Hammond and Glenn Lyons.
In 1949 when an early state of the art computer weighed 30t, the magazine ‘Popular Mechanics’ suggested that computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5t. This quote is 68 years old – not much different in timespan to the 60-year appraisal period in which – with apparent authority – we examine the expected future return on investing in the transport system. Today, the MacBook weighs less than 1kg.
In 1998 the UK Labour Government published the first transport white paper for a generation. In its follow-up 10-year plan for investment it noted: The likely effects of increasing internet use on transport and work patterns are still uncertain, but potentially profound. In 1998 less than 10% of UK households had access to the Internet. The Google domain name had only been registered for a year and the availability of Microsoft Outlook as part of Microsoft Office was only a year old; eBay had not been launched in the UK; and Wikipedia, Skype, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Having a mobile phone was not yet the norm – let alone having a smartphone with mobile Internet. Fast forward to present day and such things have become features of many people’s everyday lives.