There are many conflicting views and suggestions here which demonstrate the difficulty in predicting the future. But this is particularly necessary and particularly hard for transport: necessary, because big decisions have to be made about infrastructure that take years (if not decades) to bear fruit; and hard because assessing future patterns of mobility is fraught with uncertainty. Who would have thought, for example, that young people would fall out of love with the car when only a generation ago to own your first vehicle was a rite of passage?
Paul Clifton starts off by reminding us that we are moving around less than we did 20 years ago, yet some of his respondents argue that increasing capacity massively is absolutely essential, otherwise gridlock will ensue. Yes, so far the advent of new information technology has not reduced the overall figures for travel, but that does not mean it will not do so in the future. Indeed, as the article points out, nearly half of rail travel is now discretionary. And from my own experience, conference call and Skype technology has saved me a few journeys. Therefore, the figures may mask a shift from one type of journey to another.
Technology is the other unknown when predicting the future, and Paul notes that the car companies are engaged in secretive research on developing autonomous cars. There are plenty of optimistic statements from the motor manufacturing industry about the imminent arrival of autonomous cars, but I would counsel caution in the face of these rather gung-ho claims. As Professor Powrie suggests: “They will be quite a long time coming, perhaps decades.” Indeed, since despite the hype and the billions spent so far, current versions are still at the stage that motor cars were when the Red Flag Act was still law.
I would argue that ‘never’ is a more sober assessment, at least in terms of universality. We are likely to get niche uses - perhaps ‘trains’ of HGVs following each other down motorways (although even here there are problems as to what to do with the damn things when they turn off), or shuttle services within airports or in town centres - but the Nirvana promised by Google of a world with pooled electric pods taking you to work and then whisking your kids to school is as likely as the world of commuting by Jetpack, which was promised in my Eagle comic during my teenage years in the 1960s.
To put just one fly in the ointment, driverless cars will have to be programmed not to drive towards people (or indeed cats, dogs and even bats). So if what the Americans call a ‘bad person’ decides to rob or rape the occupant of a driverless car, they would merely have to wait on a deserted stretch of road and stand in front of the vehicle. I have posited this scenario to numerous autonomous car enthusiasts, and they mumble responses about the technology being able to adapt, but in truth they are stumped.
No wonder Carlos Ghosn, the boss of Nissan, let slip recently that cyclists are the worst difficulty faced by the designers of autonomous technology, and that he would like to see them banned from roads used by driverless cars. The future, therefore, is rather more complex than any of those quoted in the piece seem to imagine.
