The Future is up in the air. Let’s try looking backwards

WHAT ARE WE heading towards? A climate disaster that blights the future for everyone? Climate related degradation of the transport system? A human existence transformed by conflict? A takeover by artificial intelligence? Huge global economic stress? More pandemics or equally traumatic health crises?

Or business as usual, give or take a few modest adjustments? Or a world transformed into Utopia. Both seem unlikely.

Business as usual has, after all, got us where we are today – with many enhancements made and problems solved – but with plenty of unforeseen and intractable problems still troubling us too.

In the LTT889 issue of LTT magazine (9 April 2024), we cover proposed new steps to address climate resilience and the need for recognition in infrastructure investment and project planning of the significant likely implication of a changed set of weather conditions affecting transport. We also report on the assumed prospects, unlocked by new technology, of a new wave of short-haul, clean energy, aerial transport activity championed by the Government and industry, and in many ways paralleling the revolutionary developments it expects to see in automated road transport, and other beneficial applications of AI in the sector.

Meanwhile, we publish an analysis of what the limited available data indicates about emerging new patterns of freight movement with interesting implications for what kind of road system will be needed in future years, both for long-distance lorry traffic and shorter local deliveries – if they are not all taken up in the air and dropped at our feet by drones.

All three of these topics could have a profound implication for what sort of transport system we should expect in future years – but with little certainty as to what timelines and costs are involved, and how we should therefore be building the necessary flexibility into transport planning projections and provision.

Whilst analytical and decision-making models and processes obsess over detailed prognoses about passenger movements and car traffic, addressing ‘uncertainty’ within a relatively modest range of future scenarios, those bigger picture considerations seem to lie outside the radar – or at least are too left field for us to have the ability to build in the need for adaptation, not only to a changed climate, but to a changed world of human activity too. In particular in response to all sorts of new options and pressures faced by individuals, and shaping society more generally.

Who can clearly foresee and describe the world in ten, let alone 50 years time? And if we can’t, how do we make good decisions about the commitment of huge public (and private) resources on infrastructure projects supposed to last decades? Modern public policy to look carefully at the justification for committing huge public and private funds is actually fairly new – for the first couple of centuries since the Industrial revolution infrastructure projects were generally invested for present and near term utility.

But the rate of societal change has accelerated in hitherto unimaginable ways over those two centuries – and the future is turning up faster and faster now. A quick comparative check on how different things are today than they were 20, 50, 100, and, most incredibly, 200 years ago, is salutary. To some extent these changes have been a progression, but more often than not they are step change upheavals and revolutions. The inventions of power, communications, systems to transport us, manufacture things, feed us and fight each other with, are all remarkable, transformational and have been mostly unforeseen.

No one did, or probably will, completely get their head round these unexpected and ground-breaking prospects, but one thing that is surely sensible is to take any propositions delivered with enthusiastic certainty with an equivalent degree of scepticism and enquiry. Either regarding change – or the absence of it. For example, with regard to the flying taxis and drone deliveries by air, perhaps it is useful to subject the likely outcomes to some kind of realism and contextual stress tests. How would the sky look – and would we mind –, what would the management of take-offs and landings be like if dozens of drones were attempting to pick up and drop off their parcels in a particular area, and who would be the winners and losers from this new technology let loose? Or, equally, how would automated vehicles fit in to narrow urban streets in historic towns or on country lanes rather than in the artist’s impressions of futuristic boulevards with plenty of space for all types of vehicles and pedestrians too.

The responses to these new scenarios are not just a matter for individual consumers or governments, of course. Businesses adapt to circumstances and look to exploit opportunities too – arguably quicker than most citizens or public bodies do. In the world of retail, consumer products and their distribution, changes quickly emerge without announcement, for example, the way in which goods being sold online reach their intended customers. No one appeared to be planning for that, even 25 years ago when as the new century dawned we were all supposed to worry, wrongly as it turned out, about an embedded computer system glitch called the Millennium Bug.

One consequent feature of today’s unexpected and rapid change is that, despite the age of big data, all we can analyse in any real detail is what is happening now. And even then, there is not much generally shared information about some areas of activity, like the patterns of commercial goods flows, and the relationship between vehicle movements and what’s exactly on board, as we also explore elsewhere in this issue. This means that those planning the functionality and capacity of the highway system still mainly count vehicles, but rarely their contents, especially when they are an aggregation of pallets or boxes within an HGV or LGV. And where even those van-type vehicles officially counted as ‘goods’, are often not being used primarily for that purpose at all. Meanwhile a vehicle familiarly designated as being just for passenger carrying might well, these days, be on what is principally a ‘goods’ pick up journey, not determined by passenger travel needs.

A piece of interesting research might examine the detailed patterns of distribution from fulfilment centres to individual addresses. The perception that a full van leaves a depot with a carefully constructed drop schedule to get items to their end user efficiently may not invariably be the case. Firstly, fulfilling the promises to purchasers of their desired delivery times requires a schedule, not a guaranteed full load, and secondly it may be more efficient for the distributors to trans-ship at some point to smaller vehicles.

Those concerned with planning transport for the future might consider themselves, in these circumstances, confronted not only in dealing with an unknown future, but only a partially understood present too. Even if the accepted paradigm was still to plan by ‘predict and provide’ it would seem that finding the basis of what it is exactly that’s currently going on, and to project that forward, has become more and more difficult. There is not only the discussion to be had about whether the future should simply be on the same trajectory as the past, or if we’d like to make a choice to seek to end up in a better place, but whether the dynamics of the existing situation are already impelling us towards futures unknown through underlying influences that are little understood or acknowledged, and very hard to control. And well beyond the concerning climate-related ones.

Is it time to embrace a little diffidence about, and plan some resilience towards, the human, social, technological and associated change that is coming down the road into the future too, just as we should do with Climate Change. Wouldn’t the worst position on both topics be misplaced certainty – or wishful thinking about everything somehow turning out just fine.

One approach to understanding and managing things in this uncertain world might be to first look back at the changing relationship over time between assumptions and outcomes, not just in a statistical sense, but by recognising the technological, behavioural, and other changes we just didn’t see coming. With many more such upheavals surely on the way, a little hindsight about how wrong we can be, and why, might help the quality of our foresight become a little better too.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTTmagazine, LTT889, 9 April 2024.