Hypermobility, the damaging addiction of modern life

A longer version of this article, with references, is published on TAPAS and is available from this link.

OUR MODERN WORLD is just a couple of centuries old, the presence of mankind upon our planet around 300,000 years. So can it be entirely logical to just add response after response in transport interventions on top of where ‘modern man’ has ended up in just 200 years of technological trial and error (and all the problems that has brought), but ignore the basic character and needs of the people it is all supposedly for?

It is a rather simple story. Within that very recent past, as soon as human movement was liberated from dependency on the internal power source of an individual ( or their horse), and thus limited by a natural bodily energy capacity, we entered onto a slippery slope of unbridled mechanised transport activity with seriously bad implications for human life, and indeed its survival on the planet.

The key step was when we shifted from animal power to mechanical power less than two hundred years ago - in particular when we migrated from horse to steam locomotion in the mid nineteenth century, as an extension of the industrial revolution. At that time this seemed an attractive change. The high resource costs of the ingenious invention of steam power, hidden behind the rapidly rising price of grain and the enthusiasm for all things ‘steam’, especially the railways, meant that the habit of frequent travel was born. This was given a further major impulse when the motor vehicle was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the switch made from solid to liquid carbon fuel. The mass manufacture of vehicles drove not only industrial processes, but also legislative change to feed our appetite for this amazing creation.

The Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance, which incidentally came into effect exactly one hundred years ago on 25 January 1925, placed vehicles above people for the first time in the hierarchy of priority in the public realm. In the UK, common law has maintained the legal status of the person over the vehicle in theory, but the practical reality is that the UK, like many other nations, has followed the American model, and the private vehicle has dominated the landscape of social evolution ever since. Recent activity over the implementation and then partial removal of active travel schemes in the UK has shown just how robust this one century old practical hierarchy now is. The tolerance of high levels of fatalities and serious injuries arising from road collisions (a person is killed in a road traffic collision somewhere on the planet every 26 seconds) shows that Society is seemingly not too greatly concerned with this cause of loss of life.

The real issue here is not limited to the priority of vehicles over pedestrians however. What we really need to do is some basic thinking about the actual overall amount of movement we are doing, and why. Hypermobility (“too much mobility”) is the root problem. We have become used to the idea that we can move where we want, when we want, and how we want. And that the wealthiest few can do that the most – by land, air and sea. Those in lower socioeconomic groups are limited in this respect, because they are priced out of this hypermobility market, or people whose movement is restricted for other reasons, such as disability. So we have the situation where there is too much mobility in total, but that this excess is enjoyed by a “mobility elite” who can make all those choices, at the expense of a “mobility poor” who cannot.

This contrast in mobility in turn affects the equitable distribution of good quality life, whether that is made on the basis of wealth, disability, gender or some other discriminatory division. Why should one part of the population suffer the poor health imposed on it by the behaviour of others, who can themselves avoid or escape from the perils that they induce? At least the ‘progressive’ people, who favour achieving some form of equitable sustainable society with a good quality of life for all, must surely accept that there needs to be some cap – if not reduction - in this travel explosion?

Of course, an appropriate level of mobility plays a part in achieving a satisfying and sustainable quality of life. Our need for basic clean nutrition, water and air is unlikely to always be met exactly where we are, so we need to move either ourselves, or use transport modes to bring the two together. Bridging this gap is a biological requirement, and our bodies have suitably evolved to facilitate the movement we require to search for our survival needs. However, especially over the past 100 years, we have designed our world around the idea that such movement should not only be possible, but desirable, and eventually, unavoidable and so needs to be intrinsically catered for. The measured objective seems to be the quantum of “movement”, not the quality of life. So provision for movement has been prioritised, even where the quality of life suffers as a result.

To this way of thinking the railways, motorisation and then aviation were a godsend. We no longer had to bring the satisfaction of need so close to the people: people could travel to satisfy the need. “I like to travel” became “I want more travel” and has turned into “I need to travel”. A potentially vital or enjoyable occasional journey has turned into an insatiable personal addiction, and an enforced social and economic necessity to achieve the basic purposes of life.

Amongst other consequences, this prioritisation of movement which feeds our hypermobility has destabilised our physical and mental health. For example, the “enforced necessity” of travelling to a place of employment is not often a benign act. We can now readily deploy our skills in neuroscience, physiology, biochemistry, biology and psychology to measure the stress levels rising in passengers travelling in a crowded metro train. The increase in cognitive load needed to handle the stressful nature of being forced into what the brain perceives to be an unwelcome and threatening situation is truly shocking. The release of Cortisol, (the “stress hormone”) as a result means that travellers in crowded trains are subjected, not just to the uncomfortable situation of the commuter journey itself, but also to the ongoing high levels of glucose in the bloodstream until the Cortisol level dissipates. This takes several hours to do – just in time for the repeat dose in the journey home. The release of a stress hormone is the brain’s response to the presence of what it perceives as a threat to survival. This is how the brain ‘sees’ the journey on a crowded train. Some people might be able to cope OK with these mental and physiological effects, but many others may not.

It is not surprising that many people opt to avoid the crowded train by travelling in their own private space by motor vehicle. But this also induces stress, both in themselves and others who have to cope with the effects. Modal shift is an attempt to survive by avoiding such harm, not really about price or time, or even ‘saving the planet’. But only some people have access to the possibility of extracting themselves from these circumstances. The inequity of this unfair attack on human health is something that we should be seeking to address as a societal concern, and the transport community should be at the forefront of doing this. Instead, we seem to just always be trying to continually accommodate this hypermobility appetite.

So what should we do about this?

The first act should be to recognise that mobility is something quite distinct from movement. Homo sapiens is a social species, so social connectivity is crucial to our survival, indeed it is hard-wired into our brain over those 300,000 years we have been around, and is the engine of advanced civilisation. Mobility enables social connectivity. The Sociality that results is what enables Society to function and our species to prosper. This Sociality fundamentally needs connectivity and interaction between people, not between communication devices. So in order to exercise it we need to be able to meet other people, which usually means some method of connection. So yes, we need a certain level of movement, but only to the extent that it serves the purpose of Sociality. Not enough mobility leads to isolation. And so, incidentally, will the arrival of a widespread deployment of AI to replace much of the sociality in human life.

The crowded metro train mentioned earlier is an example of hypermobility, where the amount of movement is excessive to the extent of inflicting stress on people, with the attendant risk to ongoing health. In such conditions the level of pleasurable interactions and sociality is minimal. The number of people we can manage to be social with at the same time is quite limited. The observed behaviour of people resisting entering a crowded space at density levels of around 2 people per square metre, which is hardly crowded, attests to this.

Such evidence suggests that instead of trying to increase capacity to cater for – and by doing so induce - more movement, the transport community should be working for a reduction in movement from present excessive levels in order to maintain people’s mental health. The welcome emphasis on walking as a transport mode in the last contribution to this Deep Thinking series is a crucial part of this.

This wider agenda is why I set up a laboratory (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory, PEARL) to enable us to look a bit more deeply inside our brains to understand how to make mobility genuinely work for people, sociality, and society.

How much more of our daily needs might be met without the need for motorised travel? There is a whole marketing industry based on converting the more happenstance concept of “liking” into the more commercially viable one of “wanting.” “Liking” leads to the reward of a dopamine rush. The marketing world then attempts to convince people that they could have even more of such feeling of satisfaction by repeating the dose. But this can all too easily end up in addiction. In the case of mobility, we have been convinced over the last hundred years or so that we “need” to travel, even that we need a car in order to do so. We have designed our cities, working practices, our laws, even the social culture in which we live, on the basis of having become addicted to motorised movement. Placing assumed “needs” in a better spatiotemporal and social context is therefore a vitally important first step in considering a better approach to mobility in the twenty first century.

Secondly, we need to change our way of thinking about cities. Suppose we were to start thinking about how to present most of our connectivity and mobility “likes” within a range at which it is easy to reach with our internal energy supply, and design a neighbourhood around these parameters.

Think of a city, not as a megalopolis of millions of people, matching an infinite number of origins and destinations, but as a number of neighbourhoods, each of which could have its own set of immediate proximate “likes”. The strategic picture overall would be to link these through an energy-conserving sociality-inducing public transport network that complements the basic non- motorised shape of human life.

In this view, the city is an organism, where each ‘cell’ is autonomous, purposeful, and connected to others so that the vitality of the overall organism is sustained. This connective system is there to enable cells to collaborate, cooperate and communicate with each other. It is a Mobility system. It is necessary for the structure of the city’s Mobility system to be in balance with the neighbourhood cells, just as the system of nerves and blood vessels needs to be in balance with the human body’s cells. In either a cell or a city, not enough mobility leads to cellular malfunction; but hypermobility leads to a cancer.

Maybe all this is a problem for those who work on the supply side of this industry. But in just producing more we are missing the human dimension of what we are doing it all for. Here’s a fact. The processing capacity of the human brain is a little more than 11 million bits/second. Of that, just 80 bits/second are aligned with conscious awareness. The vast majority of our brain is occupied in predicting preconsciously the next few moments so that it can generate responses to keep us alive. It creates perceptions on which we act. Most of this happens long before we could be made consciously aware of the stimuli that are initiating those perceptions.

What I have been seeking to explore in this contribution is the way that the preconscious brain creates the perceptions to which people react. Working with/for the conscious mind is way too slow, late and narrowly focused to cover for the real responses to the human social and built environment that the evolved brain is making all the time.

Surely, in thinking about our transport future we need to dig more deeply into what is the essence of our lives and where mobility fits in that? That, at least, is what I am doing now in the PEARL laboratory.

Nick Tyler is the Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL and the Director of the UCL Centre for Transport Studies.

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT909, 19 February 2025.