By Greg Marsden,
This originally appeared on Fleet News
What do people want from their transport system? Sustainable Mobility Week and the forthcoming Integrated National Transport Strategy are both opportunities to further flesh out what can feel like an age-old debate.
It is possible to point to places in the middle of big cities where there is a range of options which enable the kind of go-anywhere and multi-modal visions which seem to fit the bill.
Examples of smaller towns (think Netherlands) and more rural villages (think Switzerland) exist too. But for the vast majority of people in the UK this is not their reality. Why is it so difficult to deliver change here in the UK?
One of the key issues we face is competition for space. The growth of the private car and the layout of many of our towns and cities mean that it is often a question of which mode gets the high quality space.
While there are some great schemes which improve non-car based options this is often piecemeal. It is also happening at the same time that new car dependent developments are being built elsewhere which promote the growth in cars and make the equation for change even more difficult.
When we ask people what they want in terms of this transport corridor design or the other then this can polarise the debate. Do you live there or move through there? Are people for or against an idea, a colour of tarmac or a specific junction rearrangement? Are those the terms on which we need to have the discussion?
A different starting point
I am currently leading an exciting project with a team from the University of Leeds, Lancaster University and the Royal College of Art called INFUZE. INFUZE stands for Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility.
It takes as a start point that the futures we build will be designed collaboratively between citizens, transport providers and government. This began with a series of engagement exercises to understand what people want their transport systems to enable. What does good look and feel like to people?
We heard very strongly that people want to feel safe, for the system to enable them to be independent. They want better places, more tranquil, more space for nature. They want their transport system to promote social interaction and social value.
Transport services should be designed to facilitate these wider goals, not for their own sake or because of their own specific business model logic. This provides an exciting set of design goals which can be used to begin to imagine and design what might work.
Equally important is being honest about what business as usual might result in. The national car ownership model is still projecting increases in car ownership and use across the UK. How do people feel about another 20% of cars in their streets, town centres and rural parks? The answer we heard was a range of negative emotions such as fear and sadness, despite the recognised value and necessity of the car for fulfilling a range of activities.
Turning visions into reality
In INFUZE we are developing visions and the necessary data insights and modelling tools to help explore whether the visioning exercises can create options that really do enable the wider goals we have heard.
We are also going to put the visions into practice in a range of experiments, starting this autumn. Our role is to provide expert knowledge as part of, rather than to define, the design process.
Rather than a binary public vs private mobility or car vs public transport futures, we are hearing about new system ideas, inclusive designs and pro-social models. A reflection from our first year of work is that sustainable transport week should be at least as much about the practice of building more sustainable futures as it is about the options that might inhabit those futures.
The appetite to imagine something better has been massively energising. Perhaps imagination is the fuel of the future that we don’t talk enough about.