The benefits of greater access offered by the invention of the railway in the nineteenth century were very substantial, which justified the huge investment in rail networks. Subsequently, the advantages of door-to-door travel made possible by the motorcar vindicated the vast investment in vehicles, roads and fuel supply in the twentieth century. The bicycle in its heyday also had a major impact on access to employment and leisure opportunities, in the decades between becoming generally affordable and the beginning of the era of motorized mass mobility. All these innovations were transformational in that they allowed us to travel faster and so farther, to gain access to new destinations, opportunities and choices.

Electronic innovations have also been responsible for transformational changes in access to people and services: the telegraph, telephone, radio and television. Digital technologies are changing behaviour globally through access to the internet via ubiquitous smartphones, which allow us to shop online and to communicate to friends and foes through social media.

Now we have innovative transport technologies making an impact on how we travel – electric and autonomous vehicles, digital navigation and platforms. The question is whether a step change in access is likely to arise from any of these transport technologies. In previous chapters I have argued that this appears unlikely because they do not offer any general increase in the speed of travel, unlike the trains and cars that came earlier.

There are, however, some new transport technologies that allow faster travel, as I discussed in Chapter 7: high-speed rail, magnetic levitation, the Hyperloop and electric-powered urban aviation. But none of these seem likely to be economically viable beyond limited markets at best, and not on a mass-market scale that would increase the average speed of travel significantly. The one that could conceivably be transformative is electric urban air travel, given the volume of airspace available above cities, but the requirements for battery technology and safety would be very demanding and achievement is far from certain.

Beyond economic considerations, an important constraint on new transport technologies achieving transformational change is the long-lived nature of the man-made built environment, together with our attachment to historic buildings and places and to the countryside.