The historic high cost of personal vehicles led to the growth of demand for new shared modes of travel at much lower cost, in the form of mass-market public transport: trains in the nineteenth century, buses in the first half and air travel in the second half of the twentieth century. The heyday of public transport was reached in the middle of the last century. Subsequently, there was a very substantial shift to personal means of transport as the auto makers drove down costs through efficient assembly line technology, to the point where the car is now the main mode of travel in developed economies.

Yet public transport is far from being down and out. These traditional shared modes of travel are far more efficient at moving people in their use of road and rail infrastructure. The capacity of the road network constrains car use. Rail in all its forms has undergone a major revival in Britain and elsewhere, largely because it offers fast and reliable journeys compared with cars and buses on congested roads. In contrast, the situation of buses is far more variable and depends on local circumstances. Long-term decline in passenger numbers is common. Yet in some cities passenger numbers are growing, aided by policies that prioritize buses over cars.

The main question to be considered here is the likely impact on public transport modes of the new digital technologies that I discussed in the previous chapters. I will also review technological possibilities for extending the realm of public transport, above and below congested surface networks.

Digital railway

Digital technologies are having a profound effect on the railways, both in how we interact as consumers and the way in which trains are operated and managed. The convenience of making arrangements through well-designed websites has contributed to the growth of longer-distance rail travel, eliminating the need for intermediation by travel agents. The ability to flex fares and offer choices to passengers helps contain costs by matching demand with supply to gain revenue from seats that might otherwise remain empty, although often prompting criticism of an over-complex fare structure.

Our modern transport system has developed over the past 200 years. Enormous investment in infrastructure has changed the landscape, both the roads and railways themselves, and the growth of towns and cities they made possible. All these structures have long lives, and most of the corridors are effectively permanent. The transport system and the travel it permits have shaped our lives and enlarged our horizons.

Yet potentially substantial changes are underway in why and how we travel. These began at the end of the twentieth century and are destined to continue. We are seeing important developments in attitudes towards the car; in size, age and location of populations; and in new technologies, both transport and wider digital. So the future of travel and transport could be very different from the past.

I start Part 1 with a review of the transport system as it is at present and the travel behaviour that has resulted from it. I then discuss how the present situation has developed. The focus of the analysis will be on travel and transport in Britain, both because its travel and transport statistics are world-leading in scope and extent, and because interpretation of such data requires a deep understanding of the societal context, which is most readily gained by residence. The book will also address what is happening in other high-income countries, particularly in Europe and North America, and will note some developments elsewhere, mainly in China. While there are significant differences between countries as regards demography and governance, there are many underlying similarities in respect of travel behaviour and the influence of new technologies.

In an effort to curb tailpipe emissions of standard petrol and diesel vehicles, governments have introduced increasingly stringent regulations of noxious emissions for vehicle manufacturers to meet. The tests involve running the engine in a laboratory setting under defined conditions, including speed, load and temperature. All new cars sold must comply with the emission requirements.

The vehicle manufacturers have generally resisted tighter standards, on grounds of technical feasibility and production cost. Nevertheless, they have developed new technologies, most importantly the catalytic converter for petrol (gasoline) engines, now standard, which converts noxious exhaust gases into less harmful species, in particular converting toxic NOx to inert nitrogen. Because the catalyst is poisoned by the lead additive that used to be included in petrol to improve combustion, lead was eliminated from petrol. This was doubly desirable because lead is a toxic substance.

The context for electric vehicle development

Following regulation to tackle health impacts, the need to reduce transport carbon emissions, to counter the risk of global warming, has led to regulatory action to improve fuel economy. Transport is responsible for a quarter of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, and road transport accounts for 90 per cent of this. Voluntary CO2 emission standards were introduced in the European Union in 1998 and became mandatory in 2009. The 2015 target of 130g CO2 per km for new passenger cars was met in advance in the UK. By 2021, the requirement will be 95g, averaged across manufacturers’ new fleets of vehicles. This in effect requires manufacturers to market zero, or ultra-low, emission vehicles to offset the carbon of conventional vehicles.

Concerns about both urban air quality and carbon emissions prompted the British government to commit to a “mission” for all new cars and vans to be effectively zero emissions by 2040, which involves ending the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by that date and ensuring that at least 50 per cent of new car sales are ultra-low emission by 2030. Other European governments have also adopted target dates to phase out oil fuels for road transport: for instance, France by 2040, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland by 2030 and Norway by 2025.

New technologies may provide solutions to the negative consequences of travel. Four major technologies under development offer promise of a better transport system if managed well:

• • electric propulsion

• • digital navigation

• • digital platforms

• • autonomous vehicles.

The following chapters will discuss how these new technologies could improve the present transport system, including how they might influence our travel planning and behaviour. These new technologies will themselves create problems that governments may need to anticipate, not least the longer-term implications of choices that are made today. An important question is whether to adopt a reactive or a proactive approach to regulation of the new technologies to achieve societal benefit while mitigating potentially harmful outcomes. Should governments allow new technologies space to develop creative approaches with minimal regulation, or should they regulate to head off undesirable investments?

There are many examples of innovative technologies currently being developed and deployed. My aim is to elicit the key features, both technological and economic. To this end I will focus on the leading exemplars of each kind of innovation, but will also indicate the range and variety of competitors.

A potentially very important development in motorcar technology is the autonomous vehicle (AV). Many anticipate that the development of a successful driverless car might lead to numerous changes in the operation of road networks and in travel behaviour, mitigating the adverse consequences associated with conventional vehicles, in particular crash deaths and injuries, and delays due to road traffic congestion.

There are many books, articles and op-eds on the practicalities and prospects for AVs. In this chapter, I will outline the key features of the technologies involved and how the safety of AVs would need to be regulated (cf. Lipson & Kurman 2016; Herrmann, Brenner & Stadler 2018). I will then focus on their impact on road traffic congestion, the most difficult challenge for surface transport operations.

Two routes to the development of vehicle automation are being pursued: evolutionary and revolutionary. The evolutionary route is being followed by the main vehicle manufacturers. Many anticipate that this involves developing a number of operational modes to assist the driver (known as advanced driver assistance systems, ADAS), such as adaptive cruise control, lane change assistance and automatic parking. These are generally introduced for high-end models and gradually move down the product range to mass-market models, costs reducing as scale of production increases and so more drivers gain experience of these feature. As more such systems are integrated, the role of the driver is reduced, with full automation the possible ultimate development. Before that point, there remains a role for the driver in circumstances where the automation cannot cope with road and traffic conditions. The potential difficulty of handing over to a human driver is the motivation for the revolutionary approach in which there is no role at all for a human driver.

Vehicle automation is very much in the developmental phase at present. The long-term prospects are far from clear. In this respect it is different from the technologies discussed in the previous chapters whose market prospects and societal impacts are considerably more evident. So I will first discuss the underlying technologies, since their scope for development and integration will determine the practicalities of AVs.

The digital revolution is making a big impact on transport, from smart bus stops with real-time tracking, to satnavs, to apps for taxis and train times and tickets. The interconnectivity offered by the internet and mobile phone technology has radically altered the information available for us when we travel. These developments have not been without controversy or disruption. This chapter will explore some of the major innovations that are transforming urban travel by harnessing the power of the internet to match demand to supply by means of “digital platforms”. These are revolutionizing many areas of our lives, most notably by making possible online shopping. I focus here on the way that this innovative technology has disrupted and transformed the taxi market in many cities.

Taxis and apps

The best-known example of a digital platform for transport is the Uber smartphone app, which has stimulated considerable controversy. The app connects users and taxi drivers transparently. Users know in advance the approximate price of the journey, see the progress of the taxi as it approaches the rendezvous, know the name of the driver and the number of the vehicle, pay through the app, rate the driver after the trip and receive a follow-up email recording trip details. The success of the company is mainly because the app provides a more efficient and effective way of matching the demand from travellers with the supply of vehicles: more effective than trying to wave down a regular taxi in the street or summoning a vehicle by a phone call.

A word about terminology. I use the term “taxi” broadly to cover all types of car with a driver where each trip is paid for individually, while recognizing that a range of more restricted usages is also in use. A traditional distinction is between licensed taxis equipped with a meter that regulates the fares charged and private hire vehicles without a meter where charges are agreed for each trip. In London, for instance, the iconic black cab equipped with meter can be waved down in the street; in contrast private hire vehicles without meters, commonly known as “minicabs”, cannot legally be hailed but must be summoned by phone.

Travel is central to our lives: for our daily commute, getting children to school, shopping trips, social activities, holidays and the rest. For individuals, how we travel changes through our lives, becoming more varied as we reach adulthood, when we may learn to drive and as incomes increase. Decisions about where we live and work are important for how we travel. To understand how the aggregation of decisions by individuals leads to the observed behaviour of populations, our main sources are surveys of travel behaviour, of which the most important are those carried out by national governments.

The British Department for Transport first commissioned a National Travel Survey (NTS) in 1965. The survey became a regular event starting in the early 1970s, and is now carried out annually, involving 16,000 representative individuals (a different sample each year) completing travel diaries with full details of their movements for seven days. These have provided time series of travel data spanning 45 years in considerable detail. The NTS covers all modes of travel except international air, so in effect it largely records the pattern of our daily travel, the trips that take us away from home each day.

The United States Department of Transportation carries out its National Household Travel Survey less frequently. This started in 1969 and takes place at intervals of five to eight years, most recently in 2017 when 130,000 households participated, individuals logging travel for one day of the week only. Other countries that conduct national surveys include Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand and South Africa. Such surveys allow us to understand how the transport system is used, as well as how uses change over time – the topic of the next chapter.

The broad picture we find for Britain is that in 2017 (the latest available data), on average people made 975 journeys a year, travelling 6,580 miles, spending 377 hours a year on the move, which is close to an hour a day. These are averages for the whole population, so we expect quite wide variations to be found among individuals. Some people rarely leave home, for instance due to disability, while others commute heroic distances.

There have been a number of important recent advances in digital technologies that impact on travel. This chapter considers the by now generally familiar navigation devices, which we acquire as apps for our smartphones or find in our new cars. These offer direct benefits to individuals but also have the potential to benefit all road users by improving the operations of the network.

The key technology is satellite navigation (satnav), which uses satellites to provide spatial positioning by means of small receivers that determine location to high precision. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the US version. Russia, China and the European Union have developed similar systems.

Digital mapping has essentially digitized traditional paper maps, in the same way that digital documents have digitized their paper versions. However, digital maps have the capacity to accommodate vast amounts of data, including from satellite images and street level information, data that can be readily updated, including traffic information in real time. The combination of satnav location and digital mapping provides a navigation service. For ships and planes, this takes the form of a recommended course between waypoints. For road vehicles, turn-by-turn route guidance is provided.

Satnav location allows the progress of vehicles to be monitored and congested conditions to be detected. Real-time traffic information is included in the most useful route guidance, pioneered notably by Waze, an Israeli tech start-up, an approach now widely adopted. This collects crowd-sourced data about traffic conditions from users’ satnav devices, including slow going in congested traffic, and feeds back suggestions for routes with least travel time, taking account of traffic conditions. Also provided are estimated journey times in advance of setting out. In 2013 Waze became a subsidiary of Google, which employs the Waze technology for route guidance for Google Maps. These smartphone apps are free to use and are funded from advertisers who pay to have their locations indicated on the map by small icons.

Optimizing the road network

A challenge for road authorities is to optimize traffic flows on their networks, to minimize delays and improve reliability. An approach adopted on Britain’s strategic road network is known as “smart motorways”.

I mentioned in the previous chapter the national travel surveys that provide detailed information on how, why and where we travel. They also show trends over time, which both allow us to see how our travel patterns have changed and help assess possible future developments.

The British NTS, first administered over half a century ago, offers a 45-year time series of fairly continuous data. Figure 2.1 shows outcomes per person for annual distance travelled, time spent on the move and number of journeys made, by all modes of travel (except international air travel). This very largely reflects our pattern of daily travel – the journeys to work, school, shops, to visit friends and family, for leisure activities and so forth. What is evident is that two aspects of individual travel have changed relatively little over 45 years: average travel time has remained close to 360 hours a year, or an hour a day, and the average number of trips has been about 1,000 a year. There has been some small decline in annual trips in recent years – by 9 per cent between 2002 and 2017, almost all of which is due to a reduction in walking trips of less than one mile, mainly for shopping, personal business and visiting friends.

In contrast, the average distance travelled has changed substantially over this near half a century, from 4,500 miles per person per year in the early 1970s to reach 7,000 miles by the mid-1990s, since when growth has ceased; indeed, there has been some reduction. Travelling further over the same amount of time has been possible by increased speed of travel, the result of investment in the transport system: mainly private investment in more and better cars and public investment in more capacity on the road network. However, as we transitioned to the twenty-first century, growth ceased in the average distance travelled. In Britain, about three-quarters of the total distance travelled by road and rail is by car, so it is no surprise that the average distance travelled by car has also stopped growing.

Data from the 2017 US National Travel Survey also shows that average miles travelled per person grew from 1969 to the mid-1990s, but then growth ceased.

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.

Travel is central to our lives. The transport system is what makes travel possible. We have become dependent on its smooth functioning. Yet operational failures on the roads and railways, and at airports, cause personal inconvenience or worse and attract much media interest. In Britain, the benefits of substantial investment in improved rail services were delayed by a botched introduction of the new timetable in May 2018, leading to mass cancellations and long waits for travellers. In December of that year, hundreds of flights were cancelled at Gatwick Airport following reports of sightings of drones near the runway. In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, flooding subway and road tunnels and disrupting travel for many days. The scale of disruption is greatest when transport systems are operating at close to maximum capacity.

Even when systems are running smoothly, we experience crowding and congestion, the consequence of increasing numbers of us wanting to access the destinations that modern means of travel make possible. So we invest in the transport system to increase the capacity of roads, railways and airports; but the extra capacity seems to fill pretty quickly as more of us take advantage of the additions, and crowding and congestion reappear.

There is much wishful thinking about improvements from transport infrastructure investments. Politicians are keen to promote new roads and railways that they hope will benefit the voters by speeding travel and boosting the economy. Transport professionals naturally wish to provide better services for their users. Yet the adverse impacts of transport seem to persist – road vehicles damage health from both air pollution and crashes, while road traffic congestion is a ubiquitous and seemingly insoluble problem.

Until the early twenty-first century, investment in the transport system was very largely more of the same. But now we have new technologies that promise an improved travel experience – electric vehicles, digital navigation devices to help us find our way, digital platforms to match supply of mobility to our demand and autonomous vehicles that could transform the driving experience. The likely impact of these new technologies is the main theme of this book.