Over 100 of you have now participated in FUTURES workshops in Manchester, Bristol, London, Glasgow, Leeds and Newcastle. Attendance has risen as awareness of the project has grown, and most of November’s workshops have been fully-booked.

 

When we embarked on the FUTURES project we had some slight concerns about how this unusual approach to understanding uncertainty would play with a profession often concerned with trying to minimise doubt through engineering rigour and detailed modelling. However, the reaction to Glenn Lyons’ approach, which encourages us to embrace uncertainty, has been extremely positive.

 

The project comes at a time when future transport and travel patterns seem less certain than in recent generations with an apparent decoupling of traffic growth from economic growth, a decline in driving for some purposes and among some groups, and when new technology seems poised to bring further, although unpredictable, change to our habits. We have also seen – notably in London but also in other cities – transport-related strategies increasingly seeking to shape and change travel demand, rather than to cater for it. We live in interesting times!

 

Four workshops remain: Northern Ireland and the East of England are scheduled for 23 November and 7 December, while rescheduled dates for the East and West Midlands events will be announced soon. If you would like to join us for these events, please register your interest on the FUTURES webpages*.

* note that the East of England workshop is currently fully-booked but there is a waiting list for cancellations.