Words / Glenn Lyons, CIHT vice-president and Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility at the University of the West of England.

I started my career as a graduate civil engineer and then gained a PhD in artificial intelligence and driver behaviour. It was only recently that I realised I was doing forerunner research for driverless cars. After that, I joined a research group at the University of Southampton specialising in intelligent transport systems, so the formative stages of my career were very much around science, engineering and technology.

But then my interest in human beings and the social context for transport started to develop, and I helped set up the Transport Visions Network – a network of young professionals looking at the future of transport – with some colleagues at the beginning of the millennium. That was a socio-technical undertaking, looking at society, and the system of humans and behaviour, in the context of transport systems.

I also founded the Centre for Transport and Society at the University of the West of England 20 years ago. At that time, it was still quite unusual to have a transport research centre in academia that wasn't rooted in engineering or economics: we were much more a blend of social sciences and engineering.

I suppose the journey I've been on is really one of understanding and influencing travel behaviour in the context of continuing social and technological change. During my career, the digital age has collided and been merging with the motor age. We’ve been bearing witness to the potential destabilisation of the system that we've all known throughout our lives – a world oriented to car dependence – so I‘ve found myself specialising in how to deal with uncertainty in strategic planning.

We clearly still rely on and benefit from the road network economically and socially: but at the same time, its development and use have brought with them substantial negative externalities that are part of the problems we're now facing. So what could or should the future of road investment have in store in a changing world? I'm very keen to continue being part of the navigation of this state of flux within the sector.

It's an exciting and challenging time to be in highways and transportation, within the context of the climate emergency. But it's a bizarre existence where we can all be so busy with our day-to-day concerns and deadlines, that we become distracted from the enormity of the existential threat facing us as a species. The planet is possibly, if not probably, facing temperatures ahead of between two and four degrees above pre-industrial times, and the consequences of that are huge; at the same time, we're trying to get on with daily life.

We're also realising that our levels of consumption are unsustainable. I recently critiqued the National Networks National Policy Statement draft in a LinkedIn article, and it's hard to see a credible basis for the phrase ‘supporting sustainable growth’ that is used. What the phrase is saying, I believe, is we want to support growth and we'll do our best to make it as sustainable as possible: that’s a significant watering down of the intention of the phrase (especially in light of the latest dismal assessment of UK progress on UK decarbonisation from the Committee on Climate Change). If sustainability and growth are incompatible, then you can't support both and you have to make a trade-off between one and the other. Politically, growth continues to be prioritised over sustainability: until that changes, can we make the real leaps towards becoming a decarbonised world and addressing the climate and nature crises that are desperately needed?

The CIHT has an important responsibility to act as a medium through which its membership and the wider profession can continue to share thinking and come to terms with these difficult and pressing issues. It also has a great opportunity to take a networked approach to expressing and confronting, on behalf of the membership, some of these challenges. Collectively we need to be upstanders and play our part as agents of change within our sector.