Transport decision makers and practitioners must make a step change in how they plan future network upgrades to account for falling car use among younger generations, a new report urges.

 

The first report from the Commission on Travel Demand challenges the inevitability of traffic growth. It acknowledges that there is currently increasing congestion on parts of the transport network, including motorways, as a result of the growing and ageing population.

 

However it explains that people are making substantially less trips and travelling fewer miles than they did one or two decades ago, adding that they travel less by car and more by train and bike.

 

“The only age range in which mileage per capita is growing is in the over 60s,” said the commission’s chair professor Greg Marsden. “This was anticipated as the baby boomer generation retires with a lifetime of driving behind it, replacing a generation that was far less car dependent.

 

“What was not expected was the wave of reductions in the travel of younger people following on behind.”

 

The commission now expects that as baby boomers age, the appeal of the car will diminish, requiring new approaches to decision making processes and forecasting travel demand.

 

In particular, the report calls for a shift to ‘adaptive’ decision making approaches from current approaches which it says focus too much on the benefit cost ratio of a scheme under one imagined future.

 

“It should be established that schemes make sense in a broader range of futures than is currently the case,” the report says, adding that the transport sector should learn from methods used by other sectors and establish a series of pilot studies.

 

The report also urges the creation of a cross-governmental ‘futures’ lab, to develop plausible social futures against which to plan transport policy.

 

Above all, it says that future demand policy should be led by asking “what sort of places do we want to live in and what sorts of actions need to be taken to bring that about?”

CIHT Membership & Skills Strategy Board chair Glenn Lyons, who led the Institution’s CIHT FUTURES exercise, welcomed the report. “CIHT FUTURES highlighted an appetite among transport professionals to embrace uncertainty in future travel demand and to evolve our approach to transport analysis and policy making accordingly.

“The report from the Commission on Travel Demand strongly reinforces such a need for change. It does so through a hard hitting assembly of empirical evidence and commentary that demonstrates the significance of how travel demand is changing – and in ways unanticipated.

“Its call for new thinking and action in our sector deserves widespread attention.”