Real time information will not be enough for transport users of the future, according to IBM’s intelligent transport systems development leader John Rushton.

Tomorrow’s intelligent mobility systems will need to be able to predict probable traffic conditions before they happen, he argued in an address to the ‘Route to Smarter Cities’ conference in Derby last Thursday.

According to John Ridley, another speaker at the conference, the UK could be turned into a test bed for intelligent mobility because its population is set to rise to 77M by 2050 and is a “constrained nation".

Mr Rushton noted that what is actually important for road users to know is if traffic is growing in an abnormal fashion. “Traffic changes dynamically and you need to know how it will change so that your journey can be optimised,” he said.

Mr Ridley, chief business development officer at the Transport Systems Catapult, added: “If there is disruption on the road, currently there is no system to very quickly find information about how best to complete your journey.”

Mr Ridley argued that in order to integrate efficient and sustainable transport solutions people need to be ‘nudged’ to start thinking of transport not in terms of individual modes but instead about mobility as a service.

He said: “Parts of our transport network are regularly congested. We have the capacity, we just unfortunately have certain pinch points.”

Mr Ridley explained that efficient interconnectivity between all modes of transport in future would increase capacity, safety and reliability of networks and reduce travel costs.

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