Yorkshire's Transport Future(s)

Why we hosted this session

At the start of this month, as Chair of the Yorkshire and the Humber CIHT region, I had the pleasure of inviting CIHT President Professor Glenn Lyons to meet the next generation of transport planners at Leeds College of Building (LCB).

LCB has been running its Transport Planning Engineering Technician course since 2016, and it has been at the forefront of bringing new talent into the sector; from school leavers to mid-career changers.

As Regional Chair, one gets the privilege to host the CIHT President in the local area every year. Sometimes the president is taken out on site, or asked to judge a competition, or speak at a conference. On this occasion I wanted to put the CIHT President to work!

Glenn has had a profound impact on my career ever since I invited him - through CIHT - to host a workshop in Manchester as part of the CIHT Futures initiative in 2015. At the time, I was a Senior Transport Modeller, familiar with producing "robust" predictions of traffic in 2040 and beyond. I cannot think of a workshop that shook my thinking so much. The future is inherently uncertain? We can create scenarios to decide and provide on our preferred future? There's more to life than "Do Minimum and Do Something" modelling?

Fast forward almost a decade and we're finally seeing changes at national policy level that embed "vision-led planning" into the development process. We also have readily available FUTURES Toolkits and whole handbooks written to help guide us through the complex world of planning for uncertainty.

I'm a big believer in this new philosophy as a way to open our minds out to a future where we are less reliant on cars and where we collectively reduce our impacts on climate change.

This therefore seemed like a great opportunity to bring Glenn to an audience of transport planning apprentices and emerging career professionals and introduce them to this bold new approach.

Gearing up our audience: visions of utopia and dystopia

We knew that introducing, testing and utilising a new concept such as uncertainty planning was going to be challenging within a single morning session. To get people into the mindset of thinking about the future, we began with a simple question:

"What word or phrase comes to mind when you think of a utopian/dystopian future for transport and society for Yorkshire in 2040?"

Glenn reminded the audience what a difference 26 years can make when thinking ahead from 2024 to 2040 by comparing it to what has happened between 1998 and 2024. Would the fraction of the UK population who had access to the Internet back then (running at 56 kilobits per second) envision a future where over 90% of people have internet access running at gigabits per second, 19,000 times faster than the speed they currently have?

When asked about what a dystopian future looked like, attendees responded with answers linked to high population, pollution, congestion and volumes of traffic.  Some also referenced increasing levels of inequality and underfunding.  Others worried about the impacts of climate change and whether future forms of mobility (like flying cars) would create connectivity.

Looking towards a more positive and utopian outlook, our audience suggested they’d envision a future with increased uptake of active modes.  Some specifically mentioned the completion of the proposed West Yorkshire Mass Transit system, whilst others took a broader view of greater efficiencies and safety being achieved through technology.

Whilst presenting these findings back to the audience, we asked the group to tell us which of the ideas put forward sounded plausible, and which sounded more preposterous.  This drew out some differences in opinion; with some saying that flying cars were a more preposterous vision for the future whilst something like mass transit in West Yorkshire could be more plausible.  However, others doubted the deliverability of this scheme and the longer-term future of funding in Yorkshire and the wider North of England.

The object of this exercise was to introduce the breadth of futures which are possible using the “futures cone” and how we as transport professionals can use this to expose inherent uncertainties that lie ahead and help point future planning towards the “preferable” future (and away from the more dystopian futures).

When discussing Yorkshire’s Transport Futures, this showed us that there could be several broad accessibility scenarios.  However, we wanted to really focus in on creating some “critical uncertainties” to help rationalise what we examined in this workshop.

Opening out: charting the drivers of change

From the outset, we wanted our audience to be involved in creating specific scenarios for Yorkshire’s Transport Futures.  Now armed with the knowledge of future uncertainties, we divided the room into four groups and gave each group a deck of cards which included some AI-generated “drivers of change” linked to Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political (STEEP) factors.

Ordinarily, these factors would also be discussed and agreed with the group using some of the techniques outlined in the Futures Toolkit, however in this case ChatGPT helped us to generate prompts to save time in the workshop setting.

We asked each group to organise the cards they’d been given by order of importance and level of uncertainty.  Cross-referencing the two would help us to identify those drivers for change the groups felt were both important and uncertain.  The group feedback enabled us to identify six “critical uncertainties”, including:

• Infrastructure investment

• Climate change mitigation

• Local governance co-ordination

• High-Speed Rail

• Urbanisation trends

• Green economy transition

Groups were then invited to rank these six drivers to vote for which two we would focus on for creating our future transport scenarios.  The two that emerged on top were Levels of (Local) Infrastructure Investment and Degree of (Global) Climate Change Mitigation. 

Placing these two together on an XY axis gave us the framework for creating our scenarios:

Each group was then assigned a 2040 scenario to “time travel” into and describe what that future was like.  We asked them to focus on what transport and society would look like in each future, what values, attitudes and behaviours people would have and how that future would be different from today.  We also asked our groups to name their scenarios to help paint a picture of its overall character.  In the meantime, AI was set to work in visualising these scenarios to see how closely it aligned with the group’s visions. 

Options: the emerging scenarios

Here's a summary of the group feedback, alongside the AI-generated images of each scenario.

“Same as it ever was” scenario: Low Infrastructure Investment and Low Climate Change Mitigation

"Public transport continues to be unreliable and expensive after continued decades of underinvestment.  Roads too are in a poor state of repair which leads to worse congestion, flooding and poor air quality.  The world is under the influence of big fossil fuel companies chasing profits and climate change denialists are in positions of power.  The public is largely ignorant of what can be done to change the status quo, with working people suffering the most."

“James Harold Wilson” scenario: High Infrastructure Investment and Low Climate Change Mitigation

"We continue on a trend of building more highways infrastructure, entering a second “golden age” of motorway construction much like the 1960’s in an effort to tackle modern congestion problems.  People continue to be reliant on cars and choose to live further away from their place of work to commute via car.  This sustains carbon-intensive construction and largely ignores Net Zero targets, even though the impacts of climate change are more keenly felt with poor air quality and widespread flooding."

 “Righteous Cheapskate” scenario: Low Infrastructure Investment and High Climate Change Mitigation

"This scenario sees decision-makers committed to mitigating the impacts of climate change whilst overlooking investment in transport.  We see increased working from home patterns as people don’t want to travel as much.  This in turn drives rising prices on public transport which widens inequalities in society for those that still need to travel to their place of work.  The price of goods increases as well to offset climate impacts, fuelling a cost of living crisis and growing disenchantment with decision-makers, despite the progress made towards Net Zero."

“Ecological Paradise” scenario: High Infrastructure Investment and High Climate Change Mitigation

"In this future, we see an upsurge in investment across several transport modes, funded by taxes charged to corporations based on their carbon emissions.  Cars remain in the picture, with electric vehicles and automated vehicles on the market, but people have a genuine choice between reliable public transport or driving.  There are more green spaces as we work towards biodiversity net gain, which in turn help to mitigate against the impacts of flooding."

Closing down: Our preferred and plausible futures

Returning to the idea of plausibility, we concluded the session by asking participants to individually assign “credibility points” to each scenario. 

After totalling all the points received, we found that the “James Harold Wilson Scenario” was voted the most plausible overall, followed by the “Righteous Cheapskate” scenario and “Ecological Paradise” scenario, with the  “Same As It Ever Was” scenario gathering the fewest vote. 

This illustrated that some outlooks of Yorkshire’s Transport Future imagined that things might change, either through increased infrastructure investment or increased climate mitigation.  What both these outcomes share is a perceived misalignment of priorities; either through investment being directed towards highways, or climate mitigation not encompassing the way we travel.  There was some optimism that an “Ecological Paradise” was more plausible the future being “Same As It Ever Was”, which suggested that our group thought that change was possible, but not all at once.

Finally, our groups were asked to vote for their preferred future, or the outcome they’d most like to see.  This resulted in a resounding endorsement of the “Ecological Paradise” scenario from our emerging career professionals, with some taking a more pragmatic belief in preferring either of the “James Harold Wilson” or “Righteous Cheapskate” scenarios.  None of our participants wanted to see “Same As It Ever Was”, which suggested a desire for change and seeing different investment priorities over the next decades.

Overview

The feedback we received at the end of the event illustrated that many people welcomed the chance to expand their horizons and work through the mental exercises of planning for the future.  Some felt that change was needed to embed this approach in the sector, and others didn’t think it was possible to change things at all. 

I always wanted this event to “say something” about the future of transport in Yorkshire.  It perhaps is not surprising that the next generation of transport planners want to see a future where both climate mitigation and infrastructure investment increase in an "Ecological Paradise".  What I did find surprising was the apparent acceptance or pragmaticism (some might say pessimism?) that the future may not turn out the way we want it.

What I hope our group got out of the session is the knowledge that any future is indeed possible.  We may convince ourselves that we won’t carry on “Same As It Ever Was”, but we need to expose that future in order to know what to steer away from.  Equally, whilst the more pragmatic among us may think we’re heading towards an imperfect future of "Righteous Cheapskates" or revisit the past of "James Harold Wilson", it helps to be prepared and know how to adapt to those scenarios. 

We should not be shy about our preference for an Ecological Paradise.  As transport planners, we are in a position of influence to “refract” the narrative and steer things towards a preferred vision.  This is perfectly illustrated in the “futures fan”, which Glenn introduced our audience to in the session.  I hope this group go into their careers with their eyes wide open to the possibilities on offer, and feel empowered to be the intervention that changes things towards a better future.

It is why many of us join and stay in this sector, after all.

A note on the use of AI: My personal view is still "on the fence" about the use of AI. I recognise the environmental concerns of running it, alongside the implications for the creative sector of AI-generated imagery and the need for caution in vetting AI outputs.

I do believe that like it or not, AI will enter mainstream ways of working in some form, whether its through integration with search engines, or through data analysis. For this session, its use helped to speed up the running of the event for both Glenn and I, as well as giving our attendees a visual tool to help bring their ideas to life (and ultimately - a talking point for them to take away from the session). Whilst it may not be something I apply every day, it was noticeable how AI helped to engage our young audience and act as a helping hand to bring our message out.

The practicalities and moralities of doing so are something for a whole other blog post!