On 8 June 2023 the 16th event in the PTRC Fireside Chat series took place. You can watch it here.

You can download the writeup below. What follows are 16 intergenerational insights on the future of transport & the transport profession:

💡 Gloria Steinem said “We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach”.

💡 Active travel makes children (& adults) happy – & then before you know it, having your driving licence taken away in later life can feel like your life is over.

💡 16-24-year-olds stress the need to get ‘buses right’ before moving on to more innovative transport topics. And make public transport cheaper.

💡 Rosie Lyons (aged 11): “Because of what we’re doing now, we’re affecting everybody else in the future. We’re here not worrying about it but people in a good 50 years’ time, if there are going to be people in 50 years’ time, are gonna be worrying about it then. They’re gonna be thinking if we had, if people had, done something before then we might have actually had a chance to have a better earth.”

💡 From half a century of professional experience it is apparent that the transport profession evolves & responds too slowly in a changing world.

💡 We may need to start teaching ‘polymathematics’ at universities – we need professionals to be more medieval – able to not only specialise but be conversant with a wider sphere of understanding (better systems thinkers).

💡 What’s the burn (motivation) that keeps emerging professionals in the transport sector? Perhaps we should take more trouble to ask them, unlike in the past: “anybody who was 50 would have been very unlikely to listen to anybody in their 20s”.

💡 “Agency is removed from the old & agency is not given to the young”.

💡 Younger people today, who have grown up amidst a deluge of information, can have an appetite for being well informed & have good ‘bullsh*t detectors’.

💡 How many more shocks & how much bigger do the shocks need to get before government & the public wake the hell up & start making fundamental changes to address climate change?

💡 How much more might the way we interact as humans change as we move through generations & the metaverse potentially makes its way into the mainstream in the future?

💡 “When I was a child in in the 60s my parents had a very real fear of nuclear annihilation to do with a cold war” – can this offer some comfort to the Gretas & Rosies of this world – i.e. that fear has been known before & a way through has been found?

💡 70% of children think adults are not doing enough to tackle climate change “so let’s make sure we are doing as much as we possibly can”, “recognise that the children are watching”.

💡 There can be much wisdom on little shoulders but to benefit from it you have to actually listen rather than only hear, & sometimes busy & preoccupied parents can be guilty of doing the latter rather than the former.

💡 We would all do well to recognise a tendency towards egocentric thinking & make a conscious effort to listen to & learn from others.

💡 Let’s embrace more reverse mentoring in our professional & personal lives.