10 years ago today I began my secondment as Strategy Director with the Te Manatū Waka – Ministry of Transport (New Zealand). I flew over 11,000 miles to get there. I ended up making the NZ trip four times – over 90,000 fossil-fuelled miles.

It was one of the great privileges of my career working as part of the MoT. I was reporting to Andrew Jackson, Deputy CEO of MoT and former Deputy Director of the UK Gov’s Foresight Unit. Sparing Andrew no blushes, he has an incredible brain – creative, polymathematical, lightening quick. I had to be on top form. My task? To lead a team to consider what might happen to the future demand for car travel. Why? Because New Zealand, like the UK, was experiencing ‘peak car’ – ten years of zero growth in road traffic, which had never happened, wasn’t meant to happen. This sat rather awkwardly with a right-wing government wanting to spend $10bn on roading over a ten year period ahead.

We ran a full-on scenario development exercise (including a 2042 room in the Ministry) resulting in four scenarios for 2042 ranging from ‘Travellers Paradise’ (34% increase in car kms from 2014 to 2042) to ‘Global Locals’ (53% decrease). Car kms also went down in the other two scenarios. That ruffled some feathers I can tell you!

During the work, Phil Goodwin and I ran a roundtable in London on peak car (a phenomenon Phil had drawn the world’s attention to). You can read our report here.

With the scenarios complete it was Tom Forster in our team who asked ‘so what?’. That question has defined the last 10 years of my working life. Developing scenarios is thought provoking, but using them is what matters. Decide and Provide and Triple Access Planning was born. Read our report here and the resulting academic paper here.

Ten years on. A pandemic temporarily made ‘Global Locals’ a reality. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 6%. Acute awareness of the climate emergency means I doubt I’ll ever visit the beautiful NZ again. And in March this year as we come to the end of the pan-European project ‘Triple Acccess Planning for Uncertain Futures’ (https://www.tapforuncertainty.eu/) we are about to release a Practitioners Handbook for Triple Access Planning. There are a growing number of amazing people who are putting TAP into practice. Perhaps a little recompense for those 90,000 gluttonous miles I flew.

h/t the wonderful Future Demand team: Cody Davidson, Tom Forster, Ingrid Sage, Jennifer McSaveney, Emma MacDonald, Amelia Morgan and Anke Kole.

#futuremobility#uncertainty#decideandprovide#tripleaccessplanning