📢 BREAKING NEWS I’m delighted to announce that my role as the Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility that started in 2018 has been extended by a further three years.

My love of transport stretches back into the last century, but it was a flurry of excitement in the transport sector in the mid 2010s that led to my role coming into being.

Transport nirvana awaited it seemed. All we had to do was make the future of mobility Autonomous, Connected, Electric and Shared (ACES).

Surely we weren’t being seduced by the siren sound of technology, again?

I cut my professional teeth on technological innovation. I’m not ‘anti-technology’. But it’s frustrating when I see inventive flair masquerading as ‘innovation for the betterment of society’. One doesn’t necessarily lead to the other unless we apply a socio-technical lens. How could I play a part in addressing so-called ‘intelligent mobility’ and help make sure it was *effective* mobility in terms of its social outcomes?

The answer it turned out was to approach Mott MacDonald – a company that was also up for making sense of all this and bringing constructive challenge to the sector. And so my role as the Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility was born and we got stuck in.

2018 seems a world away now. We haven’t yet been overrun (run over?) by driverless cars. I tweeted several years ago about the need for carless drivers instead of driverless cars. Connected transport is doing its work in the background. Electric is going up its s-curve. We haven’t yet seen Mobility as a Service transform travel (at least in the way it was first envisaged when the term was popularised). I once joked that there seemed to be more academic papers published on MaaS than there were MaaS users.

In 2018 we hadn’t really woken up to climate change; we hadn’t experienced COVID-19; and working from home was a fringe activity.

Since 2018, as I’ve bridged between academia (University of the West of England) and practice, we have together strongly brought forward the Decide and Provide paradigm and Triple Access Planning. Along the way I coined the phrase ‘WaaS’ and published the paper ‘Walking as a Service – does it have legs?’. We ran the Driverless Cars Emulsion. FUTURES (Future Uncertainty Toolkit for Understanding and Responding to an Evolving Society) was created which is now using increasingly for strategic planning at national through to local levels. We’ve developed technology roadmaps for decarbonising transport.

In 2024 we’re coming to terms with AI; we’re getting more comfortably uncomfortable about uncertainty and using futures and foresight techniques to address vision-led planning; and it’s still not clear whether we have really woken up to climate change.

I am excited to continue this important journey with Mott MacDonald as we all grapple with providing appropriate stewardship over the future of transport and society. Thank you to both my employers for continuing to have faith in me.

#futuremobility