This is a personal post in an awful week. Today my contribution to Local Transport Today’s 2025 ‘deep thinking’ initiative is published. I’m sorry to say fellow transport planners that it is a sobering take on our problems or predicament. It’s called ‘Looking for the light in a dark age’.

When I started my transport planning career over 30 years ago I now realise I took for granted the excitement, hope and energy of that time. I wonder what my younger self would say if I sent him a copy of this article from his older, wiser self?

It is only now as I sail through my 50s that I’m really exposing my thinking to a series of awful words such as racism, misogyny, patriarchy, nepotism, narcissism, and colonialism – and the depth and complexity of what lies behind them. The world in which we look to move our transport planning discipline forwards is a ‘wicked’ place. In my reading, I’ve understood a little of the cycle of empires rising and falling, with the stage of ‘decadence’ coming before ‘decline and collapse’. Cheap flights, and billionaires anyone?
Yes I know, ‘heavy’ right? Well, this is deep thinking.

But my attention in the article is on our efforts as transport planners. Are we the Titanic’s deckchair attendants? Is it our curse to push the proverbial boulder up the Sisyphean slope, time and time again? Or are we standing tall on the front line of guardians of the future?

Near the end of the article I say this:

“As a transport planner passionate about creating a greener, fairer future, I need to manage my expectations in the light of all of the above. And I have finally settled upon a quote from Ghandi that helps guide me. “It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

And sign off as follows:

“So let us push the boulder again up the slope as transport planners, perhaps this time doubling down on how we take communities and politicians with us into the future with visions and realistically achievable actions. But can we do that? After all, the boulder is decidedly heavy. Can we afford not to?”

My thanks to Peter Stonham for lighting up this article in Local Transport Today. I look forward to reactions & challenges. And I look forward to further deep thinking in LTT.

Thank you to Will Pedley Lynn Basford Stephen Cragg Robin Lyons Catt Lyons and Adam Tranter