Thoughts, insights and rants about futures, climate change, system change, transport, wicked problems, EDI, and heavy metal

By Professor Glenn Lyons

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  • The Driverless Cars Emulsion – are you ready to come together?

    The Driverless Cars Emulsion – are you ready to come together?

    Driverless cars – it can be a divisive topic. Some people love them. Some people hate them. The lovers and the haters are like oil and water in my experience. They just don’t come together well – they don’t like mixing. Yet oil and water can be helped to mix by adding an emulsifier. Hence Read more

  • Planning for connected autonomous vehicles

    Planning for connected autonomous vehicles

    There is a burgeoning volume of literature on autonomous vehicles. We wanted to cut to the chase and identify the most important issues for our clients (especially those in the public sector) to be aware of and addressing. We have produced a crowd-sourced report that draws upon our thinking across Mott MacDonald globally which we Read more

  • The importance of user perspective in the evolution of Mobility as a Service

    The importance of user perspective in the evolution of Mobility as a Service

    Download our new paper. See a video of the paper being presented. A collaboration between Mott MacDonald and UWE Bristol‘s Centre for Transport & Society. At the end of 2018 the UK Parliament’s House of Commons Transport Committee published the report on its inquiry into Mobility as a Service (MaaS). It considers findings and conclusions concerning MaaS in practice and issues of governance and Read more


  • Hear the voices behind the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel report – each one worth a listen in their own right I would say, and in turn a report worth taking note of in which they speak as one. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce the cast for the feature article in this week’s edition of…


  • Chat-GPT, what does a four degrees C world mean for life on earth? DALL-E, can you paint that? “A four degrees Celsius increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels would likely have catastrophic and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. This level of warming would be considered as a “Hothouse Earth” scenario, beyond which…


  • Eight professors speak with one voice about their concerns for the future of road investment in a new report published today. We face a climate emergency. We face a nature emergency. We face social injustice. We have 190,000 miles of roads in England to maintain. In 2021, 1,558 people were killed on Britain’s roads. We…


  • We are the road crew

    May I let you into a secret? I had a small hand in designing and building bypasses during my time in industry as a civil engineering student. That was back in the late 1980s, coincident with the ‘Roads for Prosperity’ white paper. I wonder what that young, long-haired Glenn, rocking along to his cherished ‘Ace…


  • Is Artificial Intellgence influenced by past data? Is this going to shape our future? I asked Chat GPT to “Write me a poem about road investment”. This is what it said: The road stretches out before us,A ribbon of asphalt and dust.A path to adventure, a gateway to growth,A vital investment, worth its weight in…