Planning for uncertainty

This short article is comprised of what I had to say at today's Mott MacDonald webinar - also involving excellent presentations from my colleague Annette Smith, and Graham Grant from Newcastle City Council. If you would like to watch the recording of the event, it is available here:

Opening minds by looking to the future from the past

So, you’re perhaps thinking about a long-term strategy out to 2050. You’re looking 30 years ahead.

Imagine now we are back in 1990 – 30 years ago.

The Web has not quite yet been invented. A mobile phone, if you have one, only makes phone calls. Even 10 years into the future, at the turn of the millennium, only a quarter of UK households will have access to the Internet – but for most this will consist of dial-up access meaning it would take them 30-40 hours to download one movie – though in 1990 you’re probably not even aware of that possibility. And I doubt you are imagining 4 or 5G mobile internet access and what might become possible through that regarding societal interactions and consequences.

I want you to consider two things:

What would happen if we had a pandemic in 1990 that meant we were locked down? How many could work from home? What would we do at home? How would we stay in touch? Where and how would we do our shopping?

And the second thing, if instead of a pandemic, a futurist in 1990 told you that in 30 years’ time the UK would be in turmoil facing a pandemic, exit from the EU and a climate emergency – would you take that seriously and consider it a plausible future? Would you believe them if they said most people would be connected to a rich online world where they could talk to each other on screen through their devices, stream movies and order shopping and other items online as they worked from home?

In a state of flux looking to the future from the present

So, fast forward to that future that is now our present. What can we say about how we should be planning for the future today?

Pre-COVID there was already growing acknowledgement of being deeply uncertain about the future. The pandemic has underlined this; and, goodness knows, this week especially epitomises the unsettled nature of the world right now. Before the pandemic we were already in a state of flux in relation to mobility – brought about by the digital age colliding and merging with the motor age. My own view is that society and mobility have been in a period of regime transition for some two decades now – as the motor age of old destabilises and we experience a decades-long process of change towards a different regime.

Now in the pandemic we have talked of the ‘new normal’ as if somehow we will emerge from this and things will settle relatively quickly into a new and stable regime. This seems unlikely to me – and there may be further system shocks to follow the pandemic that leave us thinking about a new-new normal; or new normal squared. I won’t go into new-normal cubed.

Adaptability and resilience within the Triple Access System

What we have seen from the pandemic is that it is possible to adapt as circumstances change – and this signals opportunity to decide on future circumstances that shape behaviours. It highlights an important distinction in transport planning, namely between demand-led supply and supply-led demand. We’ve focused too much on demand-led supply (you know, ‘predict and provide’) when, all along, its been as much, if not more, about supply-led demand: by changing circumstances, we change how people respond.

What the pandemic also revealed is an important truth about the 21st century world we inhabit – it’s not all about transport, not that it ever was. What underpins economic prosperity and social wellbeing is access – the ability to reach people, jobs, goods, services and opportunities. We live in what I call a Triple Access System – the transport system enables access through motorised mobility; the land use system enables access through spatial proximity (and active travel); and the telecommunications system enables access through digital connectivity. Thank goodness we have the Triple Access System – it offers resilience and flexibility in the face of a system shock. In the case of COVID, the transport system shrank in terms of its ability to provide access; instead many of us moved to an existence of living local and acting global – relying upon spatial proximity and digital connectivity much more.

Each of our experiences of the pandemic are different. For myself I have replaced planes, trains and automobiles with wires, walking and family. Yet the work I am doing and the people I am doing it with are much the same.

From Predict and Provide to Decide and Provide

So, bringing all this together, what does it mean for our forward planning?

Firstly, we need to plan for future access, not only future transport.

Secondly, the future is deeply uncertain – a forecast won’t do away with the uncertainty and may instead give a false sense of security. We need to expose and embrace uncertainty – and this can be done through scenario planning.

But thirdly we can and do also influence the future – this is about being vision-led: identifying future outcomes we would like to try and realise, and then setting a course towards achieving them, but a course that can negotiate the uncertainty.

When taken together, we have called such an approach to forward planning ‘Decide and Provide’: decide on a preferred accessibility future (and outcomes) and provide a means to move towards it in a way that accommodates the deep uncertainty ahead. Decide and Provide must now address decarbonisation – we need access to tread much more lightly if we are to achieve a net zero carbon economy by 2050. In effect we are dealing with a large scale and legally binding case of Decide and Provide.

Necessity is the mother of invention; we must, as a transport sector, rise to the challenge of the times we are living through and be prepared to change how we think and act as transport planners and policymakers. We need a new normal to establish itself in terms of how we plan for the future and the investment decisions that follow. This is already happening and I encourage you to embrace the transport planning transition. Indeed, I firmly believe that stewardship over the future now calls for a move from transport planning to what I call Triple Access Planning.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

If this is of interest to you, you can access freely available further resources here.