What is on the minds of emerging transport professionals?

On 26 April I had the great privilege to contribute to the sold-out Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation (CIHT) Emerging Professionals Conference. I was asked to address the topic of climate action. You can see a copy of the slides I used here . At the start of my presentation I invited those in the audience if they wished to email me their questions with a promise that I would endeavour to answer them. I received six responses. In retrospect I'm relieved in one way that all 120 in attendance did not respond. It would have taken me days to prepare my responses. Yet I remain curious, as I hope we all are, to be more aware of the questions and views on the minds of our emerging professionals. And the six responses alone have raised some big issues that are matters that are relevant to the transport profession more widely.

In this article I share (in anonymised form) the six lines of questioning I received and my attempts to respond to each of them. A personal thank you to the individuals who reached out. I hope there is something of use in what you read here.

Many thanks for your talk at the CIHT conference yesterday, it was very engaging and thought-provoking. Also thank you for offering to respond to questions.

?I would be interested in what you think the biggest barriers are to overcoming institutional silos, so that we can work towards a truly integrated multimodal transport systems and integrated land use/transport planning? Seems to me there is a lot of good talk around this but it is failing to materialize in practice due to siloed organisational structures at all scales of governance?

This is a big question and a challenging one. Near the start of my career the ‘Integrated Transport White Paper ’ was published by the Labour Government and its ‘Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions’. As you can tell from the title of the Department and the White Paper, here was an attempt to overcome organisational silos and take a more systemic approach. However, here we are 25 years later with a Department for Transport and no UK national transport strategy. I don’t know if you have ever watched the ‘Bed of Nails’ episode of Yes Minister, the political satire? This looks at the apparent poisoned chalice of an integrated transport policy. The episode is over 40 years old and still entertaining because it comes close to the mark.

When one looks at an integrated perspective, the system under consideration becomes analytically bigger and more complex and more challenging to make sense of. The number of stakeholders identified grows and the result is that the problem in question gets harder to make sense of, cognitively and politically. Indeed, it moves from being what might appear to be a simple problem to a wicked one – from one that was hoped to be soluble to one that can at best be managed. At the risk of decision-making paralysis because of the problem now to hand, it becomes tempting to get more focused again, to try and pick off parts of the system and move forward more decisively. Of course, doing so doesn’t make the true nature of the system go away. And so the dance continues.

Changing such a system – making it more integrated and helping it work differently and hopefully better - would take time and strong governance – neither are natural accompaniments to political cycles and vote winning. I believe the slow road to a more integrated approach may come from us all as professionals focusing in different parts of this system, having an education an continuing professional development that help us better take a systems perspective and thereby be able to better communicate with each other across the organisational constructs that otherwise come to represent the silos.

Good afternoon Glenn,

As requested, one question...

?What advice do you have for convincing clients to take responsibility for the effects and causes of climate change, especially with regard to finances that clients may have used in the past to prevent climate from being part of the conversation. For example, do you have a favorite learning resource or narrative?that you have anecdotal success with convincing clients to take a greener solution?

A thought-provoking question. At the heart of this I think is the matter of rational behaviour of actors and a fundamental social dilemma. If I assume the client in question is a private sector one then they likely have shareholders and are motivated by profit. If being more environmentally responsible positively influences their brand, order books and bottom line then doing so is rationally appealing. If not then it becomes difficult to come to terms with the fact that if they take the moral high ground and others do not follow then others will profit and the problem of climate change will worsen and the client in question will lose out. With such thinking, all organisations can be tempted to selfishly (and rationally) not seriously address climate change, the result of which is that we are all ultimately worse off.

If an organisation is knowingly using resources to conceal the problem of climate change as your questions suggests then this is one with a deeper-seated culture of vested interest and unless shareholders can force the Board to change its ways or new determinants of profit encourage it to change its ways, then things don’t look good. Employees could vote with their feet and seek work with more ethical organisations.

If, on the other hand, the client in question is a public sector one then – in theory – it should have public good as a motivating principle and there is good prospect that what is good for addressing climate change is also good – in transport terms – for helping create a more socially cohesive, less polluting, thriving community. However, when technology-fix is on offer for climate change, it can be hard politically to embrace wider measures that would involve behaviour change (especially when, again, the social dilemma exists). My focus has tended to be with public sector clients. In recent years I have been promoting an alternative transport planning paradigm of ‘decide and provide’ which emphasises a Triple Access Planning approach in which physical mobility, spatial proximity and digital connectivity are considered in combination as the means to help shape the system in a more sustainable way. This has proved conceptually appealing and indeed some authorities have sought to embrace it.

At a more human level, if I were to make two book recommendations on making sense of climate change then the first would be “The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet ” by Professor Michael Mann; the second would be “At Work in the Ruins ” by Dougald Hine. The first one highlights the insidious information war by those invested in profiting from the status quo while also emphasising the importance of urgency and agency in taking action on climate change. The second considers the end of the system as we know it – ‘modernity’ – and what we may lose that we will need to mourn, what we lose that we never needed, and what we may be able to salvage to create a new system. You may wish to save the second book for later reading, but the first book really opened my eyes to the way communication can be weaponised.

Good afternoon Glenn,

Again, I want to say thank you for such a motivating talk on climate action yesterday, it really got me thinking about what other small changes I can make in my personal life to contribute towards positive change and how I can influence other people to change their behaviour.

I made a point yesterday about how I believe the media often puts a negative spin on anything related to climate action, due to the British media having a tendency to focus on sensational stories and controversy rather than the positive impact of climate action. For instance, they are often known to give disproportionate coverage to the extensive scientific evidence supporting the reality of climate change, and tend to focus on the negative short term implications of extreme protests such as just stop oil motorway closures. I won’t say too much, as you can probably tell I’m not a huge advocate for the British media! But how do you think the actions of the media will effect political action and public opinion towards solutions to climate change? Do you think the media will ever ‘take a stand’ and project their own opinions on climate change, rather than what headlines will get them the most clicks? If not, how do you think we can change the attitude towards the subject?

I will definitely be re-watching ‘Don’t look up’ and recommending it to others, hopefully some will recognise the seriousness behind the comedy!

The nature of your questioning reminds us that the issues transport planners are grappling with are bigger than transport – they reach into the heart of the establishment and the powerful actors involved. I’m also reminded of a book I part-read (both because it was quite intense reading, long, and also rather too sobering) called “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power ” by Professor Shoshana Zuboff. Have a read about it yourself here on Wikipedia (yes, I consider it helpful to go to Wikipedia as a source of insight). “Zuboff states that surveillance capitalism "unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data [which] are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence', and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later."”. Meanwhile, back to so-called mainstream media – TV news programmes and national newspapers. I confess it took me some years into my professional life before I realised how politically-oriented newspapers were. To your questioning, they do take a ‘soft’ stand of sorts. Consider coverage of the Just Stop Oil action at the World Snooker Championship last month. The left-wing Guardian had the headline “World snooker championship disrupted by Just Stop Oil protesters in Sheffield - First-round matches held up by graphic powder protest - Government urged to ‘stop all new UK fossil fuel projects’”. Meanwhile the right-wing Telegraph ran a comment piece with the headline “Being a Just Stop Oil activist only makes sense if you’ve been pampered by Mummy and Daddy - Instead of offering a rational argument, their attention-seeking disruptions increasingly look like a spiteful, class-based attack”. If we turn to television then (even) the BBC has been subject to questions over its impartiality . When is comes to climate change there is also the matter of balance in journalism where different viewpoints are encouraged. However, when does balance become ‘false balance’? This article makes the point that, when it comes to the climate crisis, “Presenting seemingly equal sides, he [Professor David Rapp] said, can prompt one of three problematic results: doubt about whether there is consensus; confusion about what’s true; and a tendency to prefer the more placating option, i.e., “Someone’s arguing that climate change is not something to worry about, so I won’t worry.””. As you say, the media are naturally drawn to attention-grabbing stories that are controversial. Climate change is a long-game, slow-burn, repetitive story which needs some excitement to grab people’s attention. The recent ‘The Big One ’ peaceful protest in London led by Extinction Rebellion got relatively limited news coverage – because it was peaceful and there was no controversy to really seize upon.

The reality is that mainstream media, politics, profit and power are interwoven into a complex fabric of communication that has us as consumers and voters in its sights. We are of course influenced by communication and – because of our own unconscious biases – we may ‘hear what we want to hear’. This said, the pendulum of public opinion is something that moves and can be moved and the optimist in me believes the weight of evidence about the urgency of climate change and the need for climate action is overcoming those with vested interests in the status quo. The question is whether the inertia caused by behaviour of the media is slowing change down at great cost to us all.

Hi Glenn,

Thank you for the insightful presentation at the CIHT emerging professionals event on Wednesday.

?It would be great to hear your view on planning and designing infrastructure, both measures that include bus priority and cycle tracks that require the removal of trees/ other green infrastructures. I appreciate that this is not a desired compromise, and that in both national, and local policy, road space reallocation is preferred, but with the climate emergency, what do you think???

Of course in these schemes, tree re-planting is agreed with local officers at the highway authority.

At the heart of this question I think is the matter of whether further disruption of nature can be warranted in what appears to be pursuit of a greater good. What I’ve come to realise of late is how limited my understanding is of biodiversity – yet the nature and climate emergencies are both very real and intertwined (something we brought to the fore in our recent work under the banner of the Road Investment Scrutiny Panel thanks especially to Professor Zoe Davies ). I think it is all too easy for things we know less about to be demoted in importance or even ignored. Trees have life spans running into hundreds of years. To remove a mature tree cannot simply be compensated for by a like-for-like replacement. And the tree itself – depending upon where located – is part of a wider ecosystem that evolves over time spans greater than the time take for transport works.

I’m part-way through reading a book at the moment called “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. You can read a review about it here . It’s a real eye-opener in terms of stepping away from the rat-race and taking a closer look at the wonderful world of nature. Once you’ve read this, the idea of planting new trees as a substitute for removal of ancient woodland seems far fetched and shallow. And consider the recent news that “National Highways planted 850,000 saplings as part of a ￡1.5bn upgrade of the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon, which was opened in 2020. But an internal review seen by Sky News reveals three-quarters of them have since died.” I find myself questioning just how sufficient the expertise on biodiversity and ecology is within the transport sector and in turn how well-informed and appropriate investment decisions are that affect the nature and climate emergencies.

The trade-offs in decisions about changing our transport system can be complex and need to be considered carefully. I’m inclined to think that nature has for too long been a soft target for compromise in pursuit of a growth paradigm into which transport and car dependency have played. The tough decisions now relate to how to challenge that paradigm and make the difficult transport choices that don’t compromise nature and which instead compromise the status quo of mobility and confront the difficult political realities of needing to see change in transport behaviours of the sort transport planners have often only been able to dream of.

Hi Glenn,

Thank you for your presentation as part of the CIHT event (26/04). It was fascinating (but sobering) to hear your take on the current state of the industry, climate change and our collective actions.

?I did have a question to pose following your prompt:

?How do you deal with Climate Change fatigue? The pressure of sorting out climate change and the constant discussions around it seems to have two (of many) effects that you touched on; hopelessness (what’s the point?) or self-imposed ignorance. I have witnessed the second of theses in my personal conversations, typically those of older generations, where they feel that the whole thing is over blown. As humans, we are terrible at thing on large time scales and incremental changes (part of our human nature or so I have read) and I have noticed that people are unable to quantity the change that could occur with their own daily experiences and as such believe that this see it as made out to be worse than it is. This is compounded by pervious crisis’s, of which there seem to be an endless cycle, that were supposed to be world ending, usually according to the media, in which we have emerged just fine and/or point at example on when science is wrong as to a reason not to listen. Example of supposed world ending crisis’s included acid rain, hole in ozone, Y2K. My question is, how do you managed and engaged people who believe that the whole problem is over blown, human contribution is a contributing factor but one of many, and that there are more important things to focus on?

My goodness – the articulation of this questioning reveals a depth of thinking and awareness that both gives me hope for the future of the profession but also highlights the considerable difficulties of making sense of how humans, communities and society processes the difficulties it faces. I find it a daily challenge to process the world around me and the seemingly widespread apathy when it comes to climate change. Climate change denial (i.e. man-made climate change is contestable and an overblown panic or indeed one of many conspiracies) still persists and indeed I am alarmed by what I have been seeing given oxygen on this platform of late. I will not give it more oxygen by providing you with the links to some of the posts and streams of comments I have seen. However, I do think another form of denial is now at play – denial as part of the stages of grief following loss or pending loss. What climate change represents is too overwhelming to allow to become too real in one’s mind (coupled with the extent of loss of biodiversity) – once it becomes real, the sense of potential loss could be too great to bear. Denial is a defence mechanism. Of all things, I would quote here from Murray Bauman in Stranger Things – “People don’t spend their lives trying to get a look at what’s behind the curtain. They like the curtain. It provides them stability, comfort, definition.”

In my immediate circle of friends, rarely is there talk of the climate emergency. One of my friends this last weekend asked me ‘how did you get on at your protest?’. The way the question was posed made it seem I was pursuing some esoteric hobby or past-time that I shouldn’t expect most people to know about or have an interest in. And the notion that only those of us at the protest ‘owned’ the protest or were affected by what we were protesting about felt strange and alienating.

I’d love to discover that the climate emergency is like the Millennium Bug – something that in the fullness of time was not to deliver the disruption it that it was feared it might. I want some grown ups to say they have it all under control and will make the nasty stuff go away. Except I am not in a place mentally now where I can take that seriously – the problem is very real, and not enough is being done about it quickly enough.

So to the question of how to deal with climate change fatigue? Three ways come to mind.

I take comfort in being in a professional role and part of a professional network that shares my concern about climate change and allows me to both have some sense of agency but also draw comfort from other good souls who are showing deep care and concern. We can together scratch our heads and some of the madness of the system around us and hope that the numbers of those who share our concerns are growing.

I also look for things to read that help me see a bigger picture and also to make sense of things. In relation another question I’ve answered, I have recently read the book “At Work in the Ruins ” by Dougald Hine. It considers the end of the system as we know it – ‘modernity’ – and what we may lose that we will need to mourn, what we lose that we never needed, and what we may be able to salvage to create a new system. The author suggests that just as death is not a problem humans can overcome, so too is the consumerist, technology-fix system we are driven by a system that can survive in the face of the climate emergency. But the end of the system does not mean the end of life on earth or the end of humanity; it means new beginnings – at work in the ruins. Heavy stuff you might think and perhaps a book to be read when the time feels right for you.

Finally I turn to what is my shield of invincibility – my love of heavy metal music. Its songs include a focus on challenging a flawed system, about inequalities and injustices, about harm to nature and so on. They bring a sense of vitality and energy to pulling back Murray Bauman’s curtain and reminding me I’m not losing my mind but instead have taken the red pill in the Matrix.

Hey Glenn,

First question, I suppose you could rank countries in terms of how effective and sustainable their transport infrastructure and systems are. What stops countries with objectively inferior infrastructure and systems to adopt best practice demonstrated elsewhere in the world? I get that there’s going to be situational differences, but the example that shocked me when I came to the UK was the lack of electrified rail. Where I was born I cannot remember ever being on a diesel train.

The other example is active travel infrastructure. I went to school 8 km from where I lived and took that journey on my bike every day. I never had to leave a cycle path once along that whole route. Where I live in the UK some active travel infrastructure is starting to be delivered, but it is so sporadic that in real terms it doesn’t really make you feel safer to actually cycle. And then you hear the UK plans to make ￡200M cuts to active travel. What is going on?

Thank you for your vigour in advocating the climate change issue. My faith-based background has also instilled in me the idea that we need a complete systemic behavioural change and the example you set with your personal behaviour is refreshing. How do you deal with apathy? Or people who agree in theory, but are unwilling to act accordingly?

Here's a few other questions that I have been thinking about:

• How do we advocate maintenance as being superior to growth?
• What I can do to be more conscientiously professional and professionally challenging?
• On your agency/risk appetite graph, I feel like I would rank very low on both axes. Any tips on making a difference in that position or growing on either axes?

A lot to unpack in this and I won’t attempt to fully – but a wonderful exposition of the thoughts in the minds of emerging professionals in our sector. To the matter first of transferability of best practice between countries, or why this doesn’t happen. People often point to Copenhagen as a source of inspiration and the art of the possible in terms of good urban planning and thriving active travel. Why can’t every city be like that? Copenhagen’s success didn’t just happen – it has been a journey of conviction, consistency and evolution in an effort to develop an urban environment and associated norms in planning and behaviours. For another urban area to emulate that takes time but also an alignment of multiple factors able to foster the sort of change needed. I’m also reminded of a study by the London School of Economics that considers ‘accessibility pathways’ – how different cities have evolved in different ways. It contrasts the compact forms of London and Berlin with the sprawling forms of Atlanta and Los Angeles. The European cities lend themselves better to public transport while the North American cities are car-oriented. It’s difficult to change accessibility pathway once a city has gone down one path for so long.

Dealing with apathy when it comes to climate change can of course be frustrating – especially when it appears to be on such a grand scale. Imagine how energised we might now feel if everyone in the world wholeheartedly agreed that we faced a climate emergency and needed to act accordingly – we would be pulling together with what some would relate to being like a war-time spirit. We would be amazed at how much change was possible. Instead we run up against inertia and vested interest in the status quo. If I dare continue with the war analogy, I see this as a war of attrition – small scale actions that over time gradually win over the apathy and built a coalition of the willing. We can only do what we can do. And it feels markedly better than doing nothing and losing the war.

To the point on maintaining rather than growing, I would point you to the work of Jason Hickel on ‘degrowth’. These relatively short articles – “What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification ” and “The anti-colonial politics of degrowth ” will give you plenty of insight. The notion set out of a fundamentally different economic paradigm is compelling and refreshing (‘it doesn’t have to be the way it is now’). That said, the sobering question that tends to remain unanswered is ‘how do we get from where we are now to the alternative being set out?’. Regime change is typically not an event but a long-run process of transition from one ‘way of the world as we know it’ to another.

In relation to action we can each take individually, I reproduce below the diagram from my presentation as referred to.

If you feel you have low agency and low risk appetite it does not mean you are unable to make a difference because every contribution makes a difference. It is about reaching a little beyond one’s comfort zone and learning from the experience. In such a way the comfort zone grows and/or the sense of who you are and what you are prepared to do changes over time. Bringing constructive challenge to bear is possible for all of us if we tread even a little more boldly and ask the probing questions in meetings or question what we seen on social media or hear in conversations. Agency and risk appetite are likely to be in part a product of career stage and choices of career path as well as personal circumstances. It may not be the risk itself that changes as much as the consequences of taking the risk – for example losing your job when you can afford to retire may feel very different to losing your job near the start of your career with a mortgage or rent to pay and/or a young family to support. The axes should not trivialise the complex reality of factors that govern how we are prepared to behave and what influence we believe we can have. But the point remains that we can each in different ways and to varying extents take climate actions and contribute to the global movement that is needed.