The Future of Transport

Nicole Kobie debunks the hype around driverless cars and other futuristic transport and reveals why flying cars aren’t as unlikely as they sound.

- Nicole Kobie

Your commute is changing. Picture a future of self-driving cars handling the school run, autonomous flying pods avoiding traffic on the daily trek into the office, 1,200km/h trains for a quick jaunt to a business meeting, and space planes for a weekend away in Australia – each is in the works by academics and entrepreneurs, though the reality doesn’t always match the hype.

Driverless cars are clocking up miles, Dubai is considering a Hyperloop, the British government is picking locations for a spaceport, and tech luminaries are spending their time and cash on flying cars. But don’t chuck your bus pass in the bin quite yet, as transport innovation moves at a crawl – much slower than the hype surrounding it.

Though it may seem as if driverless cars are nearly ready to take to the road and space planes are but a few explosion-less trials away, Dr Tim Schwanen,director of the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford, says we need to consider longer timescales than the next few years.

“In general, there’s a highly inflated expectation around most of these… I don’t think that over the next five or 10 years we’re going to see massive changes,” he says.

“We will see more demonstration projects and test projects with electric vehicles and with autonomous vehicles.”

Schwanen argues that much of the hype behind these new-fangled transport systems is because people believe that technology can solve the problems they see in the world.

“Many people do realise that there are very fundamental problems with transport, whether those are environmental in nature – like contribution to CO2 emissions – or whether we’re talking about air pollution or things like congestion. Or whether we talk about obesity and the major contributions the car-oriented lifestyle made to a sedentary lifestyle,” he notes.