Transport and our love affair with the phone

The mobile phone is the icon of the modern age, just as the car used to be, but what does the vast potential of the former mean for the future of the latter, and other forms of transport?

Now that there are more phones than cars (indeed, more than people), the primary meaning of the word ‘mobile’ has been transformed from the movement of persons to the portability of an object. The step-change due to smartphones means that the time has come to stop talking about the potential impacts of such information technology in the future, and recognise that it has already happened. The world is different already.

It is not just that they are ubiquitous. It is that they are used more, and for more different purposes, than any other device in history. In any public place just count the proportion of people who are using their phone, and try to assess what they are using it for: partly for phone-calls, of course, but also for playing music, reading books, looking at videos, sending and receiving a variety of different types of message to individuals or networks, checking their progress on a map, taking photos, making films, checking the news, playing games.

My travel pack generally used to be a phone, a dongle, a small computer, and a couple of chargers. With them I could face the world. They needed a bag. The phone and dongle cost me around £35 a month each, and the computer around £200-£400, a new one every other year or so. Now the smartphone means I don’t need a dongle at all – it operates as a personal hot-spot, and very well – and often don’t need the computer. It has halved my monthly expenditure already. My new phone monitors my sleep at night and judges when I am in the shallow sleep suitable to be woken. It receives and answers emails as easily as text messages, so much so that the two types of messaging have nearly merged. I pay bills, go internet shopping, keep my diary. If I wanted to I could trade stocks or gamble in real time. I toyed with the idea of making a point by writing and sending off this article with the last sentence ‘sent from my iPhone’, but habit got in the way. Within a year, I am sure.

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For further information about how technology is transforming the world for travellers see www.Travel2020.co.uk

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I won’t say that the results have all been attractive. The sight of people one-handedly – and off-handedly – paying in a supermarket while not even looking at the check-out assistant is astonishingly rude. The creation of a zone of isolation around individuals in public because of the social network they carry with them can cut people off from their surroundings and reduce normal social discourse – by always being surrounded by your friends and relatives you reduce the chance encounters; no eyes meeting across a crowded room.  On the other hand, children’s phones have partly compensated for the stranger-danger fears that killed off personal exploration and street games. Heart-rate, blood pressure and blood-sugar monitors combined into the phone are already in design, so treatment cannot be far off.

I resisted the idea that ‘telecommunications would transform transport’ for a long time. The hypotheses seemed equally plausible either way: maybe telecommunications would act as a substitute for some travel, but maybe would maintain your contact with a more far-reaching web of social interaction, nationally and internationally, and hence increase the desire to meet people far away, and provide the means easily to organise such meetings. A more subtle version had it that this could go either way, depending on the policy context, so that substitution would apply if travel were expensive and restricted, but complementarity would operate if travel were cheap and easy. My take on that was that the technology would itself morph, so that gizmos intended to facilitate car travel would turn out to be the ones that facilitated charging for it. But all this was against a background that the people who had phones were also, in general, the people who had cars, and both were in strong long-term trend of growth, so it looked as though having a phone was associated with an increase in the amount of physical movement. The difference now is that phones are more widely owned and reach more diverse social groups and classes. Young children can use phones long before they can drive, as can elderly and less able people long after they have stopped. Expensive though they are, people can afford phones who simply cannot afford to own and use cars.

The money side is interesting. These intricate and expensive pieces of machinery (about £500 if you wanted to buy one, or about the same as the first desk-top electronic calculators, or indeed the cost of an aging car) are actually given away free by companies who would rather get the monthly contract income. Families provide one for every single member. The charging rates are mostly quite good, I think, apart from the wicked greed of roaming charges and the nonsense that not a single company will offer you a contract which enables you to use the same company’s services abroad for the same price as it charges its subscribers there.

This all requires some rethinking. I have been arguing for some years now that the ‘love affair with the car’ has cooled, being replaced in part by a much older relationship, the ‘marriage to the city’. But recently we have seen a new and much hotter affair, the love affair with the smartphone. The imagery of the car advertisers previously genuinely reflected the owners’ desire, but now doesn’t work so well, and could well be just fanning the fading embers.

So are there effects on transport? Some have already been observed – the effect on the ‘value’ of time, the nature of journey planning and especially the ease of changing plans to cope with unexpected incidents or just a change of mind, and so on. My colleague Juliet Jane’s recent conference on the uses of time spent travelling codified this. But underneath all that, there is a change in the nature of what we mean by a primary activity. A phone used to be something you might use while travelling, now travelling is something you might do while using the world in our pocket we still call a phone. There is no consumer object so rich in status and symbols: it is the icon of the age, just as cars used to be, and you don’t need lessons, a test, a license or insurance, and the law won’t take it away from you.

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For further information about how technology is transforming the world for travellers see www.Travel2020.co.uk