Professors offer conflicting visions of future at urban mobility event

Professor John Miles

Professor John Miles

Professor Phil Goodwin

Professor Phil Goodwin

It was a case of clash of the academic titans at last month’s Intelligent City Mobility event, which was held at KIA Oval. In one corner was Professor John Miles from the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, who offered an upbeat vision of the car’s role in the future of urban mobility. In the other corner was Phil Goodwin, Professor of Transport Policy at University College London and the University of the West of England, who took a more sceptical view.

The debate between the pair provided an invigorating opening to The Car and the City, the first session of the day, which was organised by Landor LINKS. 

Miles predicted that a new generation of small, agile and shared vehicles will serve as a convenient mode of urban transport.

By contrast, Goodwin warned that a rise in urban traffic would be a “disaster” for a host of reasons, including the adverse impact on quality of life, the environment, health including rising obesity and social cohesion. Goodwin suggested that a transition to automated transport might not necessarily be a good thing. “Changes that make life worse are just as much a part of life as the things that make life better,” he cautioned.

Making the case for technological progress, Miles spoke of the “exciting prospect” of shared, automated cars being used in mixed spaces in towns and cities. “We need to have a very agile system that provides the road transport vehicle meeting the right demand at the time. I would suggest the car is king. It is the smallest form of transport that you can put on the road.” Rail and bus networks in the UK do not have the capacity to enable a significant switch from the car to public transport, he told delegates. Miles also questioned the assumption that cars were necessarily worse emitters of CO2 than other forms of transport. Miles said he had observed buses on the Strand, central London, which were carrying few passengers. “A taxi that is full will cause less congestion and less pollution than buses with not many people on them. When the car is full it matches the best of the rest,” he said.

An almost empty bus generated 350g per passenger km compared with 20g per passenger km for a full bus, calculated Miles, who is chairman of the UK Automotive Council Working Group on Intelligent Mobility and ARUP/RAEng Res Chair Transitional Energy Strategies.

“Why are people prepared to sit in traffic jams? It has to do with user appeal – it’s because it is spontaneous, very convenient and good for door-to-door travel. It's a comfortable space, you can listen to music and if you are not driving you can watch the TV. It offers privacy and security; that is why it is so difficult to beat. It won’t be long before the car becomes our office on wheels, our cinema on wheels, so we don't mind if we are in a traffic jam.”

But Phil Goodwin challenged his fellow academic’s faith in an automated future. He was not keen on the implications of Miles’ prediction that the new form of transit would allow a 25% rise in urban traffic.

Goodwin said he actually agreed with Miles that this level of traffic growth was technically feasible but suggested it would “add another notch to the arms race between traffic growth and capacity control”.

Goodwin argued that it was debatable if the transition to driverless cars would actually be cost effective. Even if technology and automated cars are proven to be 100% feasible, that does not mean it will actually happen, he said. He said there were examples from history where the technology “no matter how brilliant, was not enough”, citing the rise and fall of Concorde and Hovercraft, which “worked technically but never worked commercially”.

Goodwin highlighted the fact that technology does not always deliver, referring to the shortcomings of fuel innovation, as well as spurious carbon reduction targets, referring to the discrediting of diesel as a ‘cleaner’ fuel.

He worried that technology was a “distraction”, offering the sort of headline grabbing solutions that appeal to politicians.

He warned of a “nightmare scenario” where the government departments responsible for transport, local government and the environment would close low profile but effective projects to help meet the 30% cuts imposed by the Treasury. Sustainable transport projects aimed at lower level car use as an objective may lose their funding, Goodwin fears. These projects may show high value but do not have the “headline grabbing appeal of high infrastructure projects”.

Goodwin also advised delegates to be wary of marketing images and promotional material that envisaged how automated and smart vehicles might work in urban contexts. Such images usually show one or two vehicles in nice urban contexts surrounded by smiling pedestrians. The reality, he predicted, would be very different. 

As the conference progressed, images of futuristic vehicles travelling in largely empty city streets were quite a common sight.