New year’s resolutions: how can we change?

Sadly what is true for individual humans is true for the things they try to do together: organisations can find it very difficult to change the way they operate, too. In fact whole sectors of our society can feel like they are resistant to change. Transport is, perhaps one of them: a time traveller from 1924 would instantly recognise the transport systems of today – bicycles, buses, cars, trains (still often accompanied by  a paper ticket), planes and ships are not very different to the way they were a century ago and even though the number of people trying to get around, and their average wealth, have dramatically increased, our ability to get them from A to B has barely kept pace. When we compare other bits of society we see big, sometimes radical differences: shops would shock our time traveller, as would the way we produce and consume music, entertainment, clothes, food and so on and so on. 

It's not as though there are not strong reasons to re-think the way we do transport. At the basic level although the average real income of people in society has forged ahead over the last century there are still far too many people for whom access to opportunity is constrained by poor access to transport: notably transport provision is not accessible for roughly 20% of the population at any time and those disabled in this way take 37% fewer trips than those whose physical and mental capabilities enable them to easily use “standard” transport systems. This is a huge cost of society (estimated at £72Bn per annum). One area of major improvement over the last century is the safety of transport: planes and trains are very safe indeed and even the roads are much safer than they were. But there is still much to do: on average more than 4 people a day are killed on UK roads and fifteen times as many are injured, often with life-changing consequences. The cost of this is estimated by the DfT to be over £40Bn per year.

Over and above the apparent lag between transport and other parts of society, and the ways in which transport systems are failing large numbers of people is the cost to everyone they impose. I’m not talking just about the billions of pounds we spend to maintain our transport infrastructure and systems, (although the fact that the productivity of infrastructure construction has barely improved in forty year is a major problem in itself); I’m talking about the fact that the transport system is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the UK economy.

So there’s a lot to do, and that before we start asking how well transport has taken advantage of the digitisation revolution that has transformed other industries over the last few decades. Before we despair, though, let’s recognise that another thing a time traveller would recognise is that the industry is still staffed by many, many highly skilled and dedicated people: that’s one thing we can be glad has not changed much in a century. But why have these talented and hard-working people not been able to deliver a better transport system? My answer is the difficulty of organisational change (and there are plenty of books about that, too, albeit on a different shelf from the ones about eating less or exercising more.)

Einstein almost certainly did NOT say “Insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results”…but that does not make it less true. So, at TRL, when we looked out across this transport landscape and asked ourselves what we could do about it the obvious starting point was not to keep on doing what we had done before and hoping for the best.

At TRL we firmly believe that all the problems listed above are opportunities for the sector to do better: in other words we think we can help the sector to change and to do so we have started by changing our own approach. We have always partnered with the best and what we need now is new inspiration, and to bring in the best thinking from other, adjacent sectors. For this reason we have started a collaboration with Buro Happold who are not just one of the most successful and innovative consultant practices around, but can bring into the transport domain the knowledge, inspiration and innovative ideas from  other sectors.

Starting out a new relationship is always and exciting and hopeful time and we believe the combination of TRL and Buro Happold will be good for the sector as these two innovators spark off each other and help the companies and organisations in the sector really deliver on their New Year’s resolutions.