If I had to name one word that captures most readily the zeitgeist in transport, it would be 'technology'. It is everywhere. We have the early tentative steps on the road to truly self-driving vehicles, and fantastic suites of sensors being tested in testbeds like the Smart Mobility Living Lab to help realise the next steps. We have electric vehicles featuring in Superbowl ads. We have data-driven solutions to manage space in our towns and cities and to focus on delivering mobility as a seamless service. .... and finally... We have AI-integration into enforcement cameras - with accompanying fright-filled headlines and quotes.
What often gets overlooked though in this tech-driven narrative is the importance of the human. As transportation continues to evolve, so too must our understanding of how people interact with it. In this blog I’d like to explore why I believe humans, not technology and robots, are the most important driver (pun intended) of the future of transport.
Deciding what we need
Starting at the top - while the rapid advancements in transport tend to be in technology, it is humans who ultimately envision and implement them. Truly creative AI might help, but ultimately there is a firm assumption that it is people who actually need the transport solutions, and who design them. In order to get the right outcomes, people from diverse backgrounds need to innovate and collaborate to ensure that transportation solutions cater for the needs of everyone.
For now at least, it seems unlikely that the robots and AI systems will ever know what is truly best for us humans in terms of the transport solutions we need and want, unless we tell them. They are not going to intuitively design with us in mind. Even if one day they do, it is not clear that we would want to hand over that control completely.
Safety and accountability
While self-driving vehicles and AI-powered technologies hold potential for greater safety, human input remains crucial in maintaining accountability, and deciding on the level of acceptability in terms of the number of collisions and severity of injuries that occur as a natural consequence of the mobility we crave. As we integrate technological advancements into transportation systems, striking the right balance between convenience and safety is essential. It is human oversight and perspective that currently defines this, and I don’t see this ever changing. Work is being undertaken to work out how self-driving cars will make those tricky decisions when dealing with uncertainty, but it is us who will have to program their systems of beliefs and morals. How do we want them to balance legality, safety, and mobility? As for my own 'human perspective' I don’t think I will ever be able to accept that a transport system that kills and seriously injures people by design is acceptable, and this is why I adopt the Safe System Approach - one that places safety as a prior, not something to be traded with other outcomes. Accidents happen, but so do miracles, and we don’t expect them every day.
Joy
To be fair, philosophers are thinking about how robots might be built in a way that would allow them to feel - see for example this paper - but right now I believe it is people who have the capacity for joy, not machines. I've written before about how great cycling is for the soul. The wider transport system can be too. Take for example my wife Kim and her recent trip on the Eurovision ‘party train’ from Euston to Liverpool - that is her stood up on the left at the very beginning of the clip. She remarked when she returned that even though she had travelled the best part of 200 miles on that train, she at no point felt like it was ‘transport’. It was, she said, a joyful few hours having fun with like-minded people. There is an excellent book on how even the everyday experience of public transport can bring this joy.
When we see developments in robotics that are bringing ‘human-like’ qualities closer and closer (consider for example this delightful clip of a robot learning to walk, and fall) the emotional responses come from the people watching, not from the robots. If we want our transport systems to be fun and joyful to use, we will likely need to tell the machines how to make this happen, not expect them to know how to do it themselves. Their job will be to facilitate the experience for us, not live it themselves.
User experience and testing
And finally, we come to the boring bit, but arguably the most important. Human-centered design is key to creating transportation solutions that are easy to use. I’m by no means alone in this view - the DfT’s Chief Scientific Advisor is, mercifully, a champion for it too.
Bad design can kill technology. For an example, see the infamous Clippy - an early AI assistant that people turned off in droves, due to its irritating user experience. Some poor design cannot simply be 'turned off' though and can cost a lot of money to correct. Years ago, I watched a presentation on human factors in warship design. I wish I had a link to the slide deck. The speaker provided photos of some design issues that would have been avoided with simple user testing, including, unbelievably, a warship bulkhead door with no handles, meaning it literally could only be opened from the 'push' side, not the 'pull' side. Engineers can do wonderful things, but my goodness they can neglect the user sometimes.
There are countless other examples, with cars just one area for improvement in transport. I’ve written before on how a lack of standardisation and good design means we have many sub-optimal solutions in vehicle design, and it is only going to get worse as the complexity of technology in vehicles and in the wider mobility system gets greater. It's one thing to not be able to find the parking brake when picking up a hire car ("Is it in the centre, under the steering wheel, is it a button, or a lever?") but quite another to not identify the safety-critical noise that just played on the motorway at 70mph ("Was that a 'bing' or a 'bong'…which system is warning me of something and what do I need to d…?")
In short, we need to include the user in understanding what is needed in the future of transport. There are some green shoots of common-sense. For example, some manufacturers have started to admit that drivers don't like touchscreens; while this is welcome, think how much better it would have been for everyone if it had been user testing rather than irate user feedback that caused the change.
Good user-centred design of the transport system must also include people with divergent needs. There is guidance for pedestrian and transport infrastructure, but it seems like much more can be done. For example there is a growing literature on how the needs of those who are neurodivergent are not being met by existing solutions.
Summary
We have always known that designing with users in mind is a good idea. Donald Norman explains this in his wonderful book The Design of Everyday Things better than I can. It is also good for those developing the solutions. In software, for example, people have written on the cost-benefit case. Transport will be no different. If we want a safe, joyful, usable transport system that everyone wants to use (and can) we will need to keep the technology to a subservient role, and place users at the centre of our thinking.
