Replacing the car

Do you remember your first car? More specifically, do you remember what came with it? The car brought responsibility: you were being placed in charge of this lethal weapon, capable of killing you and anyone around it. It was terrifying. But it also brought freedom: you could now go anywhere, unbound by the limitations of public transport.In the first few months after I passed my test, I experienced both things. I promptly crashed into another car after taking a corner a little too enthusiastically. But I also got to drive my friends on trips, down to Cardiff to get a taste of university life, and out to the countryside for some extreme sledging (Beetles are surprisingly good in the snow). I drove up to Manchester to see my then girlfriend (who promptly dumped me, but that’s a different story).

Expanding horizons

The first car I bought myself a few years after graduating holds perhaps my greatest memories of the freedom a car brings. I had been living in Reading and working in Maidenhead for two or three years when I finally decided it was time to buy a car. Until that point, I had been getting public transport everywhere and that worked fine for me. I bought a car more because I liked cars than because I thought I really needed one. Though I was reaching the stage in my career where I was starting to go to meetings on my own and many of the meeting locations were on business parks outside nearby towns and cities. Hard to access by public transport.Once I got the car though, I realised how much I had been missing. I stumbled across a local lake where you could water-ski and wakeboard – something I had grown up doing. Without a car this facility would have been utterly inaccessible to me. Now I could stick my wakeboard on the passenger seat (not much space in my BMW Coupe) in the morning and detour on the way back from work to the lake. What freedom!

LTN battles

This all came to mind because my neighbourhood is in the middle of an intense debate about traffic and cars. There is a planned scheme, of which I am very much in favour, to trial a low traffic neighbourhood or LTN. The scheme is controversial. Some people don’t like the idea of limiting where cars can go. Some have concerns that the main roads and those bordering the scheme will be negatively affected.I have some sympathy with the latter concerns, which speak to a larger issue of class divides in developing neighbourhoods. The leafy backstreets tend to benefit first from LTNs, with traffic displaced onto main roads that tend to have more flats and fewer private homes. But ultimately, we have to do something about congestion, road deaths, and pollution. And LTNs are what’s on the table.The evidence supporting LTNs is thin, but growing. They have an immediate and very positive impact on the streets where measures are added. In the trial, my street will no longer be a rat-run for cars trying to escape clogged main roads or cut between them. This, I hope, will prevent the street being used as a drag strip: cars frequently top 40 miles an hour (by my estimate – I don’t have a speed camera) down this narrow 20 limit. Over time there is some evidence emerging that LTNs reduce car use overall.

Reducing ownership

What many LTN proponents really want though is to reduce car ownership. They make sound points about the impact cars have on our streets even when they aren’t moving. Parked cars take up a lot of our shared spaces. They make it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. They frequently block pavements. And they make it harder for kids to use the streets for play.I don’t disagree with any of this. And yet, we currently own three cars. Well, two and a half: two are parked on the street while my EV project takes up our small driveway. One of those cars is practical. It’s the 10-year-old MPV in my wife’s name that carries us (in non-lockdown times) to family gatherings, walks in the countryside, to the shops and to the tip.The others…are not.My little Alfa, ultimately to be replaced by the EV when that is complete, is used for practical purposes once a week, on the rare occasion we need two cars so that I can run one child to dance classes. This is one of those journeys that is notionally do-able by public transport. But doing so would mean writing off my afternoon (I couldn’t get there back before having to turn around again), and be very costly. The bus fares are absurd (£6.80 for me and my daughter), and since there is no waiting room, I would need to spend two hours in a rather expensive café nearby.People say owning a car is expensive, but the Alfa currently costs me less than £50 a month to own. It only cost me £1200 to buy and with prices on the rise, I will probably sell it for that or more. That £10 a month over the cost of public transport and coffee buys me eight hours a month of free time and an object that gives me great joy. For all the issues, that still feels like a good deal.For the rest of the week, my Alfa is largely an ornament. It’s not an expensive car, but it is beautiful. Having it there reminds me of that first sense of freedom I felt when I first got my Beetle or my BMW.

The car's the star

The problem for those seeking to reduce car ownership is that we have built our world around cars for the last hundred years or so. Because this is how we have structured our world, cars don’t just bring a sense of freedom, they bring actual freedom over and above what is achievable via public transport or cycling – especially for families. Is there a public cost to that freedom? Absolutely. But a lot of people will feel they are giving up something very significant if they gave up their car. Purging the streets of cars will only serve to further restrict those freedoms to the wealthy, who can afford to store their cars off the street.In the long term, I think we can achieve these ends without disproportionate effects on the less wealthy. Though they are further away than many think, we will, eventually, have self-driving cars. These will make point-to-point travel in relative luxury more affordable than car ownership. They will park and charge themselves in out of town warehouses rather than on streets. They’re not an ideal solution for everything: mass transit still makes more sense for busy routes and intercity travel. But they should offer the freedom we crave with less of the downsides.We can’t wait thirty years to tackle this problem though. We need to find ways to give people the freedom a car brings without its consequences. That means trialling schemes like the LTNs. And it means finding alternatives to car ownership that work today, investing in public transport and cycling infrastructure, minimising the car’s impact on other road users. Car lovers like me might have to make some sacrifices or at the least pay more for keeping a second (or even third) car on the street.But the only way we make rapid progress on issues of congestion and indeed wider environmental issues is to make change a net luxury. Right now, the loss of the car feels too painful to too many people. And any threat to it will continue to be met with anger.

Your next new car might be a new brand, and a new shape

Your next new car might not look like your old one. And it might come from a brand you've never heard of.In 2019, I wrote a report for Auto Trader about the future car and the changes you could expect to see in the coming decades. I based the report on my Intersections process, where I examine the pressures facing and market and how they intersect (hence the name) with global change trends.One of those trends is about choice. Technology has compressed the world, bringing us all closer together. And it has cut friction from the innovation process, opening up access to the tools of creativity to many more people and lowering the cost of manufacturing. The result is that we have more choice now in a huge number of domains. The automotive space is the next one to be affected.

Han solo? Unlikely

I was inspired to write this piece by the announcement that BYD is coming to Europe. BYD is the biggest car maker you've never heard of. A Chinese giant responsible for building everything from passenger cars to utility vehicles - many of them battery powered.BYD's Han looks like a serious Tesla competitor: 376 mile range, 0-60 in 3.9 seconds. And it won't be the last new brand we see.Electric vehicles are likely to go through the same process as mobile phones in the next few years. Where once their incredible complexity meant only a handful of companies could design and build them, as the technology matures and becomes more accessible, more brands enter the market. Most will rely on third party integrators and manufacturers. But some will be design shops who have third parties build their more original designs. And some will assemble their own vehicles from a library of off-the-shelf parts.

DIY EV

I'm experimenting with how accessible the technology behind electric vehicles is myself right now. As I often do to understand the big tech trends, I have taken on a project to get under the skin of the technology. So, I'm trying to build an electric vehicle using recycled and open source parts. If you are interested in that sort of thing, I'm logging my progress over on my new projects site (very much a work in progress - both site and project).What I have learned so far is just how large the electric vehicle supply chain has become. There is a huge diversity in the array of motors, motors, batteries and electronics driving these vehicles. And there is much more to come as the likes of BYD enter the market. With scale comes possibility: more new entrants, white-label manufacture (expect to see luxury, fashion and technology brands launch cars in the future), and more new designs.

Horses for courses

Most of the cars on the road are poorly shaped for the jobs they do. How often do they actually carry four or five people? Or a full load of luggage? How often are they actually in motion? You can use the answers to any of these questions to argue that we should move away from cars, and I think that's a very valid argument. But placed in the context of our 100-year-plus love affair with the car, and the fact that most of our cities (and even countries), are designed around the car, this seems unlikely to happen fast. Instead I think we might belatedly see more variety in the design of vehicles.Right now, single or two-seater pods like the Twizy look pretty quirky and are mostly used as promotional vehicles. But as their cost falls, and the variety of them rises, we might see more and more such vehicles on the roads. In fact, I think we'll see a huge spectrum of different types of electric transport from single-wheelers, to electric juggernauts and every possibility in between. Machines that are more fit for the purpose for which they are typically used. Machines that are affordable to buy (or lease), take up less space, and cost less to run, but that fulfil 90% of the customer's need.The other 10% can be fulfilled by ride sharing services or short-term loans. Your lease might even include access to alternative vehicles for when you need something a bit bigger. Your two-seater covers the commute but you can borrow the 4x4 for the weekend trip to the countryside.

The future for dealers

This presents an interesting future for dealerships, which are usually located within easy reach of suburbs. If we are using a variety of vehicles for different purposes, where might these vehicles live when they are not in use? Dealers might still sell some cars, but they might also start to use their lots as storage space for flexible lease-and-loan schemes that give people access to a broader range of vehicles. With modular parts and continuous software upgrades, dealers might also find themselves keeping fleets on the road for longer. Maintaining, upgrading and customising the customer fleet might continue to be a big part of the business.

#AskAFuturist: Will we ever have flying cars?

Will we ever have flying cars? This #AskAFuturist question came from Danny Seabrook (@Danny_Seabrook) on Twitter, where he asked more specifically: "Are we going to be driving around like the Jetsons any time soon?"To answer this I have collected and edited together some of my previous posts on flying cars into one single guide. But I'm afraid answering this question has to start with a question: what do you mean by a flying car?

Flying car-toons

The Jetsons was a cartoon that ran initially for just a single season in 1962/63. That its influence is still felt is testament to the quality of the shows writing and design, but perhaps as much to the impact (and frequency) of re-runs. The show tells the comic stories of a family living their lives in 2062 - basically The Flintstones but set in the future. Their home, equipped with all kinds of crazy gadgets, is on stilts above the clouds. They travel around in a flying car with a big glass bubble on top. What technology this car uses for levitation and propulsion is unclear, since it has no wings and just one or two antenna-type devices that appear to release some form of exhaust.By ‘driving around like the Jetsons’, I take it to mean that Danny’s asking whether we will have flying cars. And by ‘soon’, I’m going to say Danny means the next five years. I could ask Danny, since he’s not just some random on Twitter but basically family. But these are the questions I want to answer, so I’m just going to crack on.So, what do we mean by a flying car? Is it something like the Jetsons' own vehicle? By that I mean something that a) levitates off the ground without any obvious wings, and b) anyone can get in and fly. Or can we be a little more flexible about the definition?

Powering the flying car

There are two clear problems with the Jetsons' style flying car: power, and people.As I note above, it is unclear how the Jetsons' car flies. Somehow, with very little obvious equipment, it overcomes the pull of gravity and is propelled through the air. Given that we don't yet truly understand the mechanism by which gravity interacts with our world, let alone have developed a way to counteract it, this seems far fetched. Even if we do discover and implement a means of countering gravity in the next five years, I'm going to suggest it might be quite energy-intensive. In other words, squeezing it into a passenger vehicle might be tricky. And all this before we have even thought about how the car might move forward and perhaps more importantly, steer and stop.

Do you trust other drivers with a flying car?

The even greater issue though is the people component. George Jetson is permitted to have pretty much free reign of the skies in his little flying automobile. While I'd argue about half the people on the road shouldn't be trusted with anything more powerful than a pedal-powered go-kart. Given the absolute havoc we can wreak with four wheels, do we really want to give people the power to drop in through our roofs when they screw up? I think not.So, if we are going to have flying cars soon, they have to be powered in some more conventional fashion, and either flown by trained and regulated pilots, or by similarly controlled machines.

Uber Elevate

Back in 2018 I spoke to James Max on TalkRadio about Uber’s latest announcements on self-flying drone taxis. At its second Elevate summit, the company announced partnerships with NASA and five aerospace companies to design, build, and test such vehicles, as well as showing some mock-ups of what they could look like.The idea was, and remains, to scale up a toy drone to the point where it can comfortably seat a couple of passengers and fly them around in safety and comfort. At the time I said that the technology looked to be about a decade out. It looks like I was out by about 50%.

Flying cars: tech and regulation

In 2018, the tech just wasn’t ready: it needed better batteries, lighter materials, quieter rotors, new safety systems, more reliable object detection and more. And likewise, we were not ready: the regulations surrounding self-flying  are many and complex, we don’t yet have confidence in robot pilots, and we haven’t even started thinking practically about what these devices might mean for our lives and work.Fast forward a couple of years and a lot has been achieved. Most of the technological challenges, at least from a mechanical and electrical point of view, have been overcome. The fully autonomous robot pilots aren't quite there yet, but a number of companies, including Uber and Volocopter, are close to being able to enter service around the world in the next two to three years.Note, though, that these are not taxis that you will be able to hail from any street corner or rooftop. The flying taxi isn’t a straight replacement for its wheeled alternative. Door-to-door flying is impractical in built-up areas. More likely these vehicles would have to land on a nearby pad. Yes, there may be many more of these than there are airports — eventually — but you’re still going to need last mile transit from the pad.

Point to point

Where is it for then? I can see a business case for these devices doing short suburban or intercity hops. Uber is aiming for a range of 60 miles with a five minute recharge time. In the UK that might be a quick trip from Manchester to Liverpool or Leeds, around larger cities like London, or from London to Brighton. The speed of this travel might make it an attractive alternative to rail or road, particularly for business travel, and when a self-driving car can complete the trip.In places like the US, with giant sprawling conurbations like LA or the Tri-State area, this form of transport really comes into its own. Rapid connections between business districts might be enormously valuable there.But this isn't going to be mass transit. This form of flying car does not replace road travel or more importantly, trains and buses. This is high speed, high convenience, luxury transport for the time being at least.

Like the Jetsons?

So, will we be flying around like the Jetsons any time soon? Sorry Danny, that's a hard 'no'. We don't know how to make vehicles like that fly, and even if we did, I wouldn't trust most people to fly one.Self-flying taxis in the form of up-scaled drones are absolutely practical in a defined set of scenarios. You will be able to ride in one by 2023 I suspect - maybe sooner. But they won’t be replacing your commute any time soon.

Report: Cars of the Future, with Autotrader

Today, we're releasing the report I've been working on with Autotrader on the car of the future. It looks at how changes in technology and society will be realised in the cars we drive - or don't! When can we expect autonomous vehicles? How soon will be all electric? How will new materials reshape the cars we ride in? All this is in our report.Check out the full press release and download the report over at Autotrader: https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/features/cars-of-the-future

Tomorrow's cars will reshape our cities

The car shaped the modern city. Tomorrow's cars are likely to reshape it all over again.When I’m explaining the idea of today’s phenomenon of high frequency change, I often refer back to examples of change of great magnitude from the last century. One of my frequent reference points is the shift from the horse and cart to the car.This was an enormous change, not least for the horses, nearly a million of which were made redundant in the UK alone. The advent of accessible car ownership shaped our cities. Cars required parking, both residential and commercial. Our easy range of travel increased. Families could spread out and remain physically connected. Stores could be larger and more geographically distributed. Commuting distances could be extended.Not all of these things has proven to be a net positive.What replaces the car will also reshape the city. And a large part of what replaces today’s cars will be, well, tomorrow's cars. But we often underestimate how different self-driving, electric cars will be to their human-steered, oil-fuelled counterparts.

Cleaner & quieter

For a start, there is the pollution. Electric means zero fumes but also dramatically less noise. Tomorrow's cars will be much nicer to have around when they are all electric. Proximity to a road for housing, cafes, and bars will be much less of an issue. Properties on busy roads may start to appreciate. Pavement culture can expand.Semi-pedestrianised areas should be a safer prospect with self-driving cars, at least at some point in the future where their ability to deal with complex, fast-changing environments is well-developed and proven. We can build more of a ‘pavement culture’.

Free space

Though I have questioned the validity of the fleet model in the past, it still seems most likely to me that we will largely relinquish ownership of cars, particularly those of us who live in large cities. This releases huge amounts of space at the front of properties and in garages. Space that might be used to accommodate multiple generations of the same family, if house price inflation can’t be addressed. Spaces that might be used for growing fruit and vegetables that may become more expensive in the face of climate change. Space that might be used for collecting and storing energy as the grid becomes more distributed.In city centres, parking lots may be turned over to housing. But this presents one of the less obvious potential impacts: parking is a major source of revenue for companies and councils alike, as my client Tim Devine from A J Gallagher pointed out at the Alarm risk management conference this week, where we were both speaking. It won’t just be drivers who see income disappear as machines take the wheel.

Alternative transport

Fewer of tomorrow's cars parked on the streets will clear pavements and make crossing safer. And they will ease existing, and free space for the addition of, bike lanes. Bikes and other personal transport should be safer around self-driving vehicles than humans. Self-driving cars will give cyclists more room on the road, and they won’t get aggressive. They shouldn’t fail to notice cyclists with the same frequency as drivers.If there are more cyclists on the road, then perhaps we can expand bike lanes beyond single-width, creating space for other forms of personal transport. I still find it depressing that our cramped roads and narrow pavements mean we have largely closed ourselves off in the UK to balance boards, electric scooters and other novel forms of personal transport. They have their issues but I would love to see us create both the physical and legal space for experimentation.

Mass transit

Self-driving vehicles combined with other new forms of electric personal transport potentially add value to mass transit systems. A self-driving pod or electric scooter may be a good and cheap way to get from rail station to destination. But this will be a very different proposition to using a self-driving car for intercity travel. People are rightly questioning investment in new rail with self-driving vehicles on the horizon. Could they carry people between cities more efficiently?I think this is unlikely, at least in the medium term. Given the recent performance of our rail network, a car that whisks you from door to door is incredibly attractive right now. But fix some fundamental issues with the rail network and it should remain the best prospect for rapid transit between most urban centres, and in many cases, around them.As we make the transition from human to machine control — with full autonomy in a mass market car, licensed for the road, probably still a decade or more away — the roads will still be congested, and parking will remain a problem. It will take time for the fleets to build and their proposition to become a normal part of everyday life.

Secondary effects

Autonomous, electric vehicles will have many other effects on our cities. Small garages and MOT centres will likely disappear as these vehicles will need less servicing and what they do need will mostly happen at fleet centres. There will be some form of charging infrastructure, though where that will be and what it will look like will depend on battery/fuel cell advances in the next decade. Taxis as we know them will likely be eliminated or at least drastically reduced in the long term.All of these changes will take place, but the fact of them will slow the transition. Every change to tomorrow's cars will have people lobbying against it. Long after the technology is ready we will still be arguing about whether should make the changes that we can.

Hyperloop: plus ca change…

The laws of physics are constant. Once you understand them, your solutions to challenges like transportation are always going to look pretty similar. Which is why the Hyperloop is not new. It combines the technology of pneumatic trains, first deployed in the UK in the 1860s, with the technology of magnetic levitation, first demonstrated as a technology for trains in 1913.

This is not to say that the engineering challenge of the Hyperloop is simple. It will be a great feat when completed, and take advantage of huge leaps in our application of science since the days of the pneumatic train: computing, new materials, batteries, solar power and much, much more.

But the challenges it faces may not have changed much at all.

  

G-Force

The hyperloop is, by its nature, an intercity transport platform. To get the advantages of its high speed, you need to be travelling a reasonable distance. Otherwise it has no chance to get up to speed before it is stopping again. Rough maths time: the proposed top speed of the hyperloop is around 1200 kilometres per hour, which is about 333 metres per second. At maximum acceleration, a Tesla car can pull about 1g or 10 m/s2 acceleration. That would get you near enough top speed in 30 seconds.

By comparison, a Pendolino train can reportedly accelerate at a maximum of 0.43 m/s2 — i.e. it takes 60 seconds to reach 60mph. Let’s say that the hyperloop can comfortably accelerate somewhere between the two. At slightly more than Pendolino rate, it’s going to take 11 minutes and perhaps more importantly, 54km, to get up to top speed. Crank the acceleration up to 2m/s2 and that comes down to 2m45s and 13.6km. At 5m/s2 it falls to just over a minute and 5km.

Now this may seem extreme, accelerating ten times as fast as a Pendolino, and I know some people who would be put off by that. Half a g is more than you would experience on takeoff and landing on a commercial airliner, for example — perhaps 2–3 times as much — though you might experience more on banking.

This, though, is what is proposed.

Stop and go

With 5km to get up to speed, and 5km to stop, on a short hop like Manchester to Liverpool (roughly 30 miles/50km), you’re only going to be at cruising speed for a couple of minutes. Indeed, the Northern Arc proposal suggests six minutes from Liverpool to Manchester, and seven from Manchester to Leeds. This would be absolutely transformative, genuinely making these cities part of the same economic zone, if the cost of travel is reasonable. Even Glasgow could be under an hour from Liverpool.

But this presents the new issue: how do you find the space for new tunnels — underground or in the air — between and through these densely-populated, organically-grown and mostly privately-owned urban areas? And how do you pay for those works?

If you look at the cost breakdown for HS2, it’s interesting to see that over £1.8bn of the original budget (since dramatically expanded) is allocated to land costs — half of that has already been spent. Once you strip out risk (nearly £13bn of the £33bn original 2011 costings), the biggest line items are tunnels, bridges, viaducts, and the construction works around the tracks themselves. These will be different for hyperloop but it’s hard to see how they will be *that* different.

Future technology in today’s world

I would *love* to see the Hyperloop become a reality in the UK, particularly the Northern Arc project that would have such benefits for the north of England and Scotland. But I fear that its futuristic vision may be stymied, or at the very least, slowed, by the challenges of construction in a complex and expensive environment.

For once as a futurist, I hope I’m wrong.

No more taxi queues

I got wet last night. Really wet. So wet that my shoes are still sodden this morning. Which is a problem, because I’m in a hotel and I only brought one pair.

I’m at Cambridge University for a panel on the future of mobility, bringing together futurists, designers, energy and policy specialists to understand the direction of travel, if you’ll forgive the pun.

The irony of arriving at such an event, my shirt translucent from the water, looking like I’d just emerged Darcy-like from a lake, because of a lack of transport from the station, was not lost on me. Nor was the evidence it provided for what is wrong with our current mobility systems, particularly when affected by inclement weather.

Walking not waiting

The first thing I noticed when leaving the station was an enormous queue of people waiting to get into a taxi. One that stretched well beyond the available shelter. The queue of taxis waiting to pick them up was relatively much smaller. The line of people was barely moving at all because of the time taken to get people into the taxis and for the taxi to move off was so long.

I quickly decided that I would get just as wet walking as waiting.

Once I saw the traffic down the main street, I was fairly confident this was the right decision. Only bicycles were making any real progress, but with the pouring rain and darkness this felt like a hazardous mode of transport. I could have caught a bus, if I could have worked out which one to board, but again that would have meant waiting: in line in the rain, then inside in the traffic.

As I approached my destination I came across a taxi rank. Full of cars. And with no-one queuing.

By this point it was too late.

Three changes

It could have been so different.

Information about train arrivals and their likely cohort of disembarking passengers, is not difficult to acquire. Provisioning sufficient cars to collect all those wanting them should be relatively straightforward, given the caveat below.

As should creating a boarding system that doesn’t introduce so many delays.

The caveat is that you can only provision cars that can make it back to the station through the traffic to pick up new passengers having deposited their previous fare. How do you solve the traffic issue? Take a lot of the private cars off the road and hand the piloting of all vehicles over to connected intelligences. They will speed flow, eliminate blocking behaviours, and ensure the traffic keeps moving.

Technical reality, human possibility

All of this could be made real tomorrow. Nothing I have described is unfeasible with today’s technology. We are the only barriers to making it happen. Not without good reason, in some respects.

We like control. It’s hard to hand trust over to machines that will, inevitably, fail at some point and cause injury and death. But I can tell you now: they will save many, many more lives than they take.

We like ownership. Of our vehicles, our portable palaces, particularly. Though I think this feeling is in decline. I still love what cars represent but I am less and less attached to the hunk of metal on my driveway, choosing to travel by bike, bus or train at every opportunity.

I don’t think I’m alone.

Even those who love their cars increasingly choose to rent them, in one form or another, rather than buy them outright. This is one important mental step along the way to accepting mobility as a service rather than as a poorly-utilised asset.

There are clear job implications for replacing drivers with machines. There are around 300,000 taxi drivers in the UK. Tens of thousands of bus drivers (I couldn’t find a good figure for this but it’s fair to guess it’s a multiple of the 36,000 buses).

There’s also the issue of a loss of stories. How would I have started this blog post if every journey is smooth, perfect and efficient? It seems a frivolous point in the face of the above, but there’s a lot to be said for the variety and narrative value of our lives.

Slow not stop

These things only affect when the change will come. The future is pretty certain at this point: we will hand control of our mobility over to machines. They will be more efficient. They will be safer. The orders of magnitude improvements in safety, cost, time loss, and pollution, make it inevitable.

Human factors will slow this transition. But they will not stop it.

The Answer to Our Green Transport Needs

I covered 360 miles in a round trip on Friday and Saturday. In spite of all my environmental guilt, I drove. Why? Simple economics.The choice was pretty stark. Taking the train would have meant leaving at 22:55 on the Thursday night and travelling for over nine hours with four changes. The return leg would have taken four hours. Total fare: £98, not including any taxis I would have needed at the other end (at least one at over £20).Driving meant leaving at 05:30 and driving for three hours to get to my destination. The return meant leaving at 11:00 and driving for three hours to get back again. Total cost: around £25–30 in diesel.So the train was four times as expensive, took more than twice as long, and was less than half as convenient. Yet fares continue to rise.I think it is fairly obvious how this ties in to the future. Climate change remains the elephant in the room that most of us continue to ignore. But it is not out of bloody mindedness or lack of desire to change things. It simply isn’t realistic to take many of the decisions that we would like to.I would greatly prefer to travel on the train, reading a good book or getting some work done, rather than spending six hours dodging the incompetents who inhabit the middle lane of Britain’s motorways.But I cannot afford to spend an extra £90 or seven hours on travelling, and I am in the majority.So what needs to change? Much as I like the idea of a dramatically improved rail network, clean, quick and subsidised for all, it ain’t gonna happen. There just isn’t a sufficiently large financial incentive for the private sector to drive such development, and the current government is not brave enough to renationalise the infrastructure and pour in the required investment. The next government will be ideologically opposed to such a move, whatever Cameron’s green credentials.Instead I think we will see a renaissance for the pariah of the environmental lobby, much as we have for nuclear power. The answer to all our clean, green transport needs? The car.Society is now too dependent on a means of getting themselves and their goods from A to B that gets them from door to door. The road network is the only really complete transport solution. But if it isn’t going to choke us all, or cause us all to have heart failure from road rage, a few things need to change.1. FuelThere are fuel options out there that are not perfect but a lot better than what we have today. I don’t believe electricity is the answer for the mainstream. Until there are serious developments in battery technology, the power to weight ratios are no good, the recharging too time consuming and inconvenient, and the source of electricity uncertain. Instead, liquid fuels such as biodiesel from recycled cooking oil and crops, plus ethanol from corn seem a strong option. They can be delivered through the existing refuelling network and they have a business and taxation model that everyone understands. They will also demand minimum changes to the performance we expect from our cars. Though neither is without issues, the benefits vastly outweigh the problems.Unfortunately the money being spent by the oil companies on lobbying and PR to dismiss these options is vast. Even I was convinced that there simply weren’t enough acres of land to grow the fuel we need until I read otherwise (thankyou Wired).2. DesignCars have advanced a million ways and none. They are still fundamentally the same beast they ever were — a lump of steel with four wheels and an engine. The next phase of design doesn’t have to be revolutionary but there does need to be a significant evolution to improve efficiency further. Lighter metals, composites and ceramics are currently too expensive to make it into the multi-million-selling family hatchbacks but they will over time. Recyclability is obviously key, but safety too needs to improve, in part to compensate for the generally low level of ability displayed by drivers….3. TrainingBut technology alone cannot compensate for this. While I am not a fan of the ‘nanny-state’ (where it exists in any sense other than some Daily Mail myth), I do believe that we have to improve the regulation of drivers. Looked at objectively it seems incredible that we are willing to put the incredible power of a modern car in to the hands of people with so little training. If driving were a niche sport, or perhaps was conducted only by the employees of a small industry, it would be regulated much more heavily. Licences would be renewed every five years; health and safety measures would be much more rigorous.Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to retake my test every five years. But poor driving has much more wide-ranging effects than accidents, injuries and deaths. For example, congestion (and stress levels) could be dramatically reduced by better educating people and enforcing standards for motorway driving.4. CultureIt’s an old hobby horse but I have to take it for a ride once more: 4x4s. We need to do something to prevent people from unnecessarily owning and driving vehicles that are dangerous to them, those around them and the environment. For the majority of owners, 4x4s are a statement of fashion and ego. Any argument from a parent about it being for safely transporting their kids — an argument you hear too often, even from people you previously thought sensible — makes my blood boil. Completely ignoring the actual facts about the safety (or otherwise) of 4x4s is one thing. Ignoring the damage it could do to someone else’s kids and the future of the race as a whole is unforgiveable. The answer? An additional driving test for 4x4s that requires the owner to demonstrate the ability to drive it off road, an appreciation of maneuvering and parking such a large vehicle, and a knowledge of fuel economy and the effect that burning fossil fuels has on the environment.Again I don’t wish to be misunderstood. I’m not anti-materialism. I like to buy nice things and all things considered, I’m probably a bit of a show off. In fact I plan to own a 4x4 at some point. But it will be for a purpose that requires that type of vehicle. Not for the school run.If we can address these issues, I don’t have a problem with the car remaining our primary mode of transport. What will not solve the problem though is the recently proposed road charging scheme. I agree with the basic principle of charging for use. But penalising people for travelling on busy roads at rush hour is absurd, when the public transport alternative is so clearly inadequate.