Looking for the Light in a Dark Age

In Looking for the Light  in a Dark Age, Professor Glenn Lyons, President of the Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation, shares his concerns and suggestions for planning in a world overwhelmed by rapid technological, cultural and social change. This is the first article in Local Transport Today's ‘Deep Thinking Initiative’ series. 

Lyons describes the challenges and frustrations many planners feel:

“If I was sat 30 years ago at the start of my transport planning career and someone had described the reality of 2025 to me, it would have seemed preposterous. It would have sounded like a future in which humanity was entering another dark age - characterised by a world stumbling into an unknown and unfathomable future, governed by forces outside anyone’s real control.”

“[P]ursuing the realisation of our transport planning goals is like a Sisyphean task — we push our hopes and ambitions up the long hard slope (sometimes nearly reaching the top) only for them to roll right back down before we start all over again (albeit that perhaps, just perhaps, we’ve chipped away a little at the scale of the task).”

“I certainly wouldn’t pin my hopes on technology saving us. As other scholars have noted in the past, technology has a way of ironically being a cause of our problems that then more technology is brought in to try and solve. As Sir Colin Buchanan aptly put it in the 1960s, the motor car is a prime example of a mixed blessing. Why we might now think selfdriving cars are the wonderful gift we’ve all been waiting for, is frankly beyond me.”

But he doesn't give up. “So let us push the boulder again up the slope as transport planners, perhaps this time doubling down on how we take communities and politicians with us into the future with visions and realistically achievable actions. But can we do that? After all, the boulder is decidedly heavy. Can we afford not to?”