Transport sector is NOT in transition

Sustainability gains in transport appear to be much smaller than in the agri-food and energy domains. The modest sustainability improvements in the last 20 years are due to strong lock-in mechanisms and deep inertia in transport systems, which relate to sunk investments in infrastructures, plants, and skills, user patterns and life styles, vested interests that resist major change, and beliefs from established actors. This is one of the major conclusions of the new automobility transition book.

Although the car-transport system faces persistent problems (congestion, parking problems, safety, climate change, and urban space), we conclude that the cracks (see lyrics transition song) in the regime are still relatively small. This does not mean that the problems are small, but that important regime actors are not (yet) fully committed to acknowledging these problems nor to placing them on agendas with a high sense of urgency. There is no broad debate about the need for transformative change. No powerful societal group is calling for it. Those who do are marginalized. Pressure for change in sustainable directions is therefore not great and currently not oriented towards large-scale systemic change. While the regime still has substantial stability, one crack may be occurring at the local level where many cities have begun introducing car restraining measures such as one way streets, parking restrictions and tariffs, traffic calming schemes, and the creation of traffic-free pedestrianized centers, which challenge the ubiquity of cars in certain places. Because some cities also play an active role in stimulating alternatives such as bus lanes, bicycles and road pricing, they can be seen as a new actor that challenges some of the established regime elements. A second crack may be that the growth of car mobility (in terms of passenger miles) seems to have come to a halt in developed countries such as the UK, where it seems to decline somewhat. These two cracks indicate that the automobility regime may not be as strong as it used to be, although it is still dominant compared to other transport modes.

Promising niche-innovations have appeared in four broad areas: 1) green propulsion technology for cars, which relates to sustainability and CO2 pressures, 2) intelligent transport systems (ITS), travel information provision and ICT, which relate to congestion issues, 3) public transport and inter-modal travel, which are often seen to relate to congestion, 4) cultural niches and user innovation, often related to ICT possibilities. The first two niche areas currently receive most attention, money and deliberate innovative activity from powerful actors such as the car industry, computer and telecom industry, transport planners, and policy makers. Niche-innovations in these two areas therefore have relatively more momentum than in the other areas. Although niche activities in the green propulsion area have increased substantially in the last five years, it remains difficult to predict which technology will win and how long this will take.

Our conclusions are 1) that the automobility regime is still dominant and stable, although maybe less so than fifteen years ago, 2) that there are only (moderate) cracks in the regime, and 3) that promising niches have limited internal momentum (for green propulsion technology and ITS/ICT this momentum seems bigger than for the other niches). Combining these insights, we further conclude that the interaction between niches and regimes on its own is unlikely to lead to a big transition or system change in the next 20 years (i.e. until 2030). Over a longer time frame (e.g. to 2050), however, bigger system change is possible if, firstly, certain landscape trends become bigger (e.g. Peak Oil, climate change) and are translated into tougher policies, and, secondly, promising niches are by then more developed and turned into feasible solutions.