VISION: Road Transport in Europe 2025 - FEHRL

So politically there is a distinction between the direct perception of users (with respect to convenience,
efficiency of movement, and freedom from risk of accident and pollution), and the indirect effects realised in
the national wealth generated net of the operating, maintenance, and investment costs. Most people do not
connect the two, with the result that the enormous overall benefits provided by roads are often overlooked by
the public under the weight of the day-to-day experience of delays, accidents, pollution, and general
frustration.
We believe that there are two morals to be drawn. Firstly the public's perception of the day-to-day experience
of road travel matters greatly; and secondly, more needs to be made of the benefits of road transport, and the
national and individual wealth that they help generate, and can generate in the future.
Futures
There are at least two radical views of the future. The first is a future in which technology totally transforms
travel; where communities and work places are clustered 'optimally' with high efficiency systems for
communications and activities; where they are spaced geographically to minimise the demand for physical
movement; where such movement is efficiently priced in economic terms; where it takes place by means of a
complementary set of high tech and low energy systems incorporating road, rail, maglev, urban underground
and overground shared systems ('public transport'); and where movement is co-ordinated by demandresponsive
real-time systems. Such a future would incorporate social inclusion as an integral part of its
provision and pricing. The impact on the environment would be minimised. Decisions would be firmly based
on sustainability principles.
The second radical future is a future whose supply side is quite simply the same as the present, to all intents
and purposes, with little change in the types of roads or rail, etc, or in vehicles, or operating systems, beyond a
limited continuation of the normal (i.e. historic) patterns of development. This is seen as radical because of the
lack of change at a fundamental level, rather than in spite of it. It is radical because it goes against common
expectations.
The first of these is visionary in a rather fanciful way; the second is at most a simple extrapolation of the
present. Both, however, would be subject to big changes in the demand for travel as compared to now. So in
both cases the future would look very different; since even in the second case, we would see the effects of big
differences in the volume of operation, and in the externalities.
Practically speaking, we feel that neither is realistic, though the real future is likely to contain elements of both.
What seems to us much more likely to come about is that governments and commerce, both national and
Europe-wide, will take a series of steps over the next twenty years (to 2025), that bring about some middle
ground between the extremes - a mixture of the fundamentally new combined with more conventional
updating, so achieving a reasonable economic balance between investment and benefit.
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