There are two ways of looking at yet another report proclaiming the wonders of throwing information and communications technologies (ICT) at transport. You can either roll your eyes and cry "What took them so long?" or you can welcome yet another convert to the cause. In either case, you have to wonder if this fragmented realisation of all the possibilities is slowing down progress.
The latest group to climb aboard the bandwagon is the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), with Smarter Moves: How Information Communications Technology can promote Sustainable Mobility.
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications.php?id=1050
The report is unexceptionable in its thinking on what ICT can do for transport. Anyone who has read any of the many reports on intelligent transport systems (ITS) or attended the regular meetings will recognise all the SDC's ideas.
Among the more comprehensive studies of ITS in recent years was the Foresight Project on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems. (A disclaimer – I wrote and edited much of the project's output.) Perhaps fooled by the infrastructure word, this project somehow seems to have passed by the Sustainable Development Commission – no mention of it in the report's 131 references, an otherwise excellent reading list. This makes you wonder about the depth of the SDC's analysis.
Where this new report does score is in its assessment of progress, or rather lack of it. "We found relatively little conclusive evidence of ICT being successfully used to improve overall sustainability within transport," it says. How true.
The report is also on sound ground when it says "Public transport service information is not always available and accessible in a form which can be utilised by third parties to provide accurate travel tools and assist people in making convenient, joined-up, door-to-door journeys." The suggestion that the government could "take a lead in ensuring that such information is freely available and accessible" is certainly a good idea, especially in the light of recent moves to liberate the Ordnance Survey's data along with other government information trough the 'Unlocking innovation' initiative.
Is there, though, a case for government departments "to work together to investigate the potential to reduce the need to travel through the creation of a UK network of high quality video conferencing facilities". That idea has been rattling around the commercial world for some time. If the government wants to encourage the notion, it might do better to become a customer and to limit its own travel to meetings.
Interestingly, within days of the SDC's contribution, the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) produced its own report on 'joined up thinking' in transport, 'Connecting Local Economies – The Transport Implications'.
http://www.tcpa.org.uk/data/files/connecting_local_economies_final.pdf
Despite the title – 'connecting' is, after all, something that ICT is good at – not one of the TCPA's recommendations has anything to do with the use of information technology in transport. It is mostly about building bigger and better infrastructure, more roads and airports. Perhaps we can look forward to another blinding flash in those quarters in a year or two as the TCPA discovers the potential role of ICT in transport.
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