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BelowMark Ruddy: the time has come for a more joined-up approach to transport and mobility planningYet, despite all this, there are major developments. Nowadays, data is captured on almost every journey taken in the UK. Mobile phones carried by travellers report their start and end points, direction, speed, and distance. Many commercial vehicles are tracked continuously and deliveries are monitored step by step. The analytic capability exists, given this corpus of data, to build transport provision that is optimised, in near real time, to deliver increased effective capacity, and to make improvements on, for instance, the carbon footprint of journeys, or to reduce the pollution impact. But this does not happen today.Half of the population store their future movements in smartphones or other online calendars. Nothing needs to be invented in terms of basic technical capability to collect that information, correlate it with historical patterns and predict requirements for parts of the transport network with accuracy. These dynamic scheduling/mobility-on-demand services could be offered now. The potential for a better world is already there, but existing transport networks represent large investments and are locked into their own ways of working. The TSC is working with the Intelligent Mobility community to overcome barriers and exploit the opportunities over the next decade. We expect this industry to be worth around £900bn a year globally by 2025. We may not enjoy wholly seamless, user-centric, reliable, integrated solutions in 10 years’ time; although with some joined up government-academic-business application, the UK could make great strides.We are likely to see Mobility as a Service — where you will be able to plan, arrange and pay for end-to-end journeys via a single digital platform. This new business model will see subscription charging for transport that spans multiple modes and operators, instead of per-journey ticketing.We will see more machine learning- generated solutions offered to travellers. These services will organise complete journeys that take account of individual needs and preferences, making arrangements such as booking parking space or hiring bicycles, and managing real-time changes — learning as they go to improve the service they provide. Public transport is likely to see a re-configuration toward a shared, demand-driven transport system with flexible provision that reduces costs, increases capacity, and improves customer service. In the future, it might not matter to a traveller what type of transport they use to reach their destination. Local authorities and transport operators will seek to react to two-way data flows responsively, to match demand patterns. Traditional timetables could morph into reactive, on-demand provision of capacity.Innovation is not likely to stop at passenger transport. Freight and last-mile delivery will increasingly be planned to exploit spare network capacity. For instance, night freight deliveries will release daytime road capacity for personal mobility, or free space on passenger rail transport may be utilised for lightweight freight.Much of the technology exists for these scenarios, but new business models, data exploitation and confidence building is what’s needed now. The TSC will help the transport industry exploit the possibilities of this new world, ensuring the UK captures our share of the growing global market. Visions are only realised by bringing together many specialisms, experience and novel applications. The Transport Systems Catapult is a place where technologists work with economists, social scientists, entrepreneurs and experts in management to build the future piece by piece. “THE TSC WILL HELP THE TRANSPORT INDUSTRY EXPLOIT THE POSSIBILITIES OF THIS NEW WORLD, ENSURING THE UK CAPTURES OUR SHARE OF THE GROWING GLOBAL MARKET” CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER MARK RUDDYINTRODUCTION07IMAGINE