“Posh people won’t change. They’ve got too much skin in the game. They don’t understand that you have to sacrifice”.

The words of award winning Kings College researcher Roger Hallam.

He’s right.

We love our cars, our detached homes with big backyards and our widescreen TVs. We love air conditioning, tumble driers, UberEats and shopping online. We like cheap overseas holidays, business class travel, collecting frequent flyer points and drinking cocktails next to the beach. We like cheap fuel, free parking, luxury cars and things ‘on demand’. We want to drive to the dog park and then to the local gym. We love ‘drive-thru’ fast food and take-away Latte in cardboard cups. We like monthly pay cheques, being paid when we’re sick and our employer putting cash in our superannuation scheme. We want lifestyle and choice, and to buy all the best brands.

We don’t want to walk to the shops or to wear second-hand jeans. We hate sharing DIY tools and sleeping in the summer heat. If we’re honest, we don’t want to be forced to catch the bus, to bike to work, to mend kid’s clothes or to grow our own veg.

No one likes sacrifice. And, no one wants to sacrifice.

And therein lies the problem with traffic and transport. Very few of us (perhaps none of us) are willing to sacrifice our cars.

Moreover, we’re all doing the same things – commuting, the school run, Thursday late night shopping and Saturday sports – making the same trips at the same time, by car, creating gridlock, congestion, queuing and travel delays.

So, if we’re not prepared to sacrifice our cars what can we do?

Travel Demand Management (TDM) provides one of the biggest and greatest opportunities for creating change. At its core, TDM is about managing the transport network and changing behaviours so that we can all continue to do the same things but at slightly different times and in slightly different ways. TDM is about:

  • Understanding current and future capacity pressures and constraints, for example, over-crowded peak hour trains or areas with planned population growth, and then adding capacity by adapting assets, if required.
  • Understanding where there is spare capacity, for example, under-utilised off-peak bus services, and then creating capacity by optimising networks or better utilising existing assets.
  • Redistributing demand where there is spare capacity by influencing people to use different modes, different times and different routes (Re-mode, Re-time and Re-route) or to reduce the need to travel altogether (Reduce).

Re-mode is a change to our choice of transport, for example, car pooling instead of driving to work alone. Re-time is about changing our time of travel, such as avoiding or reducing travel during peak times. Re-route is about travelling along a different route, for example using a ‘preferred driving route’ or avoiding congested roads. Reduce is when we lower or lessen the need to travel, for example, working at home just once a week.

We’ve failed. Car use is increasing and people are leaving their bikes in their sheds. Sure, we’ve been promised a perfect utopia of electric vehicles, super fast trains and driver-less cars, but the Australian bushfires have shown us that the future is likely going to be a bit different. The 4R’s of TDM (Re-mode, Re-time, Re-route and Reduce) allow us to create change without any of us sacrificing our cars.

And it’s critical, because right now around the world, our politicians, policy-makers and planners are faced with a new, unprecedented and urgent challenge: How do we create change if very few people are willing and prepared to change?

What do you think?