From now to 2030 policies under discussion and emerging trends may still remain important, to some extend. But we don’t know how European transport will be in 2050. The majority of policies and technologies to be applied and used in 2050 do not exist nowadays. Hopefully cars will be cleaner and more intelligent vehicles, maybe on-line pricing and traffic management will make the actual separation between scheduled and collective transport and individual cars allowing door-to-door trips much similar... Anyway, categories we use today, such as “transport modes” will not be relevant. In order to somehow explore these and many other uncertainties, TRANSvisions made an intensive research of “seeds”, current developments all over the world that, even if embryonic, may show the starting point of a change that may have a huge impact in the future.

The scenarios have been constructed by first studying the factors or drivers behind transport growth. Needless to say, drivers are themselves full of uncertainty. But not everything is totally unpredictable, some future trends are more likely than others. Towards 2050, Europe will likely (and hopefully) remain peaceful, and democratic, have a stable population, moderate migration, an increasing number of elderly people, causing a risk of financial sustainability of public pension systems unless there is a reform on the labor markets; the economy will become much less oil-dependent and less heavy industrialized, moving towards more technologic-intense sectors and services, growing at moderate ratios in relation to Asian and even USA economies, so European economic share of the World economy, measured conventionally in GDP, will slowly be reduced. The passengers and freight traffics overseas will grow rapidly. It is likely that further enlargement processes may happen, in order to increase the size of the internal market. European internal social and territorial cohesion, and environmental sustainability, is expected to be maintained, unless public institutions face serious financial problems. More participatory and direct democratic processes are expected. Globalisation at world level may be slowing down in the short-term, but there is no evidence that it will not continue further on... All scenarios are plausible futures, even if they represent extreme or at least very different alternatives towards a postcarbon society.

A look into the future
that never was.