The fascination of mechanical transport modes

The era of fossil powered transport systems was dominated by sectoral transport policy separating railways, public transport and road traffic from each other. In many countries ministries were responsible for railways other for roads, but so far no ministry can be found being responsible for pedestrians or cyclists. The society was and is so fascinated by the opportunities of technical modes - first the railway, then the car and the airplane that transport policy has lost footing. Institutes and institutions were established taking care separately on each of these two technical modes, regardless what was happening in the other parts of the transport sector. Railways dominated the 19^th century and the first half of the 20th century, cars became the dominant mode in the second half of the 20th century. The share of public transport in Germany was reduced from 65 % of all mechanical trips in 1950 to 17 % in the year 2000.

Transport policy in the 2^nd half of the 20 century

European transport policy followed for decades the transport policy of the winner of the World War Second, the United States, before the society and the experts realized the terrible damage of European urban structure and infrastructure by following the American car-oriented transport ideology. The first energy crisis in 1973 didn't change the transport policy very much, since each sector of mechanical mobility tried to find its own solution for the problem. There was no wider awareness of the reality of the system. At the end of the 20th century the society became aware of the climate change and the limited fossil fuel resources, mentioned already in the report to the Club of Rome 1972. The keyword "sustainability" was applied to every human activity and also to the transport sector. Multimodality goes hand in hand with the slogan of sustainability in the transport sector since about 20 years.

Difference between vision and policy

Each policy has a certain vision or we can say goal, which is in general not more as a slogan, as long as there are no clear indicators to evaluate what policy is doing. Policies are real measures interferring into the system to reach a certain goal. Multimodal transport policy has therefore no meaning as long as there are no goals casted into figures, fixed in time and budget. To make a vision to reality, which is different from the existing one, measures have to be implemented effectively to change the behavior of the system in such a way that it moves toward the goals of the vision.

The existing transport policy of the last 200 years has proved that it can produce successfully transport problems, environment degradation, social separation, urban sprawl and increasing financial deficits. Since the modern transport system is manmade, creating all these unwanted, unexpected adverse effects

people dealing with the system have not understood the reality of the transport system behavior. No wonder that this happened. There are several obvious causes: There is no scientific background of transport practice so far. What is called "Transport Science" are guilds, separated into Technicians, economists, lawyers and politicians, each of them based on assumptions, short time experience without a common understanding of the transport system behaviour.

Existing integrated transport policy - not more than a slogan

There are nice goals for an integrated transport policy combining "political integration", "technical integration" and "social integration", whatever this mean. This should lead toward a sustainable future-oriented development in the transport sector. But the real effects of this kind of transport policy are not encouraging at all. The outcome of the real activities on the state level are not more than slogans and symptom-oriented measures, when states try to combine railway with road administration and add a little bit cyclists and pedestrians into this soup. In the Western context integrated transport policy means the integration of mechanical transport modes without understanding the real transport system behavior. But the basic approach does not change. If Transport disciplines would be scientific, we can say "integrated transport policy is built on a wrong paradigm". And a paradigm is bases on core hypotheses. These hypotheses are probably wrong. The existing integrated transport policy is therefore following misleading indicators.

Basic pillars of existing transport policy - and the reality of the transport system behavior

In the last 200 years technical transport modes were developed without understanding their effects on the real world. Within few decades many people had more or less direct access to a transport system providing them with a speed they have never experienced in the whole history of mankind. At the same time technical transport modes were able to transport goods over long distances in short time as it happened never before also. The recognizable immediate effects were so convincing and encouraging that nobody thought about the flipside of this wonderful bright coin. None of the existing disciplines on the University have therefore understood the real system behavior. They formed pillars based on assumptions on personal experiences in the transport system and misused of terms they have never understood. Mobility in the existing transport system is everything which moves with technical means and is not related to purposes. It is a purposeless mobility. Transport means movements of vehicles on or in special transport channels not taking into account the origin and the destination. The system view was a cross section view of road or rail in the traffic engineering field. Three assumptions are the base of existing transport policy:

1) Growth of mobility

2) Time saving by increasing speed and

3) Freedom of modal choice

In contradiction to these assumptions the transport system behavior is totally different.

1) There is no growth of mobility if we define mobility in a purposeful way. If the number of people in a society doesn't change, the number of trips per people per day remains the same. This has been proved over many decades. There is only a shift of the kind of mode, but there is no change in the number of trips. A purposeful definition of mobility has always to be related to purposes. In a qualified scientific world there are no doubts any more about these facts.

2) In the transport system we cannot save time by increasing transport speed. Each trip is connected with the origin and destination. If the speed is increasing the location of origin and/or the location of destination is changing. This means speed changes the physical structures without changing the travel time. Travel time constancy has been proved in all observations since decades, but has not been accepted by economists, which are still calculating benefits from a figure which doesn't exist and it has not been accepted by engineers who believe what they individually experience or what they think they experience, because they have not understood the difference between the man and the combination of machine and man which is also the case for most of the politicians and the society.

3) There is no freedom of choice for real people
It is obvious that there is no freedom of choice for people without money to choose expensive transport modes. But it is not so obvious that the structure is determining human behavior in such a way that they don't have a total free choice if physical structures cause their behavior. To understand transport system behavior it is necessary to understand human behavior in general and especially in the artificial modified environment of today.

Existing multimodal transport policy is treating symptoms and not causes

Multimodal transport policy is dealing with symptoms, if it is dealing with transport flows. Transport flows are visible symptoms of causes in the background - often not easy to discover or recognize. If the causes are in the field of other disciplines, they are not visible from the narrow world view of specialists. Since the prevailing measures of multimodal transport policy are not successful as expected, attempts are made to make more of them. But a mistake can not be solved by making it bigger. Obviously the existing structures don´t produce the expected and wanted behavior of the system and its users.

This shows that integrated transport policy has to treat structures and not symptoms of the transport system, if it should be successful. And this is the basic lack of the existing integrated transport policy worldwide. Its core elements are transport modes. But transport modes are not the cause, transport modes are the mean for certain purposes.

The core of any multimodal transport policy

To find the key element for multimodal transport policy we have to go to the causes. And the cause is the man and his behavior. We have to understand human behavior not only on the psychological level, but in his whole evolutionary context. We have to go through the disciplines, to find the real cause and not only effects of it. Evolutionary epistemology is a necessary tool on this way. We have changed the physical environment with our transport policy fundamentally but without thinking how people will adapt to it. And people have adjusted perfectly from their individual point of view - but with all the adverse system effects nobody wanted to have them. To understand this behavior-change it was necessary to find the causal level, deep rooted in our evolutionary history. Human behavior is driven by body energy consumption, physical and mental (Knoflacher, 1975). Body energy consumption per time was a successful selection element for the whole history of the evolution. Using vehicles instead of walking reduces body energy consumption substantially and makes distant destinations easy accessible - the individual benefit. The energy consumption of the technical mode in the system is not recognized by our senses. What is not recognized are the other structural changes in the system: nearness is lost everywhere, dependency on fossil energy is mounting, noise and air pollution increases, local job opportunities are lost, international corporations dominate municipalities and even states, societies are separated etc.

If we want to change human behavior we have to change the structures.

to be continued...