The evidence was clear. Democratic governments around the world had continually failed to address the major issues of climate change, social inequality and economic recession, not to mention serial pandemics. Trust by citizens in how they were governed was at an all-time low due to sleaze, corruption and incompetence on an epic scale, and people were weary of an increasingly divided society. Dissatisfaction peaked by 2040, and in country after country parliaments and assemblies ceded to demands for change – and for ‘governments of national unity’ to step in and act on behalf of the people.

The 2045 Transport Commission was the fifth to report to the national parliament, and followed those on Pensions, Housing, Job Creation and Climate Change in a similar radical vein. For road transport, the need was for a more efficient, greener, safer and more socially equitable system – and one of a series of recommended solutions was Pre-booking Access To the Highway System (PATHS).

PATHS involves enhancing the interface between vehicle and infrastructure to ‘design out’ traffic delays and congestion as far as possible from the entire road transport network by more efficiently distributing traffic demand both spatially and temporally. The hope is that national productivity can be stimulated by preventing vehicles from using the busiest links at the busiest times and shifting them instead towards travelling on less well used sections in quieter periods. In doing so, PATHS will proactively manage ‘induced demand’ – namely, additional traffic that is generated as a direct result of new lane and junction capacity being provided – and support network resilience during climate-change-induced flash floods by strategically directing traffic away from affected roads.