These short stories imagine eight reasonably plausible potential near-term futures as to how our world may look in 2050. These scenarios enable us to focus on some of the crucial mechanisms by which society might evolve in different directions, and thus arrive at a series of recommendations. This chapter first brings the reader back to reality by characterizing the road we’re travelling on, before proposing directions we ought to be following, and then suggesting how we might get from where we are now to where we need to be based on lessons learnt on our journeys throughout the book.

The road we’re travelling on

The current expectations and aspirations of people to travel wherever and whenever they like, and more fundamentally to consume whatever, wherever and whenever they like, have fundamentally shaped how we in the West have lived for well over a century (Higgs, 2014), and transport has played a key role in enabling this way of life. Prior to that, transport had remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years, relying on muscle power and wind (Savage, 1966; Meijer and van Nijf, 1992). But with the onset of industrialization, first in the UK and then throughout Europe and North America, the world (and transport) began to evolve. Thus, water-power and the need for navigable waterways instilled a boom in canal construction from the mid-18th century; railways and international maritime traffic developed in parallel with iron and steel from the mid-19th century; and both motorized transport and air travel were driven by war, technology, government policy and consumerism from the early and late 20th century respectively (Dyos and Aldcroft, 1969; Bagwell, 1988; Gunn, 2018).