Substantial Changes and Their Impact on Mobility: A Typology and an Overview of the Literature

Abstract

During the past 40 years, mobility patterns have enduringly changed several times as a result of the occurrence of a number “substantial changes”. Examples of such substantial changes are the rapid emergence of affordable air travel, the oil crises, and profound ICT developments. To most researchers and policy-makers in transportation, it seems more than likely that the next 40 years will also witness a number of substantial changes, some of which might even have larger impacts on mobility than the ones described above. However, literature on substantial changes and their impact on mobility are difficult to access as it is spread across different research fields and suffers from ambiguous use of terminology. As a result, overview of the literature on substantial changes and their findings is missing and discussions on the impacts on future mobility of potential substantial changes are hampered. To overcome these problems, this paper (1) proposes a typology of substantial changes and (2) ties together and reviews the scholarly literature that has focused on identifying the impacts of past substantial changes on mobility patterns. In this paper, we show how the proposed typology on substantial changes can be applied to contemplate on substantial changes and on their impacts.

Acknowledgements

This paper is written in the context of the research project “The value of recreation: Now, and in a completely different future” which is part of the “Sustainable Accessibility of the Randstad” research programme. The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Finally, we thank three anonymous referees for providing many valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

In the book Transport Revolutions, Gilbert and Perl (2010) propose an in essence similar definition of a substantial change. However, as the name of the book suggests, Transport Revolutions is concerned with ‘revolutions’. Our scope instead is on changes that have major impacts; in our context, substantial changes not necessarily need to cause a true ‘transport revolution’. Therefore, our definition deviates from theirs in terms of the required magnitudes of impacts on mobility and in terms of the time period in which a change in mobility needs to emerge.

Or on a supra-state scale when it applies to the USA.

We only consider the literature on the impact of ICTs on, for example, teleworking, teleconferencing, etc. and do not delve into the literature on the impacts of ICTs on travel supply, for example, intelligent transportation systems.

Only papers that consider one type of substantial change (according to our typology) were used.

To name a few: severe pandemic outbreaks, oil depletion, technological breakthroughs of, for example, solar energy or nuclear fusion, a new world order, climate change, a complete financial meltdown, a third world war, etc.