What is, in your opinion, the greatest challenge these years regarding mobility and traffic? 

“The current mobility system is far from sustainable: it causes accidents, pollutes, makes too much noise, and occupies a lot of public space. That also has a financial side: our economy loses 3 to 6 percent of GDP because of these negative consequences. Amongst all these negative consequences, accidents are by far the biggest mobility problem, followed by the environment damage by pollution. Although we complain the most about congestion, the financial and societal damage from that is not so big as everyone tends to think. So that also gives a priority in where we should first concentrate on improving mobility: safety first. Having said that, mobility is already getting much safer cleaner. But that makes another problem, the unwanted use of public space, increasingly important”

And why do have to act on it? 

“Simply because everything that is not sustainable will sooner or later stop by definition. But moreover, knowing all the societal cost, it also pays off to invest in more sustainable mobility because we are lowering the economic loss with every safer and cleaner solution”

And when is it urgent? 

“If I say that that the mobility system will be sustainable sooner or later, then let’s make sure it will be ‘sooner’, rather than ‘later’”

What is the ideal mobility situation?

“That starts with the purpose of mobility which is mistakenly often put as “going from A to B”. Of course, that is very important, but it forgets the fact that we are mobile beings: for some evolutionary reason, people want to be mobile for a bit more than one hour per day. So, the ideal mobility situation can be summarized as a system that facilitates people to be mobile, and that in parallel we can reach all facilities that we need, preferably within 15-20 minutes and that we do that in a sustainable way and what are the challenges and barriers towards that? The main one, of course that, that the current system is far from sustainable now. But also, the urban design has quite some challenges: Mobility will be a battle for space”

A future mobility - what does it look like? How does it work? Can you describe it for me?

“That is a very broad question but summarizing: the winning mobilities will be the bike (and other, mostly electrified, two-wheelers), the car and the plane. Most of mobility will be electrified, accept shipping and long-haul flying which will use circular fuels (electricity stored in molecules), cars will be partly self-driving but not (or hardly) driverless. I do not share the vision that we are going to share all our modalities. Most people will still use their own bike and car. I will probably be private leased, but people will remain to value the guaranteed access of their “own” vehicle. But we must hide all these assets better (so I do see a bright future for parking garages) and use them in a much cleverer way. Going to work in your car at eight in the morning via a congested route is sincere stupid mobility, but it’s yourself to blame”

What are you sharing with us at Trafikdage 2022? And why is that knowledge/perspective important to the transport sector/world?

“Summarizing, I will be talking about the “mobile being”: explain why humanity moves around and what that means for the future of mobility and transport. And I will share my sincere believe that we can move towards an implicit safe and clean mobility system. And that will not be the often-pictured self-driving-shared-robotaxi kind of future, but a much more sensible and pleasant mobility system”