All journeys involve decisions; the decision to travel, the time to travel, the route, the mode(s), who you travel with etc. and all these decisions are based on a complexity of information. Total car emissions account for 70% of UK transport emissions and medium distance journeys are responsible for 43% of these emissions. Medium distance car journeys are known to be a ‘hard to tackle’ area as often, few alternatives to car travel are available, especially if you don’t happen to be near any public transport.

Forum for the Future has brought together four organisations- AECOM, IBM, The Highways Agency and the RAC Foundation to try and understand why people take medium distance car journeys and how information can be best used to help inform these decisions. A group of future leaders from the four organisations will spend this year exploring the issues involved and ultimately, will produce an output (a tool, process or product for instance) which will help to tackle it.

We will work to understand the different factors that influence medium distance journeys, and confirm the range of impacts of these journeys. We will also consider how the factors could develop in the future. The challenge then is to develop new applications of information to enable more informed decisions, ultimately aiming to reduce the impacts of these hard-to-tackle journeys.

If you would like further information on the project please contact Zoe Le Grand on z.legrand@forumforthefuture.org. This project forms part of the Engineers for the 21st Century Programme (E21C). More information on the E21C programme can be found here.

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Please click here for the May update on project progress