The state of transport will always be unsatisfactory to some. However we organise it, there will always be a proportion of the population who want to go further or faster, or who want others to not be in their way, or who want it to be cheaper or less dangerous (especially those who feel threatened by other modes of transport).

For personal mobility, for decades the car has been king. Post-war, it’s had an essentially unopposed run. For understandable reasons – motorised personal transport can of course be very convenient – they’ve been the perennial golden child of politicians and transport planners, the thing around which everything else has to fit itself. But it’s no longer credible to deny that Thatcher’s ‘great car economy’ has hit the buffers.

There are many social and economic reasons, but the most unarguable is the physical reality: space is limited. As ever-more people acquire and use cars (and they get bigger), at a certain point things inevitably gum up, making it harder and slower for almost everyone – notably including those driving – to get around. Car dominance is bankrupt.

Then there’s what the economists call ‘externalities’: the things we don’t mean to happen, but that do anyway. Most of these are damaging: pollution, crashes, resource consumption, parking, slowing down (and undermining the economics of) other modes, the sheer amount of money they take to run.

As all these costs have become increasingly clear, many decision-makers and drivers have made umpteen attempts to avoid accepting the obvious, frequently by pouring torrents of money into the bottomless pit of road expansion – which without fail attracts more drivers, merely delaying the need to face up to the root cause. While it’s taking a hell of a time to feed through to action on the ground, at a policy level Governments and experts seem mostly to have converged – at least in lip service – on one broad prescription: switch to electric cars, and walk, cycle and use public transport more.

It’s a rational therapy, correct as far as it goes, but one that most often fails to follow the evidence and its own inexorable logic to the self-evident conclusion: we need to steer firmly away from relying so heavily on the car. Given the overwhelming evidence that exhortation to change behaviour is not particularly effective, that means actively deciding to make driving less attractive.

So far so good. But that’s going to irritate a lot of people, isn’t it? Well some, for sure, but far fewer than you might be imagining – and certainly, according to opinion polls, a (comparatively privileged) minority.

The answer (and this is not inventing anything new or untried) lies in so-called multimodality. That’s the idea – mind bending perhaps to those who only ever move seated behind a steering wheel – that there are many perfectly satisfactory ways of getting about; that each has its strengths; and that the most sophisticated and successful transport systems premeditatedly blend them in abundance.

That’s because – and this won’t have escaped your notice – not all journeys are the same and to classify them as such is silly. Some are long and far, but most are short and near. And neither are transport users homogenous. Some are fit, able and affluent; others less strong, well, and impecunious. Together these mean that across the population, one solution simply cannot fit all: what’s optimal is that everyone can access the whole smorgasbord of choices. Some politicians and organisations have seen which way the wind is blowing and are working toward this end – but all too few in the UK.

LiMA is unashamedly pro-public transport, especially for longer and faster journeys. But we also recognise that most people making those far more numerous short and near journeys opt for powered personal vehicles (thankfully now including e-bikes). Acknowledging that, the real obstacle to achieving a comprehensively multimodal future – one where we each have access to a genuinely diverse range of personal vehicles to fit our varying needs – is twofold. First, though form factors exist to solve every personal mobility challenge, there are very few vehicles on the UK’s roads that don’t fall into one of two entirely artificial boxes – great big, heavy, fast cars and small, light and relatively slow bicycles. Second; that situation has arisen in large part because of decades of piecemeal legislation and practice that has again and again piled rigid and contradictory rule upon rule, resulting in what we see as an incoherent jumble not flowing from any overarching logic.

Poor strategic thinking. Little future-oriented planning. Mere extrapolation of what seems expedient – predict and provide – rather than pursuing a vision of what could be – decide and provide.

LiMA is a manufacturer-led organisation founded to help shape an environment and marketplace for regulators, users and business that fosters creativity in how we get around, while encouraging producers to go for it – to put that famed British ingenuity to work – to put that famed British ingenuity to work and create jobs and economic growth out of a flourishing of new form factors. We believe greater convenience, speed, health and economy can all happen simultaneously while increasing safety (no-one should pay for your mobility with their broken limb or tragic death).

There’s a future out there where the yawning gap between bikes and cars is filled with a hundred different types, sizes and capabilities of vehicle. It’s there for the taking.

©Brendan Hill 2025