Life in 2050 is largely unchanged, with two exceptions.

First, sustained high levels of investment in autonomous transport systems has paid dividends, with a steady series of technological breakthroughs. Hence, driverless refuse lorries are commonplace by 2030, albeit still with human ‘supervisors’; driverless delivery vehicles by 2032; buses and taxis by 2035; and driverless private cars by 2040 – initially on segregated motorways, but then in successive urban areas from 2045. By the end of the 2040s, there are very few areas in most developed countries still catering for drivers of non-autonomous vehicles.

Second, policies of privatization and deregulation across the economy have raised the role of the market and created an extremely competitive business environment, intolerant of underperforming companies. Government too relies heavily on applying ‘market signals’ and ‘norm entrepreneurs’ to push organizations and people to ‘do the right things’, and over time a whole series of specialized markets have been created to reduce carbon and waste, promote the efficient use of land and make people healthier. Consequently, by 2045, ‘fail fast’ culture is well established, while almost everything has been privatized and monetized to the nth degree. Tremendous energy is expended on finding the ‘next new thing’ with everything from toys, to food, to restaurants, to infrastructure, to transport systems being continually tweaked and sometimes replaced altogether, while almost every aspect of society feels in a state of constant flux.

Welcome to a journey that may be unlike any other – a journey into transport futures. When I first talked to Professor Enoch, Marcus, I was fascinated. What a possibility to step away from traditional conventions and disrupt the status quo of academia. What an opportunity to open imaginations to the endless possibilities that lie ahead for how we move through our world.

Transport, at its core, is about connection – between places, people and ideas. But as technology evolves, so too does the nature of these connections. Roads, rails and skies once confined us to predictable patterns of movement, yet now, we stand at a critical inflection point in the transport profession – where transformations have the potential to challenge ideas we have had for over a century. From autonomous vehicles and flying cars to decentralized urban systems, the future holds scenarios we are only beginning to imagine. And I believe the idea of futuristic fiction can help us better understand and plan for these scenarios.

The concept of exploring transport futures in such an unconventional way may seem unorthodox, but it’s through this creative lens that we can help probe deeply into the heart of change. In this book, Professor Enoch weaves narratives not merely based on data or projections, but through storytelling, speculative scenarios and thought experiments. Here, the lines between science fiction and future studies blur – because why should the future of transport be anything less than visionary?

My hope in encouraging this project was that these stories inspire, challenge and provoke – and I believe they do just that. They push us out of our comfort zones and established ways of thinking, and into a space where the unexpected becomes plausible. And while this is not a forecast, it is a reflection of what could be.

When it finally happened, the Great Climate Readjustment (‘The Collapse’) was not wholly unexpected. Indeed, scientists had been warning of such a possibility for several decades and had urged governments to act to cut greenhouse gases in a bid to reverse the process of climate change. However, only during the late 2020s, when climate records continued to be set at a rapid rate and the occurrence of previously extreme weather events became commonplace, did governments around the world finally commit to seriously addressing the issue. Working together, their measures included banning non-essential travel, mandating working from home, heavily taxing meat and dairy consumption, and introducing stringent carbon rationing schemes. But in the end, humanity simply ran out of time.

On 17 July 2030, after four months of unrelenting high temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere, coupled with grassland and forest fires raging across Siberia, Western Europe and North America for the fifth successive summer season, the global climate passed a final tipping point that set in motion a series of increasingly significant and irreversible changes. First, the cumulative effect of the fires destroyed not only isolated communities, infrastructure and agricultural capacity, but also entire towns and cities, and turned many previously fertile areas into de facto deserts. Second, the pyro-cumulus clouds caused by the fires pumped huge amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, which dramatically increased the level of brown carbon in the upper atmosphere, thereby increasing the global temperature of both air and sea. Hotter air led to ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream shifting onto trajectories much nearer the polar ice caps for prolonged periods, causing the temperatures there to rise precipitously and initiating the carving of several huge icebergs from both the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves over the following year.

As public faith in national governments continued to rapidly decline in the face of chronic instability, perceived incompetence and corruption throughout the 2020s and early 2030s, with hindsight it was only a matter of time before their steady replacement by the Union of International Conglomerate Communities in the late 2030s. Known simply as The Cartel, by 2050 this global oligopoly comprised five major all-purpose conglomerates and a dozen or so minor ones, which controlled every aspect of life throughout much of the developed world and significant parts of the remainder. Thus installed, once more the trend towards an ever-more globalized world, briefly interrupted by the Nationalist Revival Period of 2015– 30, continued as it had since the late 1980s.

Initially, this radical shift led directly to a massive influx of private capital across economies as regulations were removed as cartel members actively recruited subscribers for ‘societal service’ bundles of utilities, education, healthcare, recreational activities and transport in ever-growing markets among the wealthier population segments. Long-neglected infrastructure was rapidly modernized and expanded, leading to employment opportunities mushrooming and wages rising, and increased wellbeing.

But there were also downsides. Incomes of the less fortunate citizenry engaged (not employed) in delivering those services were steadily reduced. Some social groups were unable to afford up-front subscription fees and so depended on more expensive pay-as-you-go packages, meaning inequality dramatically increased. Health outcomes for those unable to afford care plummeted.

Increasing concerns about man-made climate change among the public caused by increasingly erratic and extreme weather events during the 2010s and early 2020s finally compelled governments globally to jointly commit to dramatically reducing their carbon reductions as close to zero as possible by 2030. Consequently, societies everywhere saw a fundamental restructuring in how life was lived. For instance, power generation was switched from coal and gas to solar, water and wind; businesses and citizens were first exhorted, and then heavily taxed, to reduce energy use; and community ground pumps became commonplace. Farms and factories were re-organized (sometimes forcibly) on ‘sustainable development’ principles, and new taxes were levied on agricultural products and manufactured goods to reduce consumption and the associated carbon. Companies were ‘encouraged’ to minimize commuting through adopting a community ‘labourhood’-based model of working and to localize their supply chains as far as possible. Petrol and diesel were rationed, as were flights through individual tradable climate permits; and deliveries were consolidated at local hubs to enable the majority of smaller parcels to be delivered by automated flying drones and dropped directly into people's homes through so-called ‘santa chutes’ (namely, re-purposed chimneys). Next, new communities were organized on LEGO WURLD principles whereby: (1) homes and other buildings were made of modules that could be added and removed when required; (2) residents could shrink or grow their land allocations according to need (and pay accordingly); and (3) utility services and low-impact roads were routinely diverted to best fit the needs of the community. Finally, governments and industry invested heavily in virtual communication technologies and 3D printing with associated pipelines to transport the raw materials, in an effort to minimize the energy needed for moving people and goods.

Topology optimization is a powerful tool that, when employed at the preliminary stage of the design process, can determine potential structural configurations that best satisfy specified performance objectives. This chapter explores both the different classifications of topology optimization methodologies and their implementation within the design process, specifically highlighting potential areas where such techniques may fall short. This motivates a discussion on the relevance of a bioinspired approach to topology optimization known as EvoDevo, where topologies developed by interpreting instructions from a Lindenmayer system (L-system) encoding are evolved using a genetic algorithm. Such an approach can lend itself well to multiobjective design problems with a vast design space and for which users have little/no experience or intuition.

To this point, the proposed L-system topology optimization methods have been considered in the context of benchmark structural topology optimization problems, as such problems afford an opportunity for comparison to both other topology optimization methodologies and mathematically proven optimal or ideal solutions. However, the motivation behind the development of these approaches stems from the need for preliminary design method capable of considering complex multiobjective problems involving multiple physics for which the user may not have an intuition. This chapter briefly summarizes several multiphysical problems that have been approached using L-system topology optimization, including fluid transport, heat transfer, electrical, and aeroelastic applications. By no means an exhaustive survey, these examples are intended to provide an overview of potential applications and hopefully provoke opportunities for future efforts.

To address the need for an inherently multiobjective preliminary design tool, this chapter introduces a heuristic alternative to the conventional topology optimization approaches discussed in the previous chapter. Specifically, a parallel rewriting system known as a Lindenmayer system (L-system) is used to encode a limited number of design variables into a string of characters which, when interpreted using a deterministic algorithm, governs the development of a topology. The general formulation of L-systems is provided before discussing how L-system encodings can be interpreted using a graphical method known as turtle graphics. Turtle graphics constructs continuous, straight line segments by tracking the spatial position and orientation of a line-constructing agent, leading to the creation of branched structures that mimic those found in numerous natural systems. The performance of the proposed method is then assessed using simple, well-known topology optimization problems and comparisons to mathematically known optimal or ideal solutions as well as those generated using conventional topology optimization methodologies.