When Mobility Stops Being About Movement

I realised efficiency metrics were failing us when systems kept improving on paper whilst passengers quietly stopped using them. Passengers were responding to a loss of perceived control.

The metrics that blind us

Sydney's tram extension to Randwick illustrates this. From a planning perspective, the upgrade made sense. From a passenger perspective, a familiar routine had been broken. Efficiency metrics tell us how well the system moves people who have already committed to using it, not why people trusted it in the first place, or why they stopped.

What perceived control actually looks like

Perceived control comes from knowing where you're going, what's happening, and that you can do something if plans change. Traditional planning strips this away. Parallel services get removed. Timetables get tightened. The journey works perfectly or not at all.

The trap of removing slack

Santiago's Transantiago replaced overlapping bus routes with a trunk-and-feeder model. The network flowed better. Individual journeys became brittle. Efficiency was gained by removing redundancy, concentrating risk. Networks become more efficient by internal measures whilst each journey becomes less forgiving. Slack was never waste: it was the buffer that allowed people to complete trips without perfect conditions.

Technology as the new slack

If physical redundancy gets reduced, technology must restore control. Making alternatives visible, surfacing multiple viable options, not just the fastest. Giving permission to adapt, making rerouting feel legitimate rather than exceptional. A human-centred journey planner would prioritise orientation before optimisation, confirming where you are and where you're going before proposing solutions. It would surface uncertainty honestly, making margins visible.

Ghost journeys: the trips that never happen

Ghost journeys are trips people don't take because the friction is too high. Research shows that at least one-third of older people report unmet travel needs.

During Tube strikes, alternative services illuminated corridors planners hadn't prioritised. Ride-sharing trips became longer and directional along routes technically "served" but only through indirect, fragile public transport. This revealed preference under constraint. When the primary system stopped being legible, people bypassed the complexity.

Networks already have warning signs. Asymmetric travel behaviour: Stockholm's data found routes heavily used in one direction but not the reverse due to interchange complexity. Conditional demand: in Amsterdam, simplified fares during disruption increased some journeys that vanished when normal service returned. Padding behaviour: London passengers arriving much earlier than required, buying time because the system no longer gave them options.

Behavioural design beats carbon guilt

Vienna's €365 annual ticket changed behaviour without carbon guilt. One euro a day removed repeated decision-making. Vienna sold its millionth annual ticket by 2024. Public transport use increased by 38%. Sustainability was the outcome, not the sales pitch.

Paris's post-pandemic cycling boom followed the same principle. Protected bike lanes made cycling calmer and faster. Behaviour changed because the experience improved, not because people felt lectured.

Why open systems will win

Proprietary control fails when passengers cross seams between operators, apps, rules. A single incident triggers contradictory messages. Each operator controls its estate. No one controls the journey.

Research shows most agencies don't publish cancellation statistics, depriving riders of context. Open data standards are essential infrastructure for passenger control. At city scale, control means ensuring journeys complete across organisational boundaries. Proprietary control makes each organisation locally efficient and systemically fragile. Open systems create informational redundancy.

What five years from now looks like

Five years on, the city feels easier to move around, even when imperfect. Passengers plan less defensively, trusting the system will guide them through changes. The system behaves like a single network. Information is consistent. During disruption, messages converge.

People take trips they wouldn't have taken before. Evening journeys. Cross-city hops. Discretionary travel previously suppressed, not because it's faster, but because it feels forgiving. Travel stops feeling like a test. Less fear, less vigilance. The system no longer demands perfect behaviour in exchange for access.

The belief that has to go

The biggest obstacle is believing control comes from compliance. Most transport authorities assume the system works best when people behave exactly as designed. That belief shapes everything.

For this future to happen, that belief must go. Passengers have never behaved that way. They adapt constantly. When the system pretends otherwise, it creates fragility.

Deviation is not failure. It is normal behaviour in a complex system. Once acknowledged, the operator's role changes from enforcing the plan to designing how adaptation happens safely, early, and at scale.

There's an institutional fear: giving passengers agency means losing control. But the opposite is true. When passengers are trusted to adapt within clear bounds, systems become calmer, more predictable, easier to recover.

The belief that must go is that the system's job is to make people conform. The future becomes possible when authorities accept their real job is helping people succeed, even when things don't go to plan. Efficiency still matters. Speed still matters. But they sit behind something more important: a transport system that assumes people are human, and works anyway.