Introduction

The almost utopian state in which people behave as if they were footloose and fancy-free has the potential to bring about a situation in which transport planning no longer relies on forecasts. The type of decision-making that is prevalent in a society depends on the kinds of information available. In modern, Western-type democracies, it is taken for granted that well-informed planning and decision-making are grounded in the reliable prediction of impacts. Therefore, if unlimited mobility undermines predictability, it poses a threat to public planning and democratic governance in the transport sector. This exploratory and somewhat speculative essay about a possible future analyses the planning consequences of the ‘death-of-distance’ literature. It seeks to clarify just how planning might be transformed by the loss of consequential impact analysis. It is moreover suggested that the likely responses to mobility-induced unpredictability – private rule-following behaviour, the transformation of public planning into a ritual and the expansion of government networks of control – would challenge modernist ideals.

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in mobility, not least due to globalization, high migration, expanding common markets and the rapid development of electronic information systems and premium high-speed infrastructure networks (Cresswell 2001; Crang 2002; Ray 2002). High mobility gives rise to phenomena that have intrigued academics in a number of fields: technological disciplines (Baberg 2001; Swartz 2003), social research (Urry 2000a, 2002; Kaufmann 2002), and the humanities (Kaplan 1996).