Using urban transport histories to help construct narratives of the future

The objective of current paper is to provide an impressionistic overview of 19 papers, taken from academic journals, that narrate histories of urban transport, and to consider how insights from this overview might be used in the construction of narratives of future urban transport. The selected papers provide narratives of specific cities as well as those of urban transport developments on broader scales (i.e. national and continental), and put particular emphasis upon changes in the transport system in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a period of great transition both in urban transport and in the wider economy more generally. Given the widely different geo-political trajectories of different world regions in this period, narratives are restricted to the (relatively homogenous) ‘western democracies’, covering (most of) Western Europe, North America and Australia. A distinction is made between the historical aspects of the papers (the events that are recounted by the narratives) and their historiographical aspects (how the histories are written). The paper concludes that it is the former that are more controversial when being used to help think about the future, and suggests that transport futures thinking can be enhanced by seeing the analogies between changes in the transport system in the 1960s/70s and potential changes in a future transition period associated with the ‘end of neoliberalism’.