The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 42

Guest:  Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman, Ogilvy UK

Transport for humans

For today’s discussion I suggest that you buckle up as we take a freewheeling dive into the world of behavioural science to find out how a focus on human psychology might radically transform our infrastructure and transportation planning. 

My guest today is globally renowned behavioural scientist and leading disruptive thinker Rory Sutherland who, frankly blew my mind when I heard him speak at the Interchange conference earlier in the year.

There he effectively put a rocket under our current transport planning system and urged a radical rethink towards what he describes as a more human centred approach. Ensuring that travel is more than just a means of getting from A to B.

Rory is vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy UK and in his latest book Transport for Humans – which I highly recommend every person in transport and infrastructure should read - he points out, that the way that engineers design and measure the success of their transport solutions is, in short, just plain wrong. 

The current focus on speed, journey times and efficiency, he reckons, are aimed at Homo Transporticus, an idealised, naturally selected transport user who possesses an encyclopaedic knowledge of our transport networks and ticketing systems. 

Yet real human beings are very different - we actually value more; we value experiences based on a different set of more emotionally driven measures such as comfort, being in control or even just having a fold down tray-table on our train seat.

So designers need to bin our current siloed thinking and avoid what he describes as a “quantification trap” of cost benefit analysis, to embrace a systems human centre approach that values end to end journey time, places greater value on the quality of time spent traveling and that rethinks our notion that the only way to increase capacity is to build more. 

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