THE MOBILITY CHALLENGE 

Modern transportation systems have given the industrialized world a 
degree of mobility that could not have been dreamed of in the nineteenth 
century. Such mobility not only provides unparalleled convenience, 
independence, and accessibility to markets, health care, education, and 
social interactions; over the last few decades it has done so with an 
ever increasing degree of engineering performance, comfort, safety, 
convenience, and other measures of desirability. This mobility, however, 
has brought with it a growing number of unintended consequences in the 
form of environmental and socioeconomic costs. The environmental costs 
include significant contributions to air and noise pollution and 
greenhouse gas emissions. The socioeconomic costs include urban sprawl, 
congestion, injuries and fatalities. Some estimate that up to two-thirds 
of these costs are "externalized" to society, in that they are not borne 
by travelers in the form of fuel taxes, vehicle taxes, or road use fees.

Any serious study of sustainable transportation must include all 
transportation systems and their optimal integration. For example, global 
air passenger traffic and airfreight shipments are predicted to continue 
growing at the rate of 10% a year. Such a study must be global in 
orientation since, for example, most of the projected tripling of the 
current global car fleet to 1.5 billion by 2030 will occur in developing 
nations where automobiles have not yet had the impact they have had in 
the US and Europe. By 2030, according to some forecasts, 75% of the world 
s population (about 6 billion people) could be living in densely packed 
urban agglomerations in the coastal zones of the world. What integrated 
transportation systems will best meet their needs while optimizing 
environmental and economic considerations? 

The sustainable mobility challenge is to contain the growth of the 
environmental and socioeconomic costs of mobility while simultaneously 
ensuring that future generations have access to adequate mobility 
resources to meet their own needs and aspirations. The sustainability 
problem is not only a technological problem but also a  commons problem  
because it hinges on the consideration of long run costs and societal 
costs in decision- making about transportation options. 

Some areas of the world have more sustainable transportation systems than 
others. What factors lie behind the diversity of existing transportation 
patterns and successes? What are the characteristics that promote 
sustainability? The answers lie in the structure, order and functioning 
that emerge from the interactions among a myriad of interacting economic, 
cultural, institutional and technological factors shaping transport 
patterns, e.g., private vs. pub lic, motorized vs. non- motorized, road 
vs. air vs. water, low vs. high demand, individual vs. mass, diverse vs. 
uniform, and disconnected vs. connected systems. 

THE COMPLEX SYSTEMS APPROACH

Any given transport system can be viewed as an emergent, large-scale, 
long-term entity that has arisen from billions of small-scale, short-term 
actions of individual agents, that is, as a complex adaptive system. 
These systems include diverse, mutually adaptive collections of agents 
(including politicians, transport and energy companies, land developers, 
bankers, consumers, regulators, planners, citizens, action groups) 
pursuing varied (often opposing) strategies. These agents interact in 
complex, nonrandom ways and organize into  neighborhoods  and 
hierarchies. The linked economic, cultural, institutional and 
technological subsystems are highly nonlinear dynamic, and path 
dependent. The system entails interactions of slow moving (e.g., cultural) 
and fast moving (e.g., technological) processes, as well as interactions 
among processes that have large spatial reach with those that are 
relatively localized. Significant time and space lags, discontinuities, 
thresholds and limits characterize these interactions. 

Given this level of complexity, transport systems challenge understanding 
as well as prediction. Further, the classical reductionist, 
compartmentalized, static, linear, incremental, equilibrium mindset that 
has dominated western society since the Newtonian and industrial 
revolution is unlikely to be of much value in delivering a human future of 
sustainable mobility --- not because those ways of thinking are wrong, but 
because they are incomplete. They tend to produce simplistic 
transportation models with unintended negative environmental, social and 
economic consequences. Viewing transport as a complex adaptive system 
means adopting a new scientific approach which shifts from reductionism to 
connectionism across ecological, economic, social, technological and 
institutional realms; from statics to dynamics; from single to multiple 
scales of time and space; from linearity to nonlinearity; from an emphasis 
on technofix to an inclusion of attitudes, behaviors and policies. 

The emerging field of complex systems represents a fundamentally new 
scientific approach most in harmony with this challenge. It provides a 
conceptual framework that includes more holistic, nonlinear and dynamic 
components. It asks us to de-emphasize the traditional goals of 
prediction, optimization and control in favor of appreciating the 
importance of contingency, emergence, perpetual novelty, 
self-organization, evolution, adaptation, diversity, hierarchy, network 
effects, flows, etc. The emphasis on complex adaptive systems at The 
University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) and 
the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) draws heavily on biological analogies, 
statistical physics, agent-based modeling, network theory, and 
non-equilibrium dynamical modes of spatial- temporal pattern formation. 
These approaches are very much at the forefront of the general topics of 
sustainability, resilience, robustness, cultural and organizational 
change, and thus of the combined challenge of sustainable mobility. 

THE MISSION AND FRAMEWORK

The mission of this proposed enterprise is to harness the emerging 
science of complexity to design mobility systems that serve to secure a 
sustainable human future in an attainable manner. The envisioned 
conference and research program are quite novel -- in at least four ways: 
It calls for intense collaborative interactions between university 
and industrial researchers; 
It examines mobility concerns in both the developing and the 
developed world; 
It relies on the emerging science of complexity to tackle the dynamic, 
diverse, and interdependent problems of sustainable mobility; and 
In the interdisciplinary spirit of the complex systems approach it 
includes consumer behavior and government policies, in addition to the 
usual emphasis on technological innovation. 
While there is an explosion of work on complexity, mobility, 
sustainability and attainability, we know of no effort that has 
attempted to integrate these four ideas. This mission is intellectually 
ambitious, challenging and exciting, revolutionary in its potential for 
generating a new paradigmatic structure, and socially important and 
responsible in helping society move toward an ecologically sound, socially 
just and economically feasible pattern of moving people and goods. Our 
hope is that novel application of complexity science to mobility systems 
may uncover a small set of variables and critical processes ("tipping 
points") that control and guide the evolution of such systems toward or 
against sustainability. 

CONFERENCE AND RESEARCH AGENDA 

To jumpstart this initiative on the application of comple xity science to 
questions of sustainable mobility, we plan a conference at The University 
of Michigan Business School June 20-22, 2003. The conference will 
include: 

overviews of sustainability concerns in general and sustainable mobility 
concerns in particular, both in the US and around the world, 
discussions of economic, behavior, technology and policy aspects and 
options of sustainable mobility, and 
collective generation of a large scale and long term research agenda 
applying complexity science to sustainable/attainable mobility. 
Speakers will include government, NGO, and industry leaders and 
researchers on sustainability issues and complex systems researchers from 
industry and the academy. It will include keynote speeches, panel 
discussions and workshops. 

Once the conference sheds light on the problems and approaches to 
sustainable mobility from a complex systems perspective, it is important 
to continue the momentum by catalyzing research groups that will follow up 
on the ideas raised at the conference and look more deeply into all 
aspects of sustainable mobility concerns. Ideally, these groups will 
include both academic and industry-based researchers, with an emphasis on 
complex systems approaches. We hope to raise substantial resources from 
public and private foundations to catalyze this research agenda. 

ORGANIZERS (alphabetically)

 Thomas Gladwin, Max McGraw Professor of Sustainable Enterprise an 
Director of the Erb Environmental Management Institute jointly in the 
School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and the Environment 
at The University of Michigan.
Carl Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Economics, and Public Policy at 
The University of Michigan and Director of the UM Center for the Study of 
Complex Systems.
John Sullivan, Staff Scientist and Group Leader in Sustainable 
Development in the Physical and Environment Sciences Department at Ford 
Research Laboratories.