Looking beyond the forecast: Why good transport planning starts with asking what else could happen

Cindy William’s reflections from The Next 40 Years: Shaping Transport in Southeast Queensland Transport Professionals Association event

Thank you, Transport Professionals Association and VLC, for a great evening at The Next 40 Years: Shaping Transport in Southeast Queensland, part of your 40-year celebration of shaping better places as an organisation.

Most of the discussion was about what you'd expect: emerging technology, population growth and where mobility is heading. The conversation that stuck with me was the one that looked backwards.

Thank you Mark Iliffe for revisiting Queensland's 4 Seeable Futures scenario planning exercise from 1999. The team didn't try to pick a single future. They developed four plausible ones, then used them to ask how transport challenges might evolve and which decisions would still stand-up whichever way things went.

More than 25 years later, it still holds up.

We don't predict the future. We prepare for it.

One of the core ideas in 4 Seeable Futures was that transport planning shouldn't be about accurately forecasting what will happen. It should be about understanding what could happen.

The report described its scenarios as ‘plausible test environments’. They were there to improve decisions, challenge assumptions and test whether a strategy still works when conditions change.

The four futures were:

• Super City: a highly urbanised Southeast Queensland, with strong population growth and more pressure on the transport network.

• Coastal Bloom: rapid growth spread across the coastal centres beyond Brisbane.

• Carbon Crunch: a future shaped by climate change, carbon constraints and changing transport technology.

• Global Bust: economic disruption, localisation and changing travel behaviour.

Looking back now, I can see a bit of all four around us. SEQ is growing fast, as anyone who has sat in Brisbane traffic lately can tell you. Climate resilience is a standard part of planning. Technology has changed how we work, travel and access services. And global events (aka Covid and Trump) have rattled supply chains and reshuffled economic priorities.

The scenarios didn't predict the future. What they did was widen the conversation.

Some of yesterday's futures are today's reality

What stood out most was how many of the 1999 drivers are still sitting on our desks today. The study pointed to:

• Population growth and migration

• Ageing demographics

• Changing patterns of work

• Technology and telecommuting (work from home)

• Environmental pressures and carbon reduction

• Evolving community expectations

• The role of government in managing increasing complexity.

The report even explored how remote work and telecommuting could change travel demand well before they became mainstream topics. It asked whether technology would reduce travel or just change when, where and why we travel. Sound familiar? It also identified climate change, carbon pricing and low-carbon transport technology as major influences on the transport task. Those issues now sit at the centre of planning conversations across Australia.

The real value was the process

Here's the part I think matters most. The scenarios themselves weren't the biggest benefit. The process was.

4 Seeable Futures involved extensive research, interviews, workshops and discussion across government, industry and academia. People had to question their assumptions, hear different perspectives and sit with some uncomfortable possibilities.

The report suggests that good scenarios shouldn't be judged on whether they ‘get the future right’, but on whether they lead to better decisions in the present. I would argue that this matters even more today, because the pace of change is picking up. AI, automation, autonomous vehicles, connected mobility, climate adaptation, demographic shifts and changing travel behaviour all add uncertainty. Forecasting still matters, and we'll keep doing it. But a forecast can't tell us much about a future that looks fundamentally different to today.

Planning for a 2066 nobody can predict

Those of us working as transport professionals, planners and engineers are being asked to make long-term investments with a lot of uncertainty. The projects we design today could still be operating in 2066. The communities we're planning for will deal with technology, economic conditions and social behaviours we can't fully see yet.

That's why I think scenario planning deserves another look. Alongside asking “What will happen?”, we could also be asking, what if:

• travel demand evolves differently than expected?

• AI changes how and where people work?

• climate adaptation reshapes where people live?

• automation transforms freight and logistics?

• community values and expectations shift dramatically?

Asking these doesn't weaken planning. It strengthens it.

Good timing for Sydney

The conversation at VLC's Brisbane event feels well timed, with a similar discussion planned in Sydney on 26 November 2026. Sydney is asking the same questions as Southeast Queensland: growth, housing, productivity, climate resilience, mobility and technology disruption. The decisions being made now will shape travel behaviour, accessibility and liveability for decades.

As our profession works through all of this, one of the most useful lessons comes from a piece of work that's more than 20 years old.

Scenario planning isn't about predicting the future. It's about making better decisions today.

So if someone hands you a single forecast for 2066 and sounds very sure about it, I'd be asking what else they've tested.