The world is changing rapidly. Yet a common assumption is that cars, buses, and taxis will remain the dominant local passenger transport modes in the coming decades. This concept paper draws on literature sources and on discussions with industry stakeholders to look anew at the local passenger transport sector in the light of broader societal trends to suggest an alternative future, and to offer insights to practitioners and policy-makers. The paper finds that the traditional modes of car, bus and taxi are slowly beginning to lose market share to intermediate modes such as shared taxis, lift-sharing schemes, demand-responsive transport services and car clubs whilst numerous technological and market trends are combining to accelerate this process of ‘modal convergence’. Taken together, these trends could revolutionise how we move about, with one possible outcome being the emergence of a single dominant passenger mode of an automated universal taxi system or dial-a-pod.

Correctly pricing transport behaviour to take account of the ‘external’ costs such as congestion and emissions imposed on society by excessive car use has long been a tenet of effective transportation demand management. But while policy‐makers have striven to increase public transport subsidies, raise petrol taxes and introduce road‐user charging schemes to price the real costs of car travel properly, in most cases correcting the wider influences of the personal tax regime has begun only relatively recently. This paper is based on work undertaken for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and the Inland Revenue of the UK government, which is currently working on addressing this very issue. In addition to reporting the British situation, the paper also uses a series of case studies to outline how this same process has been approached in the USA, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway, and how successful they have been thus far with respect to transportation demand management objectives. It then draws conclusions about which direction policy‐makers should be aiming for in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic had been a major crisis for the air transport industry due to its global reach, duration, and continuing uncertainty. Demand for air travel fell globally by around 90% in the period immediately following the introduction of lockdown restrictions which induced significant revenue loss for the industry and led to widespread bankruptcies and job losses. Within this extremely challenging business environment, commercially operated airports have struggled.