Future foresight is essential for sustainable transportation: meeting future needs involves anticipating them. Future transport is often explored using scenario narratives: written accounts of linked events, often developed through a scenario planning process. The objective of this project was to analyze and synthesize existing scenario narratives from across a variety of recent studies.

• Reviewed published academic articles to identify scenario planning studies.
• Collate scenario narratives from these studies.
• Use qualitative thematic analysis to identify key descriptive themes across narratives.
• Evaluate these themes critically, with respect to how they are used in narratives and the in the wider research literature.

Analysis and synthesis of these scenarios provide insight into what is present (and absent) in contemporary accounts of future urban mobility, including what factors are thought to drive mobility, the sustainability consequences, and which elements are more plausible. This information can assist in developing future transport scenarios, providing an informed starting point for further quantitative scenario analysis.

This project takes published future transport scenario narratives and uses broad themes to identify what they have in common and how they differ. Approaching them critically, plausible transport futures can be identified, both those that have been elaborated across several studies and those that may have been mostly overlooked. These can be used as the basis for creating new transport scenarios and then modelling the likely outcomes of these quantitatively.

• Haggar P. Potoglou D. 2025. Sustainability in Future Urban Transport Scenarios: Qualitative Synthesis. SRI Sustainability Research + Innovation Congress, June 16-19, 2025, Chicago IL. USA.

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