Hamish McRae: Britain's future is up in the air

The urge to travel seems to be one of our species' most embedded desires.

The urge to travel seems to be one of our species' most embedded desires. Travel and tourism account now for 10 per cent of world output and employ nearly 200 million people – defined widely, it is the world's largest industry. While the basic technologies of transport – the steamship, the railway, the motor car and the jet plane – have not changed in substance for a generation or more, their use has surged. As we get richer we just seem to want to move around ever more.

Whenever you get rapid sustained growth you get a mixture of commercial success and pressure on resources. The past few days have given Britons a sharp illustration of both. EasyJet's purchase of Go shows how it is possible to turn an airline worth £110m into one worth £374m in less than a year. And the pressure was reflected by the continued chaos on our railways and a report by the RAC Foundation that warns of "disastrous" gridlock by 2015 and suggests tolls on our main roads by 2010 and/or a massive road and tunnel-building programme.

Nightmare? Well, no, not at all. The alternative – our society not getting richer, our people not being able to travel – is much worse. That would be a society where horizons narrowed, people learned less about each other, where laws had to be brought in to stop people moving, or the price so increased that travel became again the privilege of the rich, as it was two or more generations ago. It would, in fact, be profoundly anti-democratic. We need to acknowledge these human desires and plan sensibly to cope with them.

But how? Look at some numbers and you see a much more manageable and indeed encouraging picture than the doomsayers would have us believe.

First, have a look at what has been happening within the UK over the past 40 years. The big picture is that road transport, particularly by car, has risen from 157 billion passenger kilometres in 1961 to 613 billion in 2001. (Don't ask me why the official stats come in kilometres instead of miles but I suspect it has something to do with Brussels.) Road transport by bus, on the other hand, has plunged from 76 billion to 45 billion km and is now less than rail, which has gone from 39 billion to 46 billion km. Air travel is still tiny, but rising fast from only 1 billion to 8 billion km over the period.

Two obvious conclusions emerge from these figures. The first is that the car has won. The disparity is so large that no conceivable rise in train use, or indeed air travel, will significantly reduce car use.

The second and, in a way, more interesting conclusion is that the growth of car travel is tapering off. Most people do not now "go for a drive" as a recreation – the very expression has a dated feel to it. Yes, car travel was still rising slowly through the 1990s but at nothing like the pace of previous decades, particularly given the sharp rise in living standards over the past 10 years.

So some sort of big socio-economic change is at work. There will continue to be growth in the use of the car, but I would bet that whereas previous forecasts grossly underestimated the rise in car use, present forecasts will somewhat overestimate it. If that is right, then a sensible combination of some road-building, encouragement of alternative methods of transport, and environmental measures such as quieter road surfaces could make what now seems an insufferable problem perfectly manageable.

But if domestic transport seems to be moving from rapid growth to something more like a plateau, international transport is likely to continue to race ahead. The Ryanair revolution that spawned easyJet and Go has given a push to a trend that was already well established: cut the price of air travel and it will draw spending away from other forms of leisure activity.

The recent stories that claim it is cheaper to have a weekend abroad than stay in Britain may be pushing it. The rationale of a friend of my daughter – that if you go to Rome for a weekend, provided you spend enough money buying clothes, you can pay for your airfare – is very attractive, but there must be a catch somewhere... Nevertheless cheap air travel has created a whole new market, as is shown in the graph on the right above.

The top set of bars show the breakdown between business and leisure travel since 1981, with leisure vastly outstripping business. The bottom set show where people go to and come from, with European travel in booming. In 2000, Britons made almost 46 million visits to Europe, and there are only 60 million of us. Interestingly, Europeans are not nearly so eager to come here as visitors, though there is considerable net migration from Europe, attracted by the strong jobs market. We go there to play; they come here to work.

Look at that surge in outward visits between 1996 and 2000. The growth might tail off were there to be some economic catastrophe here and sterling to plunge against the euro but, short of that, it seems set to continue. We just seem to love going abroad. Providing the continental European economy is reasonably successful, we ought also to expect reasonable growth in the flow of visitors here too; though we should probably target the US tourist market, as the Prime Minister is at the moment.

This really does need some wise planning. Obviously, we need to plan to cope with the rise in low-cost air travel. But we also need to think about ways in which that imbalance of the graph on the right might to some extent be corrected. By making this island more attractive to visitors we would make it more attractive for ourselves.

And that surely should be the message that we should ponder when we sit in a traffic jam, as well as when we sit in an open-air restaurant in, say, Seville. If people want to travel, more power to them. It is one of the great freedoms of our age.