2004 Australasian Transport Research Forum Keynote address Population futures and implications for society As the title indicates, I’ve NOT been asked to talk about transport, which is just as well since I have no expertise on the subject, while you have lots. However I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the area of population ageing and its implications for the transport industry, and I’ve become quite fascinated with the topic – if you’ll forgive a novice’s understanding of the industry itself I’m going to weave these into my talk here and there. I’m going to begin with an overview of what is causing population ageing, and what this means for population growth and so on. I find this a particularly important place to start, because it provides an indication of the degree of confidence with which you can anticipate the various dimensions of population ageing. Once you understand these dimensions and what we might think of as their ‘confidence levels’, you are much better placed to respond. As I have argued in a soon-to-be-published paper on local government funding, I feel particularly strongly that governments need to gear their funding ahead of the unfolding ‘ageing game’, rather than behind it. SLIDE 2 – Numerical ageing etc. SLIDES 6-7 – Change by age – PROFOUND IMPLICATIONS that I will come back to. SLIDE 17: Automobile drivers by age: Enormous implications – and fortunately an equally enormous literature about them: • ...