This paper reappraises the ways in which travellers in urban areas have interacted with new transport technologies and argues that mobility change over the past century or so may be less than is sometimes assumed. Attention is focused on changes in the journey to work over the twentieth century, on the experience of new travel technologies by an adolescent female in the late-nineteenth century, on perceptions of competing forms of urban transport in Manchester and Glasgow in the inter-war period, and on changes in the everyday mobility of children aged 10/11 since the 1940s. It is argued that although the material experience of everyday transport has changed significantly over the past century with the advent of new transport technologies, these did not necessarily change the aspirations and decisions of people with regard to everyday mobility. Moreover, such changes did not always bring benefits to all travellers