Individual freight transport policies have been investigated in the literature extensively in the last 10–15 years, yet there has surprisingly been very little attention to the process of selecting ...urban freight transport (UFT) policy measures. This study focuses on UFT policy choice by local authorities, investigating how policy context, resource availability and the need for legitimacy influence how local authorities seek and select UFT specific policies. The methodology is a cross-case analysis of eleven cities across three countries (Sweden, England and Scotland), based on interview and documentary data.
Findings reveal that all cities have the same high-level goals, such as reducing emissions and congestion, supporting the economy and improving quality of life. However, in most cases these rather general goals are not broken down into clear objectives with targets that can be measured. Therefore, selected UFT policy measures are chosen from a pool of common measures (primarily access restrictions such as time windows and weight restrictions), but without monitored targets that determine whether or not they are achieving objectives. This does not necessarily mean that the measures chosen are inappropriate, but that there is a lack of a strategic approach to setting and reviewing measures according to achieving specific policy goals. This is primarily a result of a lack of resources and dedicated UFT personnel, as well as challenges related to public acceptability of restrictive policies.
•All cities have the same high-level goals, such as reducing emissions and congestion.•Goals are not broken down into clear objectives with targets that can be measured.•UFT measures chosen from a pool of commonly accepted measures.•Main challenges were a lack of dedicated UFT personnel and public acceptability.•Need for increased learning from and collaboration with private sector operators.
Background
Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is key to the success of public transport and for sustainable urban and regional development. Previous research has often focused on delivering TOD in ...urban areas with high population and building densities. This highlights the need to broaden the scope of TOD approaches to also include less densely populated areas located outside the immediate urban cores as a key concern for policy.
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to increase the knowledge of how to deliver TOD in such low-density contexts.
Methods
Three case studies of attempts at delivering TOD in sparsely populated areas in three Swedish city-regions are made. The data for the case studies consist of planning documents and 13 interviews with key stakeholders involved in the planning processes of the three cases.
Results
The results show that many of the barriers and enablers are rather similar to those identified in research on TOD in much more urban contexts in other parts of the world, but the relationships between them are differently nuanced in low-density contexts. The lack of clear quantified definitions of what TOD is (or is not) allows a more flexible, site-specific understanding of TOD to emerge in this context.
Results
It is important that a shared vision of TOD in each location is developed by the organizations involved—and such a shared vision appears to be crucial for the development to have a good chance of being delivered. Informal definitions, and individual perceptions (including those of the public) are important; and in locations that are quite “marginal” for TOD, all enablers must interact together positively for the development to have the maximum likelihood of going ahead as planned.
Ridesourcing services such as Uber provide a segment of the total daily trips in Urban cities, for instance, its reported that Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle (PHV) mode share were 1.3% of total daily ...trips in London in 2014 (GLA, 2016) - which includes Ridesourcing - however the adoption of Ridesourcing services is growing rapidly – with Uber reporting 3.5 million users of its services in London – thereby disrupting traditional travel habits in urban areas. The number of PHVs in London has increased by 58% since 2008/09 to over 77,000 in 2016, meanwhile, the number of licensed PHV drivers has increased by 81% over the same period, (TFL, 2017) - these include Uber drivers. However, it is not well known, how much of recent changes in people’s travel habits, is attributed to Ridesourcing or other tech-driven habits.
Conventional transport systems have a limited capacity and are becoming increasingly overloaded in urban areas, creating increasing disruption, congestion and emissions in cities around the world. However, new technology-driven, on-demand Ridesourcing business models that provide low-cost alternative transport to car ownership and public transport - such as those provided by Uber and Lyft – are causing unprecedented disruption to the way urban mobility services are provided and used in urban cities around the world. Ridesourcing is part of the wider phenomenon of the ‘sharing economy’ that is making people re-think, how they avail services from different sectors such as the Transport (i.e. Uber) and Hotel (i.e. Airbnb) industries. As a result, new types of on-demand shared mobility services (i.e. UberPOOL), which use advanced mobile technologies and Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) are becoming popular in cities such as London, UK. Shared Ridesourcing services have the potential to increase positive transport behaviours, including reduced single car occupancy and decreased car ownership. This has triggered debate among policymakers, transport planners and transport authorities; however, the impacts for and consequences of these services on conventional public transport are not well understood.
This research provides insights about shared ridesourcing services (i.e. UberPOOL) and potential implications on traditional transport services in an urban context, using Uber operations in London (U.K) as the case study. This paper discusses the current literature on this topic and the key findings from the first phase of multi-phased research that investigates the impacts of shared ridesourcing services on transport policy and operations. Extensive qualitative interview data were collected from policymakers and operators and key findings from the analysed data are discussed in this paper. The results help to answer key research questions and provide a broad appreciation of these new disruptive mobility services
In February 2005 residents of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, were given the opportunity to vote in a referendum on the introduction of a road user charging scheme, which had been in development for ...almost a decade. The public voted against the scheme by a ratio of 3:1 and it was consequently abandoned. The objective of this research was to determine the principal factors responsible for the public's overwhelming opposition to the scheme. A postal self-completion questionnaire was distributed to 1300 randomly selected households along a transect from central to south Edinburgh. The 368 completed questionnaires returned were analysed to assess the influence of several factors on the way respondents voted in the referendum. Car use was shown to be the principal determinant of voting behaviour, with car owners strongly opposing the scheme and non-car owners only weakly supporting it. The public's limited understanding of the scheme increased the strength of the opposing vote. Further, the public were largely unconvinced that the scheme would have achieved its dual objectives of reducing congestion and improving public transport. The findings suggest that more attention should have been paid to designing a simpler, more easily communicated scheme and convincing residents, particularly public transport users, of its benefits.
Scientific publishing is experiencing unprecedented growth in terms of outputs across all fields. Inevitably this creates pressure throughout the system on a number of entities. One key element is ...represented by peer-reviewers, whose demand increases at an even higher pace than that of publications, since more than one reviewer per paper is needed and not all papers that get reviewed get published. The relatively recent Publons platform allows for unprecedented insight into the usual ‘blindness’ of the peer-review system. At a time where the world’s top peer-reviewers are announced and celebrated, we have taken a step back in order to attempt a partial mapping of their profiles to identify trends and key dimensions of this community of ‘super-reviewers’. This commentary focuses necessarily on a limited sample due to manual processing of data, which needs to be done within a single day for the type of information we seek. In investigating the numbers of performed reviews vs. academic citations, our analysis suggests that most reviews are carried out by relatively inexperienced academics. For some of these early career academics, peer-reviewing seems to be the only activity they engage with, given the high number of reviews performed (e.g., three manuscripts per day) and the lack of outputs (zero academic papers and citations in some cases). Additionally, the world’s top researchers (i.e., highly-cited researchers) are understandably busy with research activities and therefore far less active in peer-reviewing. Lastly, there seems to be an uneven distribution at a national level between scientific outputs (e.g., publications) and reviews performed. Our analysis contributes to the ongoing global discourse on the health of scientific peer-review, and it raises some important questions for further discussion.
This paper analyzes strategies that can be successfully pursued to implement measures to reduce car traffic in what has traditionally been a very car-centric planning praxis. Analytically, the paper ...use path dependency theory to provide an understanding of why certain types of measure are not implemented in cities on as widespread a basis as policy objectives may require, and to understand how transport planning path dependence in urban authorities might be changed. Empirically, the analysis builds on a comparative case study of transport and land use planning in Swedish cities. The most effective strategies do not appear to be radical policies leading to fast implementation of goals about sustainable transport, for example by implementing very car restrictive measures, even in the face of resistance from the public and from within the city administration. The results support an approach that from a strategy making perspective can be understood as an institutionalizing process by which internal organizational and external public support for car restrictive and potentially controversial measures are built. Implementation may be achieved by building new institutions within city administrations, where routines and norms gradually change so that car restraint measures gradually become part of the normal way of doing transport planning. This then starts to lock-in certain patterns of travel and make further car restraint measures more feasible and institutionalized as part of a standard menu of measures that cities use, and not something out of the order.
Climate change is one of the key global policy issues of our time. Transport is the sector from which it has been hardest to cut emissions and, to make substantial progress in the future, action will ...be required at all levels of government from international to local. The governance of transport within this already challenging arena is further complicated by the existence of different structures for the management of transport modes and variations in formal governance structures across countries and regions.
This paper examines the prospect for deep cuts in CO
2 emissions from transport through an examination of the key policy levers for change and considering the governance issues that surround them. The focus of the paper is the United Kingdom, and in particular England and Scotland. The UK is the first country to have a legally binding internal obligation to meet carbon dioxide reduction targets and this has prompted significant activity in both governance institutions and delivery. The research uses a multi-level governance framework to understand the policy environment in England and Scotland, capturing both the range of spatial actors and the influence of sectoral actors in what is a complex polity.
It is concluded that the policy approach currently appears constrained by a desire to divide accountability by formal institutional structures, thus failing to tackle the dispersed nature of travel and the national and international nature of businesses. There is currently a lack of clarity about the tiering of responsibilities between spatial levels and there is therefore a comparative lack of commitment to the potential for demand management and travel reduction strategies to contribute to carbon reduction. Carbon reduction policies are also influenced by strong industry lobbies whose goals may not be fully aligned with carbon reduction strategies. The profusion of actors engaged in climate change policy seems to dilute rather than promote effective policy making.
This article analyses actor relationships in Transit Oriented Development (TOD) planning in order to better understand the preconditions necessary for planning processes to result in TOD in lower ...density contexts, in suburbs, or small cities. Empirically, the analysis builds on a comparative case study of TOD planning projects. The focus in the analytical work is on understanding how market conditions in lower density contexts influence the conditions for TOD planning projects, and how this feeds through to planning processes. The overall conclusion is that we should not expect that planning processes in small cities with low to medium densities of populations and activities differ much from those in more 'classic' highly urban TOD locations. Market conditions had an impact on planning processes, but once in the planning stage conditions for implementation depended more on the ability to handle competing interests and less on market conditions. In terms of policy recommendations, it is important for actors to develop a joint vision of the built environment of the site in question that channels organizations' individual actions in a joint direction. The ability to achieve such a joint vision for the design of the site in question may be more important in small towns than in more 'typical' TOD contexts in denser urban areas. This is because all enablers need to work together in a positive way in such location - which may be marginal from a market point of view - for the development to be able to go ahead.
The objective of the paper is to explore whether particular problematisations of cars and car use lead to sets of solutions that may not deal with all problems associated with car use, and whether ...this leads to any internal conflicts within the chosen policies. The paper is based on a review of local transport policy documents from 13 cities in four countries using the lens of policy problematisation as an analytical framework. Some critiques of policy problematisation are discussed in the paper but it is nonetheless shown to be helpful for this analysis. The paper finds that the problems most typically highlighted in the strategies reviewed are poor accessibility (as a “bad” in itself, but also because it is seen to compromise economic growth); the negative impacts of traffic on liveability of the central part of the city and therefore its ability to attract inhabitants, especially those needed to support a knowledge economy; local air and noise pollution; and road safety. The resulting visions are for urban areas less dominated by private cars, with more green and public space, in order to maximise accessibility and liveability to attract economic development; and most cities also seek to reduce car travel as a proportion of trips. However, in many cities this vision covers mainly the central city, with car use set to remain dominant in outer cities and for regional trips. In almost all cities, only one measure, parking management, is proposed as a means of cutting car use. The differing sets of measures envisaged for outer areas of cities threatens to undermine those envisaged for more central cities.
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