There has been widespread interest in the potential for the significant behavioural and policy adaptations rendered necessary by Coronavirus to act as a catalyst for radical longer term policy change ...in transport. However, this body of work to date has been limited in its consideration of how such policy change might be brought about. Translating the lessons from the Coronavirus response to other ongoing strategic challenges such as decarbonisation requires analysis of what the pandemic has revealed about processes of policy formulation and how institutions responsible for policy implementation actually work.
This paper explores the extent to which rapid policy change has actually been possible in the transport sector in England and Scotland during the pandemic, and key examples of how such change has been both achieved and blocked. Two rounds of interviews with senior stakeholders from across the transport sector were undertaken in June and November 2020 to inform the analysis.
We find that the pandemic has accelerated some policy commitments that were already planned, but at a time of huge stress on the whole of government and its partner delivery organisations, the potential to deliver radical policy adaptation was limited. However, Coronavirus is recognised as being a potentially path-changing disruption to existing trajectories in terms of the adaptations to business practices, industry structures, ways of working and the public finances. Paradoxically, whilst recognising these uncertainties, decision-makers are yet to deviate from pre-pandemic planning assumptions and policy plans and this risks missing the opportunities to steer how those changes unfold.
•Addresses research gap in the study of governance responses during disruptions.•Identifies transport as a distant policy sub-sector in a crisis that affected all parts of government.•Finds that the response to the pandemic has accelerated already planned policies but generated few new policies.•Long-term impacts on the future structure of cities, use of public transport and uptake of active travel could still emerge.•The leading strategic thinkers on transport policy are still unsure what kinds of future demand to plan for.
The transition towards 'smarter' autonomous transport systems calls for a rethink in how transport is governed/who governs it, to ensure a step-change to a more sustainable future. This book ...critically reflects on these governance challenges analysing the role of the state; the new actors and discourses; and the implications for state capacity.
The notion of ‘fuel poverty’, referring to affordable warmth, underpins established research and policy agendas in the UK and has been extremely influential worldwide. In this context, British ...researchers, official policymaking bodies and NGOs have put forward the notion of ‘transport poverty’, building on an implicit analogy between (recognised) fuel poverty and (neglected) transport affordability issues. However, the conceptual similarities and differences between 'fuel' and 'transport' poverty remain largely unaddressed in the UK. This paper systematically compares and contrasts the two concepts, examining critically the assumption of a simple equivalence between them. We illustrate similarities and differences under four headings: (i) negative consequences of lack of warmth and lack of access; (ii) drivers of fuel and transport poverty; (iii) definition and measurement; (iv) policy interventions. Our review suggests that there are important conceptual and practical differences between transport and domestic energy consumption, with crucial consequences for how affordability problems amongst households are to be conceptualised and addressed. In a context where transport and energy exhibit two parallel policy worlds, the analysis in the paper and these conclusions reinforce how and why these differences matter. As we embark on an ever closer union between our domestic energy and transport energy systems the importance of these contradictions will become increasingly evident and problematic. This work contributes to the long-term debate about how best to manage these issues in a radical energy transition that properly pays attention to issues of equity and affordability.
•Transport affordability is only a subset of a broader 'transport poverty' problem.•Mismatches between income, prices and energy efficiency worsen affordability.•Households prioritise commuting over other expenditure, including domestic energy.•Fuel poverty metrics should be carefully adapted for use in the transport domain.•Social gradients in the diffusion of low-carbon technology are a matter of concern.
The continued failure to put transport on a robust low carbon transition pathway calls for new approaches in policy and research. In studies of transport systems and patterns of mobility, established ...approaches to data collection, analysis and subsequent policy design have focused on capturing ‘typical’ conditions rather than identifying the potential for substantive change. This focus on the apparent aggregate stability of the transport regime has reproduced a belief in policy circles that our current travel patterns are largely fixed and therefore very difficult to alter, which in turn has resulted in an over reliance on implausible assumptions about the carbon reductions that can be achieved through technological improvements such as low emission vehicles.
This paper argues that there is potentially much greater adaptive capacity in the mobility system than currently allowed for. It illustrates this potential through the investigation of actual adaptations made during a set of specific ‘disruptive’ events. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can go further in reducing the demand for travel if we broaden the scope of intervention to take a wider view of when and how mobility matters to participation in activities across the population. This could enable an acceleration of existing trends which suggest the potential for less mobility and therefore less carbon intensive lives.
•Data collected during episodes of transport ‘disruption’ offer novel insights on behavioural adaptations.•The learnings from responses to ‘disruptions’ are important for understanding the potential for policy change.•Transport patterns are not as difficult to change as is commonly understood.
This paper critiques the state of the art approaches to studying transportation policy. It does so through analysing 100 papers sampled from the two leading policy journals in the transportation ...literature. On applying two different frameworks for understanding policy, the review finds that only 13% of papers consider specific aspects of the policy cycle, that 60% focus on ‘tools’ for policy, and that two-thirds of papers did not engage with real-world policy examples or policy makers and focussed on quantitative analysis alone. We argue that these findings highlight the persistence of the technical-rational model within the transportation literature. This model, and the numerous traditions and disciplines that have fed into it have an important role to play in developing the transportation evidence base. However, we argue there are important questions of governance; such as context, power, resources and legitimacy, that are largely being ignored in the literature as it stands. The substantial lack of engagement with governance issues and debates means that as a field we are artificially, but more importantly, disproportionately generating a science of applied policy making which is unlikely to be utilised because of the distance between it and the realities on the ground. The paper identifies analytical approaches deployed readily in other fields that could be used to address some of the key deficiencies.
This paper explores the carbon impacts of the reductions in commute travel which resulted from restrictions placed on the general population in the UK. The article uses anonymised and aggregated ...mobile data for the period February 2020 to June 2020 to understand how commute trips changed spatially. This has been linked to journey length and emissions data to produce estimates of the consequent reductions in CO
2
(an average range of 17-60%). At a local level, the key factors that contributed to substantial CO
2
reductions were high car ownership, paired with the prevalence of specific industrial employment types that could readily transition from a desk-based work to virtual working.
Since the 1960s, development of the transport system has been framed by the notion of forecasting future demand. Yet the past decade or more appears to signal some significant changes to the role of ...travel in society which are having a material impact on how much people travel (and may travel in the future). Coupled with the potential for major technological changes and a range of climate adaptation scenarios, the future of mobility presents today’s decision making on transport strategy and investment with a broader set of uncertainties than has previously been considered. This paper examines current mainstream practice for incorporating uncertainty into decision-making, through an illustrative case study of the highly codified approaches of the Department for Transport in England. It deconstructs the issue by first focussing on different ways in which there is an
opening out
or acceptance of new uncertainties and how this creates a (wider) set of potential futures. It then turns to consider how this set of futures is used, or not, in decision-making, i.e. the process of
closing down
uncertainty to arrive at or at least inform a decision. We demonstrate that, because the range of uncertainties has broadened in scope and scale, the traditional technocratic approach of closing down decisions through sensitivity testing is at odds with the greater breadth now being called for at the opening out stage. We conclude that transport decision-making would benefit from a rebalancing of technical depth with analytical breadth. The paper outlines a plausible new approach to opening out and closing down that is starting to be applied in practice. This approach must be accompanied by an
opening up
of the processes by which technical advice for decisions are reached and how uncertainties are understood and negotiated.
•Travel behaviour is far more variable than policy makers allow for.•Factors external and internal to the transport system engender change in behaviour.•Accepting rather than problematising change ...could unlock more radical policies.
Policy change is characterised as being slow and incremental over long time periods. In discussing a radical shift to a low carbon economy, many researchers identify a need for a more significant and rapid change to transport policy and travel patterns. However, it is not clear what is meant by rapid policy change and what conditions might be needed to support its delivery.
Our contention in this paper is that notions of habit and stability dominate thinking about transport trends and the policy responses to them. We limit variability in our data collection and seek to design policies and transport systems that broadly support the continuation of existing practices. This framing of the policy context limits the scale of change deemed plausible and the scope of activities and actions that could be used to effect it.
This paper identifies evidence from two sources to support the contention that more radical policy change is possible. First, there is a substantial and on-going churn in household travel behaviour which, harnessed properly over the medium term, could provide the raw material for steering behaviour change. Secondly, there is a growing evidence base analysing significant events at local, regional and national level which highlight how travellers can adapt to major change to network conditions, service availability and social norms. Taken together, we contend that the population is far more adaptable to major change than the policy process currently assumes.
Disruptions and the responses to them provide a window on the range of adaptations that are possible (and, given that we can actually observe people carrying them out, could be more widely acceptable) given the current configuration of the transport system. In other words, if we conceptualise the system as one in which disruptions are commonplace, then different policy choices become tractable. Policy change itself can also be seen as a positive disruption, which could open up a raft of new opportunities to align policy implementation with the capacity for change. However, when set against the current framing of stability and habit, disruption can also be a major political embarrassment. We conclude that rather than being inherently problematic, disruption are in fact an opportunity through which to construct a different approach to transport policy that might enable rather than frustrate significant, low carbon change.
The governance of smart mobility Docherty, Iain; Marsden, Greg; Anable, Jillian
Transportation research. Part A, Policy and practice,
09/2018, Letnik:
115
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•Proponents envisage the adoption of ‘Smart Mobility’ as a profound transition.•There is very little debate about how the ‘Smart Transition’ should be governed.•Effective governance is necessary to ...ensure Smart Mobility generates public value.•This paper sets out key challenges to the state arising from ‘Smart Mobility’.
There is an active contemporary debate about how emerging technologies such as automated vehicles, peer-to-peer sharing applications and the ‘internet of things’ will revolutionise individual and collective mobility. Indeed, it is argued that the so-called ‘Smart Mobility’ transition, in which these technologies combine to transform how the mobility system is organised and operates, has already begun. As with any socio-technical transition there are critical questions to be posed in terms of how the transition is managed, and how both the benefits and any negative externalities of change will be governed.
This paper deploys the notion of ensuring and enhancing public value as a key governance aim for the transition. It sets out modes and methods of governance that could be deployed to steer the transition and, through four thematic cases explores how current mobility governance challenges will change. In particular, changing networks of actors, resources and power, new logics of consumption, and shifts in how mobility is regulated, priced and taxed – will require to be successfully negotiated if public value is to be captured from the transition. This is a critical time for such questions to be raised because technological change is clearly outpacing the capacity of systems and structures of governance to respond to the challenges already apparent. A failure to address both the short and longer-term governance issues risks locking the mobility system into transition paths which exacerbate rather than ameliorate the wider social and environmental problems that have challenged planners throughout the automobility transition.
The uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) industry is expanding, offering services such as video/photography, inspection, monitoring, surveying, and logistics. This is leading to competing demands ...for airspace with existing crewed aircraft activities, especially in uncontrolled airspace. As a result, there is an increasingly urgent need for a shared airspace solution that enables drones to be integrated with the wider aviation community in unsegregated operations. The purpose of this research was to engage with the drone industry to understand their issues regarding shared airspace as an important first step in the co-development of operating procedures that can provide equitable airspace access for all. An online, interactive workshop format was employed, with participants (n ~ 80) drawn from the UK drone industry and other attendant organisations. Verbal and written data were recorded, and then analysed using thematic analysis. The findings summarise the issues on a range of topics, grouped into three over-arching themes: (1) operational environment; (2) technical and regulatory environment; and (3) equity and wider society. Results suggested that important issues included the necessity for a dependable detect-and-avoid (DAA) system for in-flight de-confliction, based on onboard electronic conspicuity (EC) devices, and the need for support for shared airspace from the wider aviation community. This study contributes to the stakeholder engagement that will be essential if the co-development of a shared airspace solution is to be widely acceptable to all.
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