Influencing travel behaviour

As travel planning’s theoretical underpinnings have broadened from engineering and economics to embrace psychology and sociology, an emphasis has been placed on social marketing and nudge theory. It is argued that this is consistent with a neo-liberal trend towards governing from a distance. Using two case studies, one a qualitative study of reducing short-haul air travel, the other a quantitative study of attempts to reduce local car travel, it is found that actual behaviour change is limited. This seems to arise because behavioural change has been too narrowly defined and overly identified with personal choice.

Public engagement and consultation: decide, announce and defend?

Phase One of the UK’s High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project is taken as a representative example of the government’s approach to citizen participation with respect to planning major infrastructure projects. The engagement process in general and the 2011 national consultation in particular are found to be paradigm cases of “decide, announce and defend”, in spite of an increasing need for scheme sponsors to take a more inclusive and open approach to planning. A methodical approach to selecting engagement techniques produces three approaches – deliberative polling, the 21st century town meeting, and participatory multi-criteria analysis – that appear well suited to a project such as HS2. Without suggesting that any of these would have been a panacea, it is possible to conclude that the government could have pursued a more innovative approach to participation.

Health, wellbeing and quality of life

Transport is fundamental to health, wellbeing and quality of life. By providing accessibility and mobility, it contributes positively to population health in numerous ways. At the same time, many significant health challenges can also be attributed to particular ways of travelling, with the dominance of the private car a particular issue. Transport has the potential to address health inequalities, yet despite a recent upsurge of interest in the benefits of active travel, health is seldom a primary consideration in transport policy. Proposing an agenda for change that puts health and wellbeing at the heart of transport policy, we investigate how transport and health policy can intertwine to realise the benefits of transport while mitigating its negative impacts, and argue that the underlying purpose of transport policy must be to improve the health and wellbeing of citizens.

Will the ‘smart mobility’ revolution matter?

Powerful claims are being made about revolution in the transport sector, with digital technology seen as underpinning a new ‘ecosystem’ of more efficient, more pleasant and less environmentally-damaging mobility. The chapter examines how far such claims are based on evidence, and the contextual conditions that would be necessary for such benefits to be realised. The four key technological shifts identified as part of the transition are interrogated: automation, electrification, digitally-enabled mobility, and collaborative-shared mobility. The benefits of ‘connected autonomous vehicles’ are found to be highly uncertain, in terms of extent and evolution, whereas electrification is confirmed as a necessary but not sufficient condition for more sustainable mobility. Digitally-enabled mobility is technically quite feasible, but continues to face considerable regulatory, institutional and financial barriers. Collective mobility is identified as the development which can potentially have the greatest impact on the sustainability of mobility, but its core claim, that middle-income citizens will choose to share small vehicles to achieve modest cost savings, is least supported by evidence. We conclude that the traditional concerns of transport planning, such as congestion and inequality of access, will likely be persistent features of the new regime.

Future mobility

This chapter reflects upon change and the prospect of change in looking to the future of mobility and why transport matters. As we bear witness to the digital age colliding and merging with the motor age, it seems we are in a transitional period towards a new regime of mobility – or perhaps more helpfully, a new regime of how society interacts and how people access what they need or desire. Against the backdrop of examining technological innovation and social and behaviour change, the chapter highlights that we are confronted by two agendas: (i) a need for policymaking and investment to chart a course into a deeply uncertain future; and (ii) a need to consider how well equipped our orthodox approaches in transport analysis are in the face of what appears to be an ever more complex and changing world. With regards to the latter, ‘decide and provide’ is advocated as an alternative to ‘predict and provide’.

Changing demographics

Older people are travelling more than previous generations, especially by private vehicle. By contrast there has been a decline in car use among the younger population. We highlight how many of the reasons for these trends lie outside the transport sector. Younger people are living at home longer, delaying getting married and having children later in life. A decline in young people’s disposable income, a growth in low-end service jobs and the rise of precarious employment are also likely to be key contributors to a reduction in car use, especially with rising learning to drive and insurance costs. Younger people are also more likely to live in urban areas, which means less need for private vehicles. Older people are more likely to live in dispersed communities that require a car to access services and shops. They are less likely to use the internet for shopping, for accessing services and for staying connected to people. They have lived through a time of increased reliance and norms around using the car and continue this into later life. Examining mobility in relation to age suggests a need to look at how transport matters from the viewpoint of individuals and their relationship with society.

Disruption and resilience: new realities?

This chapter reviews the implications of growing travel demand and the increased risk of climatic events damaging infrastructure on transport policy. Whilst the policy narrative remains one of tackling congestion and removing pinch points, growing travel demand will outstrip investments, placing greater day-to-day pressure on networks and increasing susceptibility to breakdowns and minor demand variations. Less frequent and higher impact climate related events will become more commonplace but will struggle to command resources for anticipatory action relative to the day-to-day pressures, particularly in areas with lower congestion and fewer alternatives. By necessity travellers and businesses will develop their own adaptive strategies to both reduce exposure and create alternatives to disruptive events. Policies which promote greater localism, multi-modalism, flexibility in activity locations (both physically and virtually) should become more highly valued as antidotes to both the regular and irregular patterns of disruption we should anticipate.

Connecting places: towards a participatory, ordinary urbanism

This chapter examines the opportunities and pitfalls of integrating transport planning with urban design and place-making strategies, using design thinking as a way to address many of the ‘intractables’ associated with implementing transport policy. We argue for a focus on the substance and consistency of macro level strategy alongside the significance of creative and consistent micro level interventions. We position our argument alongside smart city debates, aiming to reinsert into these a more ‘ordinary’ approach that celebrates the significance of intervention in ‘ordinary neighbourhoods’ through the deployment of ‘ordinary technologies’ (benches, quality pavements) to create more livable cities and neighbourhoods. We concur that planning is a form of knowledge in action but choices over what counts as knowledge and how it is used and deployed are highly significant. In doing so, and to better secure citizen buy-in to the transformation of public space, we argue for an approach centred on co-design to counter planning orthodoxy that subverts people’s everyday needs to the paradigms and embedded routines of regulatory systems.

Forecasting road traffic and its significance for transport policy

Traffic forecasting developed initially to decide how much road capacity to provide, but early methods tended to underestimate the growth. The methods were changed but then from the late 1980s systematically overestimated traffic growth, distorting the appraisal of benefits, and transforming the policy implications: it became evident that no feasible road capacity expansion would be enough to cope with the forecast traffic, and it would be necessary to manage demand instead. Since 2015 the official forecasts have sensibly avoided specifying a ‘most probable’ future, replacing it with a variety of different possibilities from almost no growth to exceedingly high. This creates a framework for a much more useful type of policy appraisal, though practical road proposals mostly still confidently assert high traffic growth at levels which have not been seen for over 25 years.

The gentle tyranny of cost–benefit analysis in transport appraisal

This chapter considers the application of cost-benefit analysis in the UK transport planning process, asking whether a reliance on narrow economic criteria, and a centralised decision-making process, helps us to progress sufficiently against wide-ranging sustainability goals. A case study of the proposed Merseytram is examined, a project that remains unimplemented from the early 2000s.