Category Archives: Travel behaviour analysis

Call for papers for a special issue of Transportation Research Part D: Evaluating initiatives to combat injustice in transportation

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Environmental and social justice in transportation refers to the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in the planning, operation, and functioning of transportation infrastructure and services, irrespective of gender, class, race/ethnicity, age, dis/ability, sexuality, religion, and other markers of social identity. It includes, but cannot be reduced to, the distribution of benefits and costs of different transport infrastructures and services, and also relates to questions of governance, decision-making, and knowledge generation regarding transport systems and their environmental effects.

A large and diverse literature has examined and charted inequalities and inequities regarding transportation infrastructures and services. Less is known, however, about the effectiveness of remedial actions taken to improve environmental and social justice in transportation. Activists, grassroots communities, public authorities, academic researchers, and others might promote successful policies and interventions while advocating for their widespread adoption, or challenge unsuccessful ones and emphasize the need for further change. Careful, rigorous, and honest evaluations of remedial actions are critically important, if transportation systems are to become fairer and more sustainable.

This special issue of Transportation Research Part D aims to gather research that evaluates the effects of interventions that have been taken to improve environmental and social justice in transportation systems. We seek submissions from around the world and consider any mode, infrastructure, or service, including freight, maritime, and aviation. Papers may offer evaluations of remedial action in relation to, for instance:

  • Attempts to improve public participation in sustainable transport policies
  • Endeavours to increase epistemic justice in the planning, design, and assessment of interventions in transport systems
  • Interdisciplinary theories and perspectives aiming to improve environmental and social injustices in transportation
  • New methods of evaluating the efficacy of transport-related interventions among disadvantaged groups
  • Initiatives to address unfulfilled mobility-related needs undertaken by activist and citizen-led organizations (e.g. cycling advocates and activists)
  • Improvement of cycling and pedestrian infrastructures in underserved communities
  • Reduction of noise and air pollution along heavy-traffic roads and close to ports, airports and other infrastructure hubs
  • Road space reallocation away from privately owned or heavy- and light-goods vehicles
  • Impact of free or reduced-fare public transport policy
  • Redistribution of transportation funding away from road construction and expansion of ports, airports, and other hubs of carbon-intensive transportation
  • Initiatives to make electric and shared mobility (e.g. MaaS) services available in disadvantaged communities or to owner-operators and SMEs in the freight sector

The special issue is edited by David Durán-Rodas (Technical University of Munich), Hannah Hook (Ghent University), Shaila Jamal (McMaster University), and myself.

Full papers are due by 30 March 2024. This issue will be a virtual special issue, meaning that accepted papers will appear in the next regular issue. After all papers are accepted, guest editors will compile a virtual issue on the journal website.

Manuscripts need to be submitted via the Transportation Research Part D (TRD) online submission system. Authors should indicate that the paper is submitted for consideration for publication in this special issue. When choosing Manuscript “Article Type” during the submission procedure, click “VSI: Eval Justice Initiatives”, otherwise your submission will be handled as a regular manuscript. Author Guidelines are available here.

Mobility levels and socioeconomic status during England’s first nationwide lockdown in Spring 2020

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Today Won Do Lee, Matthias Qian and myself have published our first paper on the sociospatially differentiation in person mobility levels across England at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Health & Place. In the paper we use data from 1.1 m mobile phones and spatial statistics to analyse how income levels and a wide range of other variables were correlated with the reduction in mobility levels in 191 clinical commissioning group (CCG) areas in March and April 2020. The CCG area classification is used because most of England’s hospital services, including care for seriously ill patients during a pandemic, are planned on this basis.

Like other studies, we find that the extent of mobility reduction is significantly higher in areas with more high income households (belonging to the top quintile of the household income distribution at the national level). The relationship between income and mobility reduction remains after controlling for spatial autocorrelation but does vary across the country: they are most pronounced in and around the post-industrial cities of northern England.

On a more technical note, geographically weighted regression models offer substantially better goodness of fit indicators than global regression models (in which one coefficient is estimated to characterize the relationship of mobility reduction with income indicators and other independent variables), with or without correction for spatial autocorrelation. Spatial heterogeneity in correlations with mobility reduction must be accounted for if the effect of, say, income is to be characterized accurately.

We are currently conducting a series of follow up analyses, looking at temporal variations in mobilty reduction over the Spring of 2020, and the complex relationships between changes in mobility levels on the one hand and (local variations in) COVID-19 infection and mortality levels.

Do Bike Sharing Schemes Reduce Energy Consumption?

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Even though they have been around for some 50 years, bike sharing schemes (BSSs) have in recent years witnessed a dramatic growth in cities in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, North America, East Asia and to some extent Latin America and Australia (for overview of the current spatial distribution, see  http://bikes.oobrien.com/global.php and  http://bike-sharing.blogspot.co.uk). Recent schemes differ enormously in terms of size, governance and business models. Compare, for instance, Hangzhou‘s mammoth scheme which is initiated, provided and run by the local state with Oxford‘s recent BSS experiment with 30 bikes and 6 docking stations that has been initiated by the county council but provided and run by a private company.

Intuition would suggest that BSS help to reduce energy consumption in urban transport, but I don’t think we really know much about their energy implications, for various reasons. First, on top of the existing diversity in schemes, the growth in both the number of schemes and size of individual schemes means that the social practices in which shared bikes are enrolled and hence the energy implications are diversifying rapidly. This increases uncertainty about energy implications. Second, there is a lack of appropriate data. This claim may appear counterintuitive given that most 3G and 4G schemes are hailed for the unique data they generate. But these data suffer from similar limitations as many other ‘big data’ on transport in being extensive but also thin on actual content. They either show which bikes are docked at (many) specific moments at particular stations, or where in physical space a given bike is at particular times. At best, we can reconstruct high-resolution space-time trajectories of individual bikes, but learn little about how bikes become coupled to and enrolled in the space-time paths (time-geography) and activity/travel patterns (activity-based travel behaviour analysis) of individuals, or in social practices (practice theory). Neither do we currently know much about how the space-time trajectories of shared bikes are related to those of other, motorised modes of transport. Consequently, as far as I am aware, there is little or no robust evidence that BSS usage actually substitutes for more energy-intensive ways of moving around the city, or about the extent to which schemes generate new demand for mobility. The nascent, and often rather celebratory, academic literature on BSS usage tends to examine trip patterns in isolation from wider urban transport systems. What is known on substitution comes either from modelling studies, in which all kinds of often strong assumptions about modal choice and substitution are made, or from studies using questionnaires with general questions about mode use that often lack the required precision, validity and reliability.

That said, there are good reasons why BSSs might help reduce energy consumption. Not only are the embedded energy and greenhouse gas emissions likely to be much lower for a BSS than for a bus, light rail or car system of the same spatial extension (a life cycle analysis examining this conjecture would be useful!);  by reducing the ‘last mile’ problem of ‘egress’ transport from a public transport stop to one’s final destination, a BSS can – if integrated adequately into a multimodal transport system – increase the attractiveness of public transport for people who might otherwise be using a private vehicle. BSS usage in a city context also generates all kinds of indirect effects, which might even exceed direct modal substitution effects. Use of shared bikes for utilitarian trips, for instance by people commuting into London by train seeking to reach their final destination, may increase those people’s inclination to cycle in other situations, for instance around the home for non-work trips. Widespread use of shared bikes in cities may also increase skills and competency among a range of road users: cyclists may begin to feel more confident in using bikes in other contexts, including those where conditions (infrastructure, actions of other road users) are less conducive to cycling, and drivers of cars and goods vehicles become more attuned to sharing the road with cyclists, possibly to the extent that subconsciously reckoning with cycling at left turns and other risk traffic situations becomes second nature. This reasoning obviously is a variant of the more widely known ‘safety in numbers‘ argument.

The question of energy consumption should not only be looked at through a lens of instrumental rationality and effectiveness; issues of social justice should be considered as well. Few studies have so far examined the social distribution of benefits, but the limited work that is available suggests that white, middle-class men are most likely to regularly use a BSS (e.g. Goodman and Cheshire 2014). It would appear that BSSs do little to address inequalities in access to transport that exist in most cities. Perhaps this is not surprising if the proactive approach of many local governments regarding BSS is placed in a wider context of urban entrepreneurialism and government-led, pro-growth oriented gentrification and regeneration. Having a BSS in a city is then not merely about environmental or social sustainability (air quality, GHG emissions, redistribution) but – and perhaps primarily – about creating an environment capable of attracting the mobile capital of firms, tourists and prospective residents by offering a transport scheme that is both fast and congestion-free, and fashionable and fun. There are also opportunity costs: pouring public money into a BSS probably means that less funds are available for more socio-spatially inclusive initiatives that can promote cycling as an energy-efficient means of urban mobility, such as bike co-ops, maintenance workshops or cycling competency training. Community-led, grassroots initiatives should not be romanticised and many in UK cities are to some extent supported by councils, but it would appear that these activities have greater potential than BSSs to reach migrant communities, the elderly and the urban poor and thus to link energy efficiency aims with progressive public health and social agendas.

BSSs have potential to reduce energy consumption in urban transport, if adequately integrated in a wider multi-modal transport system and as long as they do not constitute the mainstay of cycling policy and local governments’ financial support for cycling. It is a cliché to say that more research is needed, but we really need to know much more about how BSS usage is shaping and shaped by social practices in the city, what its energy implications are, and how BSSs link in with pro-growth agendas that do little to redress the soaring inequalities in mobility, life chances and health in contemporary British cities.

Happy New Year

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Happy 2014! It has been a while since my last post, which is largely because I have been in Hong Kong for most of December to work on some joint research with Prof Donggen Wang on well-being and to attend two conferences. I gave a plenary during the 18th Conference of the Hong Kong Society for Transportation Studies on the insights that can be derived from Whitehead’s philosophy for the analysis of processes of change in transport (see picture).

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And on the day prior to the main conference I gave a keynote on how I believe activity analysis in transport studies should be reconfigured so that we can better understand how socio-technical innovations in urban transport (e.g. car sharing schemes or electric vehicles) change, develop and diffuse over time in particular places. I will probably discuss this work in a later post.

Apart from working and attending conferences, I have also had the opportunity to experience the fantastic city that is Hong Kong — a paradise for urban geographers interested in processes of urban expansion, growing sociospatial inequality and low carbon urban mobility. I visited Hong Kong in 1998, just after the hand-over, but the city has changed almost unrecognisably since: it has grown in terms of population size, ‘neoliberal’ urban (re)development projects are now much more common, social inequalities have increased markedly, and the city has become much more Chinese than it was in my memory. It has not, however, lost any of its positive energy. If anything, its vitality has only increased and easily surpasses that of Europe’s major cities. It is now truly a global city where East and West mingle in all kinds of innovative and inspiring ways!

Seminar on Social Theory, Transport and Energy Modelling

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I will be speaking at one of the seminars organised by Rachel Aldred (University of Westminster) in the context of the ESRC-funded seminar series Modelling on the Move: Towards Transport System Transitions? on 13th September in London.

This particular event focuses on the relevance of social theory for transport and energy modelling, and my talk will offer reflections on the way transport researchers have conceptualised, understood and ‘done’ process and change over the past decades. It will problematise conventional ways in which change has been examined and argue that insights from ‘process philosophies’ can usefully inform standard practice in transport research. Process philosophies are a heterogeneous collection of philosophical thinking, including amongst others the work of authors as diverse as Henri Bergson, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and also Alfred North Whithead. IN the presentation and accompanying paper I will be drawing on the latter and show how his philosophical ideas and metaphysics can be used to think about change in a transport research context.

More information on the seminar, including an abstract of my talk, is available here, and registration for the seminar can be done here.

Rethinking behaviour change with Dewey

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The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers ended two weeks ago but I have not been able to write about my experiences during the conference so far. This post will address the presentation I gave at the conference, where I was part of a very interesting panel on what pragmatism — the philosophical movement that emerged from the work of RW Emerson, CS Peirce, W James and J Dewey around the turn of the 20th century in the USA — has to contribute to contemporary human geography. I gave a paper on how the work of Dewey (and James) on habits can be used to rethinking existing conceptualisations of behaviour change in academia and policy with regard to mobility, energy consumption and in other domains.

The thrust of my argument was that Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct (1922) offers a useful perspective on behaviour change that can function as a corrective for prevailing conceptualisations in behavioural economics, social and behavioural psychology, and thinking on habits in sociology and geography. This is because Dewey strikes, perhaps more successfully than other thinkers, a genuine balance between body and mind: he refrains from privileging one over the other and avoids the risk of making too much (economics, psychology) or too little (non-representational thinking in geography) of reflective thought.

More specifically, Human Nature and Conduct understands habits as forceful predispositions to act and interact with one’s environment, and not as actual behaviour. As such habits are socially constructed, ecological (they are not attributes of an individual but distributed across individual and environment) and generative. For Dewey repetition is not the essence of habits; what is important is that they propel individuals into action. The key distinction is not between habit and (reflective) thought, but between routine habits and intelligent habits. Both entail mechanism but in quite different ways. Routine habits reflect the often inert and maladapted mechanism of the ‘mere technician’; it amounts to ‘enslavement to old ruts’. In contrast, intelligent habits  amount to the mechanisms of the artist which are infused with thought and feeling and which afford mastery of emergent conditions; the archetypal example would be the piano virtuoso. The implications of this way of thinking are that  habit and reflective thought are non-exclusive of each other, and that thought itself is habitual.

Dewey also offers an interesting perspective on how habits and thought emerge. Discussing this is beyond the scope of this post but suffice to say that, on a Deweyian view, an always changing configuration of habits allow people to move through the situations of everyday life in a more or less unthinking manner. However, the working of those configurations can be disrupted by problems thrown up by the ‘on-flow’ of situations of which individuals as bundles of habit become part. Habits of movement , for instance, are impeded when suddenly confronted with a forked road. It is at such moments that, triggered by ‘impulse’ or instinctive and biologically driven action, emotions surge and reflective thought (as a function of mental habits) emerges in a person. So, as in recent perspectives in the life sciences, the philosophies of AN Whitehead and M Merleau-Ponty and contemporary social theories of affect, reflective thought is not primordial to action but a consequence of how individuals interact with their environment.

The point of reflective thought, for Dewey, is to transform (disrupted) action, impulse and emotions into a new course of action and so create a new meta-stable equilibrium between individual and his/her environment. This may imply that previously created habits need to be updated or revised. And for Dewey the role of reflective thought in habit change is crucial as it alone makes durable change possible. Impulse and emotion are crucially important to behaviour change but their surge wears off over time in ways that does not (always) happen with reflective thought. At the same time, Dewey was adamant that emotion and thought are continuous. They are not to be thought of in dualistic terms, but as mutually reinforcing: thought powered by feeling is likely to be more effective in bringing about change.

What does all of this mean for thinking about behaviour change with regard to mobility and energy consumption? I believe there are two key lessons here. One pertains to education — a topic on which Dewey has written extensively throughout his academic career and for which he is arguably most well known; the other to change of the environment which gets incorporated in habits.

Dewey was clear that changes to the ‘objective environment’ were the only way to influence habit formation through policy and governance. On the face of it, this reasoning appears to support such initiatives as New Urbanism or road pricing policies to trigger behaviour change in everyday mobility. However, a Deweyian perspective moves us beyond  this. It is not enough to increase densities, walkability and public transport accessibility in general; the challenge is to start from the situations of ongoing activity: what were people doing before taking a trip? where do they want to go? what/whom do they need to travel with? etcetera. This means that the lessons from activity-based approaches to passenger transport and time-geography need to be taken serious and to the extreme. The focus should really be on how each individual trip is embedded in the lived experience of everyday life and on all the problematisations (where problem is defined in the Deweyian sense outlined above) one may encounter along the way.

With regard to education, a Deweyian perspective foregrounds the importance of helping the younger generations — society’s future — to learn mental habits and habits of overt action that differ from ours. They, first of all, need to develop the skills to low-carbon mobility. So cycling training where children learn-by-doing how to navigate complex traffic situations should be a key part of primary education across the Global North: today’s practical skills are tomorrow’s mental habits. All generations — but especially the younger for whom mental habits are easier to change — should also be stimulated to develop new mental habits. Educating them about the ‘unfreedoms’ and socio-environmental costs of automobiles would be one part of this; another would be to learn them to resist to think in silo’s about energy use. This would hopefully prevent the pattern of what behavioural economists call mental accounting and that can be observed in many users of transport systems (myself included) who walk and cycle extensively to access everyday activities and hence consider themselves to be environmentally conscious but who also treat themselves to one or more long-distance trips by airplane for holiday or leisure purposes and so increase their emissions of greenhouse gases far beyond those of people who use the car much more often and only make short-distance holiday and leisure trips by surface modes of transport. Clearly, then, the forms of education that can be derived from a Deweyian perspective on habit and behaviour change are quite different from the social marketing and attitude oriented approaches that would result from a behavioural psychology account.

Exploring all details of Dewey’s account of habits is beyond this post, and the same applies to all the lessons for policy and governance. However, I hope to have made clear that a Deweyian vision can usually complement existing thinking on behaviour change. I am sure I will be writing more on this theme in the future.

Peak car travel?

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A topic that is currently attracting considerable attention in transport studies is the slowing down or even decline in the growth of car use across the Global North. The car evidently remains the the dominant mode of transport for everyday activities, but among young adults – and especially young men – holding a driver’s license, car ownership and the per capita distance by car have been decreasing since 1990 or thereabout. This trend has been attributed to a range of factors (see, for instance, Newman and Kenworthy 2012):

  • a revival of public transport in urban areas
  • a slowing down of the pace of urban sprawl
  • (re)emerging cultures of urbanism, implying among others that more younger adults than before remain in the city rather than relocate to the suburbs
  • population ageing
  • the rise in fuel prices since 2000
  • the economic crisis followng the 2007/07 credit crunch
  • the waning influence of the car industry and lobby on public attitudes towards transport
  • possibility that growing number of car users now spend so much time in their cars  that they are unwilling to drive even more

It is beyond doubt that automobility — the practices, institutions and landscapes centred on the private car — is changing in countries like the UK, Germany, Japan and even the USA. But it is far too early to read the end of the car’s dominance into these developments. For one, a stabilising of the growth in car use and ownership is just that: it does not mean that as yet there are fewer people who are actually using or owning a car. And it remains to be seen what the future brings: it is not unlikely that the growth of car use and car ownership picks up again in the near future, for instance when the capitalist economies of the Global North enter a new growth cycle.

More significant, however, is that automobility has gone global over the past decades. At the global scale automobility continues to expand rapidly — think of the rapid growth in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. We could therefore say that the global system of automobility is in great ‘health’, however undesirable that is from the point of view of environmental degradation, CO2 emissions and social justice. Peak car travel in the Global North is a significant development at the national level but it is also dwarfed at the global level by the developments in the Global South. A narrow focus on the developments in car use in the Global North is therefore a variant of western-centric thinking.

One might argue that the developments in the Global North are still significant as they are countries like Japan or Germany are the front runners and that the patters observed there will eventually be replicated in places that now experience rapid growth in car use. This argument, however, is developmentalist: it assumes that there is a more or less universal development trajectory that all countries will ultimately follow — a form of thinking that is not only Western-centric (as it positions Europe, the USA and Japan as leading by example) but also sidelines the role of spatial multiplicity (see Doreen Massey’s book For Space for further elaboration of this argument).

Peak car travel is a significant development but it must be placed in perspective: it is ultimately a local phenomenon that hardly dampens the global growth of car use. This means that transport’s contribution to global warming remains enormous and that there is no time for complacency: it remains absolutely critical that transport planners and professionals think more seriously and creatively about how step changes away from automobility can be realised. Conventional policies (investment in new public transport infrastructure, urban compaction, mobility management, road pricing) may have facilitated peak car travel in the Global North — though their effects should not be exaggerated as these policies’ public acceptability is partly a result of the same cultural, social and demographic changes that made peak car travel possible — but they appear quite inadequate at fundamentally reducing the growth of automobility across the Global South.

On the Rational and the Emotional in Transport Analysis

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Yesterday a PhD student posted a series of questions regarding the analysis of the choice of acquiring and using a car on the mailing list of the UTSG (universities’ transport studies group). He had spoken with experts in marketing and psychology who claimed (a) that this choice is both rational (travel utility – price, time, etc) and emotive (symbolism of a brand for an individual and their self image), and (b) that transport analysis — and more specifically analysis using discrete choice models — only considered the rational side of things, ignoring the emotive. With his post he wanted to canvass the views of transport academics on these matters, and asked three questions:

  1. Is (b) above true and discrete choice modelling deficient in the way it approaches matters such as ‘symbolism of a brand’ or ‘aversion to a mode’?
  2. If it isn’t, how does discrete choice modelling account for such things?
  3. Has any work actually quantified the % split between the ‘rational’ and the ’emotive’ when choosing to acquire and/or use a car.  Could this percentage vary by culture?

These are interesting questions and I couldn’t resist responding. This is (and edited version of) what I wrote:

I am afraid that the experts you have spoken to are not aware of recent developments in discrete choice modelling in transport studies. There is a growing number of empirical studies using discrete choice models to account for what you term ’emotive’ factors (more on this below). These studies tend to adopt one of the following approaches:

  1. Include measures of people’s attitudes, beliefs and values directly into the utility function — a good example of this line of work is provided by the work of Pat Mokhtarian at UC Davis. For an example of a study of vehicle choice, see her co-authored paper ‘What type of vehicle do people drive?‘ published in 2004 in Transportation Research A.
  2. Use a latent class model whereby people are endogenously classified into groups with similar preferences/attitudes as part of the choice model. I don’t have an example of this approach in the context of vehicle type choice at hand, but this approach is increasingly used (see e.g. Walker and Li’s 2007 paper ‘Latent lifestyle preferences and household location decisions‘ in Journal of Geographical Systems) and is directly applicable to decisions about what sort of vehicle people drive.

However, there is also a problem with the way the three questions are framed. There is a long history of dualistically opposing the ‘rational’ and the ’emotional’ in mainstream western thought, but evidence from a wide variety of sources suggests that this opposition is in itself very problematic: it is not possible to separate the two. In the neurosciences, for instance, it is now increasingly accepted that emotions are indispensable to good, or at least effective, decision-making — the work of Antonio Damasio is a key source here. In fact, one could argue that the opposition of the rational and the emotional is a somewhat curious particularity of the vagaries of mainstream western philosophy, and certainly not shared by all the mainstream philosophers of the past centuries. David Hume and some of the utilitarians, for instance, already acknowledged that the rational and the emotional were entangled in complex ways in (good) decision-making. These arguments imply that your third question is very problematic from a philosophical point of view — the question cannot be addressed in a meaningful way if one also wants to incorporate non-Western countries/cultures.

At the same time, there is much to say in favour of the criticisms articulated by the experts from marketing and psychology, but the key here is to distinguish between the ‘rational’ and the ‘instrumental’. In mainstream discrete choice modelling of travel behaviour, decisions regarding vehicle ownership, and so on, there has long been a tendency to privilege the instrumental aspects of behaviour — e.g. how can I get to X the quickest, at the lowest monetary costs and with the highest level of comfort? This one-sided focus on the instrumental has a long and complex genealogy and derives in part from theoretical considerations but also reflects data availability issues and the difficulty of constructing reliable measurements of the more-than-instrumental factors that mediate people’s decision-making.

The ‘expressive’ dimensions of behaviour and decisions about vehicle ownership have long been side-lined in transport modelling, and until fairly recently there has been little attention for the links between transport and identity (and symbolism) and for the links between transport/movement, sensory experience, affects and feelings. The most powerful work on those expressive dimensions can nonetheless be found outside the body of research drawing on discrete choice models; two strands of work would be particularly useful to consider:

  1. Research informed by thinking from behavioural psychology — see e.g. the work of Linda Steg (among others her 2005 paper ‘Car use: lust and must‘ in Transportation Research Part A)
  2. Research belonging to what John Urry and Mimi Sheller have called the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ — the best place to start here would be the work of Peter Merriman (his 2009 paper ‘Automobility and the geographies of the car‘ in Geography Compass provides an excellent introduction to this line of thinking)

Considering the more-than-instrumental is important in choice modelling; models that only consider the instrumental dimensions of individuals’ decision-making — e.g. travel time, travel cost, comfort, reliability — seem to systematically over-predict the extent to which people will change their behaviour or choices compared to what happens in the real world. The more-than-instrumental must be given much more attention if we want to move towards more sustainable transport systems.

Thinking Climate Change Mitigation in Transport

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A few weeks ago the special section of Journal of Transport Geography that David Banister, Jillian Anable and myself guest edited has been published. This special section introduces a range of theoretical approaches that can help (transport) scholars to better understand climate change mitigation and reduced use of carbon-intensive energy sources in transport. The general idea is that new understandings — and especially social science approaches — are needed alongside more mainstream transport studies perspectives emphasising the importance of green infrastructures and technologies and pricing measures, given that transport planning and practice has made little headway in reducing transport’s deep dependence on fossil fuels.

The approaches highlighted in the special section include: the sociotechnical transitions approach and multi-level perspective advanced by Frank Geels and others; theories of social practices a.k.a. practice theory; and behavioural economics. Each approach is introduced by one or a team of leading experts — Frank Geels, Matt Watson, and Paul Dolan & Robert Metcalfe, respectively — and its value and usefulness is then evaluated by a expert in the field of transport or mobility studies — Lorraine Whitmarsh, Thomas Birtchnell, and Erel Avineri. In this way each perspective is discussed from two sides and the views of both the protagonist and the transport/mobility scholar sympathetic to the approach.

The special section also contains the paper about rethinking travel habits I authored with David and Jillian (as discussed previously), and a commentary by John Urry. More details are available here.

Approaches to Time in Transport Studies

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This week I have been to the wonderful Forge Network summer school in York organised by Greg Marsden and Elizabeth Shove on ‘Time, Travel and Everyday Life‘ and attended by young researchers in a range of disciplines (transport, geography, sociology, etc.) from the UK and a number of European countries.

I gave one of the talks, and mine was on different theoretical understandings of time in transport and mobilities research and how understandings of time can be used to change current transport research and planning practice. I used the works of Barbara Adam, David Harvey and Henry Lefebvre to highlight how time (a) is a multi-faceted construct intimately tied to space and matter, and (b) understood in very partial ways in mainstream transport research and practice.

With regard to the first point, I discussed Harvey’s distinction between absolute time (a Newtonian, linear and immovable grid), relative space-time (dependent on the frame of the observer as proposed by Einstein) and relational spacetime (emergent from the relations between entities as suggested by Leibniz, quantum mechanism and complexity theory, among others) and criticised Harvey’s idea that time is all three, arguing that (space)time is ultimately relational. I also discussed Lefebvre’s distinction between linear and cycles rhythms and times, whereby the former pertain to a man-made pure repitition as epitomised in clock-time and the latter to nature and the cosmos where each re-occurence differs from a previous manifestion. And I drew on Adam’s timescapes framework to argue that mainstream transport research and practice are deeply commited to her five ‘C’s. That is, in transport research, planning and practice time is commonly and continually:

a) constructed, through the privileging of clock time to the exclusion of almost any other form of time;

b) commodified and monetarised, among others through the widespread use of values of time;

c) compressed, primarily through the valorisation of acceleration (i.e. the assumption that travel time is a waste and disutility) in transport appraisal (cost-benefit analysis) and basically all micro-economic theory inflected thinking about transport;

d) colonising the future, among others because of the failure to reduce transport’s extreme dependence on oil and its contribution to anthropogenic climate change; and

e) considered something that must be controlled in that the different features of time (such as the duration, timing, etc. of travel time) must be shaped and steered in some way or another, and this perhaps best exemplified with the preoccupation in some circles of research and planning with the reliability and travel times and transport networks.

I do believe, however, that the deep commitment to Adam’s five ‘C’s and the privileging of absolute and linear understandings of time in mainstream transport research and planning are ultimately a barrier to making transport more environmentally sustainable and socially just and to more effective transport policies. As the privileging of these understandings is one of the factors that got us where we are at the present (i.e. transport as a major contributor to both carbon consumption and social inequalities), we — researchers and practitioners in transport, urban planning and cognate fields — need to reconsider how we ‘think’ time (and space) in relation to transport and travel behaviour. So, in the end my talk was a plea for (a) more sophistated understandings of time (and space) in transport research and planning, and (b) greater attention being paid to relational and cyclical understandings of time in connection to transport as these allow us to better understand how the users of transport systems act and respond to the situations they face whilst travelling. I sought to illustrate the latter point by contrasting mainstream transport studies of how travellers respond to travel time variability and my own research on this topic and on what arriving late at a destination is and means (as summarised here and here).

I do realise of course that talk about the nature of time (and space) and how it relates to transport & mobility is rather abstract and philosophical, and in many ways challenges common-sense understandings of how the world is. But those common-sense understandings are partly responsible for the non-sustainable nature of contemporary transport systems, and bringing the typically taken-for-granted understandings of time (and space) into focus and challenging them is one way in which social scientists can make a major contribution to transport policy and practice.

I would be very happy to share the slides of my talk with anyone who is interested. Just drop me an e-mail.