AAG 2023 Call For Papers: Transportation Justice

Transportation equity is an important and growing component of urban social and spatial justice. The crises associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, global economic recession, climate change, and racial injustice have only made more urgent the need to consider transportation as a key input in building an actionable “right to the city” for all.

Previous research has developed both a robust vocabulary through which to discuss transportation in light of diverse theories of justice, and a range of quantitative and qualitative metrics by which to evaluate transportation equity initiatives. The foundations set by this body of research and the pressing examples of urgent need in the contemporary transportation environment together suggest new, creative, and rigorous engagements by asking what transportation equity and justice mean today and how a more just distribution of transportation resources can be achieved.

In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have shifted how people travel in cities around the world. Many cities have used these crises as opportunities to experiment with various strategies to promote more equitable travel options, especially for those who lack access to an automobile.

Recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of this topic, and building on the theme of this year’s Annual Meeting “Toward More Just Geographies”, we encourage submission of conceptual, theoretical, or empirical research that draws on different research traditions within our discipline – i.e., transport geography, urban geography, urban planning, urban design, etc. – and/or takes different methodological approaches – i.e., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods. We encourage papers that: a) move beyond the analysis of socio-spatial inequalities to more explicitly discuss the need for procedural, recognition, restorative and epistemic justice within the transport domain; b) highlight equity/justice-oriented research that better describes the mobility, accessibility, and/or safety of users who travel by means other than automobiles; and/or c) those that look at key examples from the Global South.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Transportation-related gentrification/neighborhood change
  • Modal shifts of workers in response to climate change/pandemic/displacement
  • Innovative or cross-sectoral partnerships to address transit and active travel in the new normal
  • Addressing equity and justice issues for public transit and/or active travel users during the pandemic
  • Mobility related equity and justice issues with a focus on vulnerable populations such as immigrants, racial minorities, elderly, persons with disabilities, etc.
  • User centric transportation system design focusing on equity and justice issues
  • The geographies of predatory financial practices in transportation
  • The geographies of urban protest in transport spaces
  • Affordability, housing policy and transportation justice
  • Environmental justice research pertaining to transportation infrastructure
  • Linkages between climate change, carbon emission mitigation and transportation justice
  • Policy and/or grassroots initiatives contributing to equitable mobility outcomes, and planning practices
  • Emerging theories, conceptualizations, standards, or practices in mobility equity and justice
  • Data collection for measuring transport poverty and its consequences
  • Measuring the benefits of achieving improved transport equity

Interested presenters may submit their title, Personal Identification Number (PIN), and abstract (max 250 words) to Joshua Davidson (jdavids@design.upenn.edu by October 26, 2022. In your message, please use the email subject header “AAG 2023 – Transportation Justice abstract”. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Organizers: Joshua Davidson (University of Pennsylvania); Hannah Hook (Ghent University); Hannah King (University of California, Los Angeles); Shaila Jamal (McMaster University); Dr Steven Farber ( University of Toronto); Dr Karen Lucas (The University of Manchester); and Dr Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford)

Autonomous transportation seminar at Florida Atlantic University

On 16th April I will be one of the presenters in a seminar about automated vehicles organised by Prof John Renne at Florida Atlantic University and held at the port of Palm Beach. I will talk about expectations and prospects of automated vehicles in freight transport, based on the research that Debbie Hopkins and myself are undertaking as part of the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand. This won’t deal directly with the controversy around autonomous driving’s first first death of a fellow road user in Arizona, but I am sure this will come up in the discussion parts of the seminar.

More information about the seminar is available here.

Uber in London

Last week Transport for London (TfL) announced in what is widely see as a shock move that Uber’s license in London is not going to be extended for another five years beyond 30 September 2017. The decision and its aftermath have attracted extensive media coverage and propelled the comany once more into the midst of the public debate.

As Geoff Dudley, David Banister and myself have argued, the relation between TfL and Uber has been strenuous for quite some time, so TfL’s move is arguably less surprising than many commentators are making it to be. It is also important to appreciate that this is not (yet) the end of Uber’s presence in London. Uber will contest the decision in the courts, and TfL themselves have suggested that there is some room for negotiation. It will be interesting to see how the sage unfolds over the next couple of weeks, if not months.

I was interviewed by WIRED magazine about the developments in London two days ago. You can read the result here.

Uber in London article available for download

A paper on the introduction and regulation of Uber in London led by Geoff Dudley, with David Banister and myself as co-authors, is now published in The Political Quarterly. It is available for free download until mid-June. You can find the paper here. The article discusses the challenges that Uber’s disruptive innovation strategy has brought to various stakeholders in London, particularly taxi operators and TfL. It also discusses the prospects of Uber’s disruptive innovation strategy now the company is rapidly becoming an established player.

The paper is part of a research project on the governance of urban mobility transitions which focuses on Uber in London as a case.

Cities and Transition towards Low Energy Mobility

The first paper from my research on Innovations in Urban Transport has recently been published in the open access journal Sustainability. It summarises some of the analyses on the emergence and early development of low energy innovations in the everyday mobility of two UK cities, Brighton and Oxford. In many ways these cities are ahead of the curve in transitioning towards urban mobility systems characterised by lower energy consumption and greater energy efficiency compared to systems that are strongly dominated by private car use. And the empirical analysis confirms that many innovations related to cycling, bus and rail transport, shared mobility and clean cars are developing in both cities.

The paper argues that geography matters to transition processes in various ways. Innovation trajectories with regard to low energy mobility are differentiated geographically: where Oxford has a stronger orientation towards electric mobility (hybrid buses, electric vehicle charging, a car club with electric vehicles), Brighton tends to stand out in its attempts to create a cycling friendly infrastructure and the rapid expansion of car clubs. But the analysis also shows that cities should not be seen as independent and discrete spatial units in which innovation processes unfold. This is because most of the financial resources for those innovations come from elsewhere, notably the national government but also the EU. Thus, like technology and expertise do (as the literature on policy mobilities suggests), the finance of innovations in low energy mobility ties cities into wider uneven and networked constellations that encompass cities, states and EU institutions.

From this perspective, the budget cuts that local authorities across the UK will be experiencing due to changes to national level policy are not good news: they are likely to threaten the much needed continuity in support — finance, expertise, officers’ social capital, etc. — for innovations in low energy mobility in the early stages of their development. Indeed, a discourse of localism cannot prevent that significant reductions in national funding for local transport are likely to slow down of the rate change towards lower energy consumption in everyday mobility in many UK cities.

Do Bike Sharing Schemes Reduce Energy Consumption?

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.

The financial viability of public bicycle hiring schemes

At the Journal of Transport Geography we are currently preparing a special section on the spatial analysis of public bicycle hiring schemes. The section will be guest edited by Jonathan Corcoran at the University of Queensland, Australia and Teibei (Terry) Li at Griffith University, Australia and is due to be published later this year.

The section will make a useful contribution to the now burgeoning literature on bike sharing schemes in transport studies and geography. Many of the recent studies are fairly positive about the potential of these schemes to expand and help making urban transport more sustainable. But there are some more critical voices as well, and my attention was drawn to a recent piece by Matthew Christensen and Susan Shaheen — a leading researcher when it comes to the sharing of bikes and cars.

Their argument is that the financial future of many of urban bike sharing schemes are not as bright as some of the celebratory accounts of bike sharing suggest. This is partly because corporate sponsors may be quite interested in supporting schemes in the start up phase but less so in keeping established schemes running (as is currently happening in London). Furthermore, at the current time of financial austerity at the local level across large swaths of the Global North, the local state may not be very willing to keep bike sharing system with ailing finances afloat. On the other hand, there is the question whether local governments really have a choice: when push comes to shove, will they really withdraw support for schemes whose start up has attracted lots of attention in the (local) media? As often in transport governance, political discourse and reality may go their separate ways.

A series of risks can nonetheless be identified. If it turns out that ailing systems will indeed be kept running with public subsidy, we will see that local governments — keen to follow ‘best practice’ and set up their own bike sharing scheme — have locked themselves into (financially) supporting another public transport system in an era when extra funds for transprt policy are unlikely to become available (at least in the Global North). Given that public bicycle sharing system are often socially selective — they are often patronized much less by poorer households, migrants from non-western backgrounds, women — ethical questions regarding justice in the city will be raised as well.

Slack time?

It has been a while since I last wrote on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I have been idle over the past two months. I have just returned from a visit to Chile and more specifically the University of Concepcion, where I have worked with our great host Juan-Antonio Carrasco as well as Karen Lucas and colleagues from Ghent and Concepcion on a collaborative project about the relationships between social exclusion and transport disadvantage in different geographical contexts. This three-year project — funded by the EU’s Marie Curie programme – has been under way for quite a while now, but our visit to Concepcion has been important in taking the project to a new level. I am really excited about the empirical work with data from Chile and Belgium (and the UK at a later stage) that we have set out to undertake.

Since June the Research Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand, in which the Universities of Sussex, Manchester and Oxford collaborate and which is funded by the UK research councils (primarily the EPSRC), has officially been in existence. We are currently in the starting-up phase and our website is still under construction. However, a summary of what the Centre is about is available here. As part of the Centre we are currently developing a project about what drives the emergence and success of low-energy initiatives in energy consumption reduction in urban transport, in which we will be comparing different city-regions in the UK: Greater London, Merseyside (Liverpool), Brighton and Hove, and Oxford. The idea of the project is to more fully integrate understandings of niche developments in sociotechical transitions thinking in innovation studies with thinking on the role of space and place from economic, urban and cultural geography.

There is no doubt I will report on the development of the project and the Centre on this blog in the (near) future!

Moving towards low carbon mobility

Moving Towards Low Carbon Mobility

A few weeks ago the Moving towards Low Carbon Mobility book edited by Moshe Givoni and David Banister came out. This is a book with chapters written by researchers of the Transport Studies Unit on different dimensions of low-carbon mobility, including technology, governance, infrastructure finance and pathways to a low-carbon future.

My contribution to the book consists of a chapter that reviews the latest thinking on socio-technical transitions in transport. It covers key theories — the multi-level perspective advanced by Frank Geels and others, social practice theories advocated by Elizabeth Shove and colleagues and the complex systems approach that John Urry has elaborated over the past decade — and seeks to outline how these strands of social science research can inform thinking about how to effectuate the step change towards low carbon transport.

I have also contributed to the final chapter of the book on how transport policy should be reconfigured for a low-carbon transport future to become a more realistic prospect. Here Moshe, David, James Macmillan and myself argue that what I tend to call the ‘logic of provision’ — the idea that providing alternative, better, speedier, more fashionable, etc infrastructure is the primary means for bring about change in the transport system — and prevailing understandings of travel time as a cost to be minimised are more of a hindrance to step change than that they will really help to bring a transition about. We also begin to outline a list of guiding principles for alternative transport policy but it must be said that this is only the beginning. Much more thought needs to go into answering the question what policies should look like if they are to help to bring about fundamental change in transport.

Rethinking behaviour change with Dewey

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.