Supporting policy packages: the future of road pricing in the UK

Transport is already a large component of our economy and society. Historically, transport programmes were substantially about developing basic infrastructure networks. Now the emphasis is on the active management of systems and operating them to maximum advantage in the face of growing travel demand and capacity limitations. Combined developments in technology and the world economy have accelerated change to almost unpredictable levels. The change affects many areas and transport is not an exception. With new vehicle technologies, radical policies and the persistent growth in private and commercial vehicles, a new changing transport landscape is emerging. One of these changes comes in the form of sustainable transport management - managing the demand of existing infrastructure networks. The role of demand management has been illustrated in many reports and papers and it seems that governments are becoming more aware of it. This paper focuses on one particular demand management policy that is often regarded as radical and generally unacceptable. Road pricing often gets delayed or abandoned due to controversy, disagreements, unanticipated problems and a whole host of other delaying factors. There are complex interactions in transport management - there is a need for cooperation between networks, stakeholders and different authorities. Single measures that focus on 'sustainable transport' usually address a limited set of objectives and are not usually combined with other policy measures. When combined, it is sometimes unclear whether the multiple interactions between policy tools and implementation networks have been considered. An emerging case of implementation of a policy package in the UK is the support of road pricing initiatives combined with public transport improvements by the Transport Innovation Fund. The paper will present a review of the UK road pricing situation along with key implementation factors that show firstly the importance of combining policy tools and secondly the necessity in creating and maintaining strong implementation networks

Evolutionary urban transportation planning? An exploration

For urban transportation planners these are challenging times. Mounting practical concerns are mirrored by more fundamental critiques. The latter come together in the observation that conventional approaches do not adequately account for the irreducible uncertainty of future developments. The central aim of this paper is to explore if and how an evolutionary approach can help overcome this limit. Two core-hypotheses are formulated. The first is that the urban transportation system behaves in an evolutionary fashion. The second hypothesis is that because of this, urban transportation planning needs also to focus on enhancing the resilience and adaptability of the system. Changes in transport and land use development patterns and policies and in the broader context in the post-war period in the Amsterdam region are analysed in order to illustrate the two core-hypotheses. In the conclusions more general implications are drawn.evolutionary economics, urban economics, transportation planning

Cracking the Network Code: Four Principles for Grantmakers

As grantmakers and nonprofits are looking for ways to collaborate more effectively, many are experimenting working with and through networks to achieve greater impact. Because networks are by definition loosely controlled and emergent, understanding how to effectively support them feels like a mystery to many grantmakers.GEO's newest publication sets out to crack the code behind the network mystique. In fact, there is a method to working more efficiently and effectively through networks, and a critical first step for grantmakers is adopting a network mindset, which may require dramatic shifts in attitude and behavior for some. "Cracking the Network Code" outlines four principles that comprise the network mindset, illustrates the principles with a range of examples of networks that have achieved real results, and offers practical questions and recommendations to help grantmakers achieve the benefits and avoid common pitfalls of working through networks

Sustainable innovation: key conclusions from Sustainable Innovation Conferences 2003–2006 organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design

The following is taken directly from the introduction. This booklet summarises the key conclusions from the 2003–2006 conferences on Sustainable Innovation organised by The Centre for Sustainable Design (www.cfsd.org.uk). The conclusions are drawn from the respective conference presentations, papers and discussions. The publication has been sponsored as part of a ‘Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Innovation & Design’ project awarded to The Centre for Sustainable Design by the South-East England Development Agency (SEEDA)

World city network research at a theoretical impasse::On the need to re-establish qualitative approaches to understanding agency in world city networks

From the late 1990s, the establishment of a new relational ‘turn’ in the study of world city connectedness in globalization has run parallel to the wider relational turn occurring in economic geography. Early work, built firmly upon a qualitative approach to the collection and analyses of new inter-city datasets, considered cities as being constituted by their relations with other cities. Subsequent research, however, would take a strong quantitative turn, best demonstrated through the articulation of the inter-locking world city network (ILWCN) ‘model’ for measuring relations between cities. In this paper, we develop a critique of research based around the ILWCN model, arguing that this ‘top down’ quantitative approach has now reached a theoretical impasse. To address this impasse, we argue for a move away from Structural approaches in which the firm is the main unit of analysis, towards qualitative approaches in which individual agency and practice are afforded greater importance

If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0

Over the past 15 years, the web has transformed the way we seek and use information. In the last 5 years in particular a set of innovative techniques – collectively termed ‘web 2.0’ – have enabled people to become producers as well as consumers of information. It has been suggested that these relatively easy-to-use tools, and the behaviours which underpin their use, have enormous potential for scholarly researchers, enabling them to communicate their research and its findings more rapidly, broadly and effectively than ever before. This report is based on a study commissioned by the Research Information Network to investigate whether such aspirations are being realised. It seeks to improve our currently limited understanding of whether, and if so how, researchers are making use of various web 2.0 tools in the course of their work, the factors that encourage or inhibit adoption, and researchers’ attitudes towards web 2.0 and other forms of communication. Context: How researchers communicate their work and their findings varies in different subjects or disciplines, and in different institutional settings. Such differences have a strong influence on how researchers approach the adoption – or not – of new information and communications technologies. It is also important to stress that ‘web 2.0’ encompasses a wide range of interactions between technologies and social practices which allow web users to generate, repurpose and share content with each other. We focus in this study on a range of generic tools – wikis, blogs and some social networking systems – as well as those designed specifically by and for people within the scholarly community. Method: Our study was designed not only to capture current attitudes and patterns of adoption but also to identify researchers’ needs and aspirations, and problems that they encounter. We began with an online survey, which collected information about researchers’ information gathering and dissemination habits and their attitudes towards web 2.0. This was followed by in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of survey respondents to explore in more depth their experience of web 2.0, including perceived barriers as well as drivers to adoption. Finally, we undertook five case studies of web 2.0 services to investigate their development and adoption across different communities and business models. Key findings: Our study indicates that a majority of researchers are making at least occasional use of one or more web 2.0 tools or services for purposes related to their research: for communicating their work; for developing and sustaining networks and collaborations; or for finding out about what others are doing. But frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. In deciding if they will make web 2.0 tools and services part of their everyday practice, the key questions for researchers are the benefits they may secure from doing so, and how it fits with their use of established services. Researchers who use web 2.0 tools and services do not see them as comparable to or substitutes for other channels and means of communication, but as having their own distinctive role for specific purposes and at particular stages of research. And frequent use of one kind of tool does not imply frequent use of others as well

Evaluation of the implementation process of urban road pricing schemes in the United Kingdom and Italy

This paper is based upon detailed research that has taken place in the UK and Italy, on the implementation strategies for urban road pricing schemes. In the UK, both in London and Durham, the Road User Charging schemes required new legislation, and were implemented rapidly. The time from announcement to implementation took three years and the schemes were introduced after short periods of intensive planning, consultations and stakeholder networking. In Italy, the situation has been very different. The road pricing schemes in Rome and Genoa were not introduced under specific legislation but rather evolved from access control zones originally implemented in historic urban centres. The incremental introduction of the Italian road pricing experiments has taken approximately ten years. The paper undertakes a comparison of these different strategies to introduce urban road pricing and the lessons they contain for the development of similar measures elsewhere. The comparison of the different implementing experiences is undertaken using Strategic Policy Niche Management, a method designed to explore, among other factors, the dynamics of the stakeholder networks involved in planning, introducing, marketing and managing radical urban Travel Demand Management policies

Efficient smile detection by Extreme Learning Machine

Smile detection is a specialized task in facial expression analysis with applications such as photo selection, user experience analysis, and patient monitoring. As one of the most important and informative expressions, smile conveys the underlying emotion status such as joy, happiness, and satisfaction. In this paper, an efficient smile detection approach is proposed based on Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). The faces are first detected and a holistic flow-based face registration is applied which does not need any manual labeling or key point detection. Then ELM is used to train the classifier. The proposed smile detector is tested with different feature descriptors on publicly available databases including real-world face images. The comparisons against benchmark classifiers including Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) suggest that the proposed ELM based smile detector in general performs better and is very efficient. Compared to state-of-the-art smile detector, the proposed method achieves competitive results without preprocessing and manual registration