Transport in a sustainable urban future

Transport is acknowledged as a vital ingredient of any credible strategy for the sustainable city because of the key role it plays in promoting economic development, quality of life and wellbeing. Yet managing urban transport effectively, given its complex and intersecting economic, environmental and social impacts, is also precisely the kind of ‘wicked problem’ that policy makers consistently find hard to resolve (Docherty and Shaw, 2011a; Conklin, 2006; Rittel and Webber, 1973). Many of the reasons for this are longstanding and emanate in particular from the dominance of the private car in meeting the demand for mobility, which has built up over many decades in the developed world, but which is now being reproduced at a much higher pace in the fast growing cities of the Pacific Rim and elsewhere (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Lyons and Loo, 2008). Although it has undoubtedly transformed our patterns of travel and consumption, concerns over the limitations and externalities of private car transport – primarily traffic congestion, environmental degradation and social exclusion – have for many years stimulated various initiatives designed to mitigate these externalities (Feitelson and Verhoef, 2001; Knowles et al, 2008). The conflict between the car, long promoted by neoliberal voices as a potent weapon of the free market and individual liberty, and competing visions of a more ‘public’ transport system based on collective modes such as the bus and train, and active travel by walking and cycling, has been played out over many years. Nowhere has this conflict been more intense than in cities, as it is here that the problems such as congestion, poor local air quality and mobility deprivation are often at their most intense (Cahill, 2010; Docherty et al, 2008)

Transport strategy in Scotland since devolution

This article critically reviews how the Scottish Executive's approach to transport has developed since devolution. Although there is much to commend, a number of concerns can be identified, including the possibility that a number of strategic infrastructure schemes appear to have been approved on political rather than on technical grounds. It is difficult to know whether the current set of transport infrastructure investment plans represents good value for public money

Devolution as process: institutional structures, state personnel and transport policy in the United Kingdom

Devolution has been described as a key ‘global trend’ over recent decades as governments have decentralised power and responsibilities to subordinate regional institutions (Rodriguez-Pose and Gill, 2003). UK devolution is characterised by its asymmetrical nature with different territories granted different institutional arrangements and powers. In this paper, we seek examine the role of state personnel in mobilising the new institutional machinery and managing the process of devolution, focusing on transport policy. Our research shows a clear contrast between London and Northern Ireland, on the one hand, and Scotland and Wales, on the other, in terms of the effectiveness of political leaders in creating clear policy priorities and momentum in transport

Forth Road Bridge Closure Survey: Analysis of Commuter Behaviour: Final Findings Report May 2016

No abstract available

The Governance of Smart Mobility

There is an active contemporary debate about how emerging technologies such as automated vehicles, peer-to-peer sharing applications and the ‘internet of things’ will revolutionise individual and collective mobility. Indeed, it is argued that the so-called ‘Smart Mobility’ transition, in which these technologies combine to transform how the mobility system is organised and operates, has already begun. As with any socio-technical transition there are critical questions to be posed in terms of how the transition is managed, and how both the benefits and any negative externalities of change will be governed. This paper deploys the notion of ensuring and enhancing public value as a key governance aim for the transition. It sets out modes and methods of governance that could be deployed to steer the transition and, through four thematic cases explores how current mobility governance challenges will change. In particular, changing networks of actors, resources and power, new logics of consumption, and shifts in how mobility is regulated, priced and taxed – will require to be successfully negotiated if public value is to be captured from the transition. This is a critical time for such questions to be raised because technological change is clearly outpacing the capacity of systems and structures of governance to respond to the challenges already apparent. A failure to address both the short and longer-term governance issues risks locking the mobility system into transition paths which exacerbate rather than ameliorate the wider social and environmental problems that have challenged planners throughout the automobility transition

Priorities, policies and (time)scales : the delivery of emissions reductions in the UK transport sector

Peer reviewedPreprin

An interpretation of Robinson-Trautman type N solutions

The Robinson-Trautman type N solutions, which describe expanding gravitational waves, are investigated for all possible values of the cosmological constant Lambda and the curvature parameter epsilon. The wave surfaces are always (hemi-)spherical, with successive surfaces displaced in a way which depends on epsilon. Explicit sandwich waves of this class are studied in Minkowski, de Sitter or anti-de Sitter backgrounds. A particular family of such solutions which can be used to represent snapping or decaying cosmic strings is considered in detail, and its singularity and global structure is presented.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Class. Quantum Gra

Design and fabrication of diffractive atom chips for laser cooling and trapping

It has recently been shown that optical reflection gratings fabricated directly into an atom chip provide a simple and effective way to trap and cool substantial clouds of atoms [1,2]. In this article we describe how the gratings are designed and micro-fabricated and we characterise their optical properties, which determine their effectiveness as a cold atom source. We use simple scalar diffraction theory to understand how the morphology of the gratings determines the power in the diffracted beams

The transformation of transport policy in Great Britain? 'New Realism' and New Labour's decade of displacement activity

In a 1999 paper, Goodwin announced ‘the transformation of transport policy in Great Britain’. His central point was that consensus was emerging among policy makers and academics based on earlier work including Transport: The New Realism, which rejected previous orthodoxy that the supply of road space could and should be continually expanded to match demand. Instead a combination of investment in public transport, walking and cycling opportunities and – crucially – demand management should form the basis of transport policy to address rising vehicle use and associated increases in congestion and pollution / carbon emissions. This thinking formed the basis of the 1997 Labour government’s ‘sustainable transport’ policy, but after 13 years in power ministers neither transformed policy nor tackled longstanding transport trends. Our main aim in this paper is to revisit the concept of New Realism and re-examine its potential utility as an agent of change in British transport policy. Notwithstanding the outcome of Labour’s approach to transport policy, we find that the central tenets of the New Realism remain robust and that the main barriers to change are related to broader political and governance issues which suppress radical policy innovation