Governance in niche development for a transition to a new mobility regime

Urban mobility is a difficult sustainability challenge; measures to reduce transport impacts produce only marginal reductions in overall energy use and CO2 emissions. Even fuel switch to electric vehicles and measures to manage traffic produce insufficient improvements. Seeking transport sustainability within the existing socio-technical regime involves policy approaches for dense cities to provide high-capacity, corridor-based public transport, expecting people to arrange their lives around such transport systems. Yet this socio-technical regime ill-fits modern mobility needs. The reluctance to use public transport stems much from this 150 year old regime configuration. The social-technical landscape has shifted significantly: travel patterns are increasingly dispersed in space and time – not funnelled into traditional corridor peak-hour movements. The key is not getting people to return to travel patterns of 100 years ago, but in a transition to a socio-technical transport regime that delivers sustainability compatible with the 21st century social-technical landscape. An opportunity may be emerging for socio-technical configurations in niche environments to effect transitions to alternate mobility futures. Autonomous vehicles are rapidly approaching market application. Since 2011, small autonomous pods have operated on segregated tracks at Heathrow Airport. In 2014 a similar system opened at the Suncheon Bay tourist area in South Korea. Since 2011 there have been public street trials of autonomous vehicles in the USA and in 2015 they became street legal in the UK. The Milton Keynes (MK) ‘Pathfinder’ project focuses on two-seat pods which do not need segregated tracks, but will run on cycleways and footpaths, mixing with cyclists and pedestrians. Trials will start in 2015, on short distance links from the railway station to destinations in Central Milton Keynes. This project forms part of the wider Milton Keynes Future Cities Programme and Open University-led MK:Smart project. This paper draws on these trials in MK to show through case study research how autonomous vehicles applications are moving beyond protected niches and, along with other developments, hold the potential to stimulate a major transition in public transport systems. The vehicles are small and each journey is individual to the passenger(s). Services do not run along corridor routes, like buses and trams, but are based on alternate rule-sets to the existing regime with individual journeys customised for each user. Such developments may therefore stimulate transition to totally different sorts of public transport systems and ultimately, socio-technical mobility regimes, by offering much more to users than any corridor system can provide. Rather than people adjusting their behaviour to bus routes, schedules and operating times, they travel directly, whenever they want, on services running 24/7. Thus these new regimes could be more compatible with lifestyle and economic trends that comprise 21st century socio-technical landscapes. As such, they provide credible alternatives to the private car, and so hold potential to deliver major sustainability gains. But such transitions face major challenges from entrenched actors within the existing regime. Taxis, minicabs and bus operators would be threatened. If the Uber cab app is being blocked by incumbent actors, they look likely to be powerful opponents of autonomous vehicle based cab services. However, MK provides an interesting innovation context where there are several overlapping smart transport niches in different stages of development. As well as autonomous pods, demand responsive minibuses are planned and inductive changed electric buses are in service. If these projects build links to each other (niche accumulation), demonstrate economic value and reproduced beyond their original experimental spaces (niche proliferation), there is potential for them to overcome incumbent resistance. In Milton Keynes, these processes could be getting close to reaching critical mass, opening up the possibility of moving closer to radical regime transitions

Consuming the million-mile electric car

Unlike for many consumer products, there has been no strong environmental case for extending the life of internal combustion engine cars as the majority of their environmental impact is fuel consumed in use and not the energy and materials involved in manufacturing. Indeed, with improving fuel efficiency, product life extension is environmentally undesirable; older, less fuel-efficient cars need to be replaced by newer more fuel-efficient models. Electric vehicles (EVs) are predominantly considered environmentally beneficial by using an increasingly decarbonised fuel – electricity. However, LCA analyses show that EVs have substantial environmental impacts in their materials, manufacturing and disposal. The high ‘embedded’ environmental impacts of EVs fundamentally change the case for product life extension. Thus, product life extension is desirable for EVs and they are suited to it. While petrol and diesel cars have an average lifetime mileage of 124,000 miles (200,000 Kilometres), the case for the million-mile (1.6 million Kilometre) electric car appears strong. Although it may be technically possible to produce a million-mile EV, how will such vehicles be consumed given that the car consumption is complex, involving, for example, extracting use and symbolic value? In this contribution we explore the nature of the relationship between cars and the consumer that moves beyond technical and functional value to understand what form of access consumers require to an EV across its entire 50-year life. If such consumption aspects are overlooked then, even if the million-mile car is technically viable, it is unlikely to be adopted and the environmental benefits they may yield will be lost.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Developing a business innovation perspective of electric vehicle uptake: lessons from Milton Keynes' electric vehicle programme

Electrification of transport forms a major part of British policy for energy and climate change. The formation of the early market for Electric Vehicles (EVs) has been supported through consumer subsidies, regulatory support, and programmes for the deployment of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, but uptake does not seem to be proceeding at the rate needed for meeting policy objectives. The approach pursued by policy actors is consistent with the approach of Strategic Niche Management (SNM), which would call for the creation of protected spaces to facilitate the development of new sociotechnical configurations. The Plugged-in Programme (PiP) in Milton Keynes is an example of creating a protective space. A comparison of PiP and other case studies in the literature of sociotechnical transitions identified a gap in SNM that may shed light on the limitations of EV policy in the UK. Traditionally, SNM has been used to monitor and manage interventions in support of prototype or pre-production vehicles. In consequence, there is no precedent for its application in support of early market technologies. The market introduction of innovative technologies can trigger interrelated technological and behavioural changes, affecting the preferences of producers and consumers while altering the demand structure of the sector. However, SNM does not account for the patterns of use and demand implied in what remain largely technological templates for the future. This thesis begins to develop a framework for the analysis and management of early market strategic niches. Insights from a second discipline, that of social marketing, were sought to complement the analytical tools of SNM. Social marketing is useful for understanding the effect of behavioural and market factors on the adoption of innovative technologies. Social marketing provides a framework for analysing and influencing behaviour in socially beneficial directions. Behaviour and choice are modulated through the application of a marketing orientation, identifying and addressing needs and creating valuable offerings. This research is centred on organizational users of electric vehicles (EVs), and explores the effectiveness of the policy portfolio for addressing the needs of early adopters and for building an early market for EVs. Thematic analysis, a form of qualitative content analysis, is applied to evidence from documentary sources, participant observation and interviews with key organizational actors in the community of pioneering and prospective EV users. The analysis draws on concepts from SNM and social marketing to explore previously neglected forces affecting the early market for EVs, with particular focus on the increasing importance of market selection and the competition presented by an entrenched but socially undesirable incumbent. Contrary to the expectations of policy actors, financial incentives and infrastructure deployment have a limited impact on the choices made by organizational actors. This thesis shows that the processes of learning and embedding that take place within the niche need to be multidimensional. Before a choice can be made, pioneering and prospective adopters of EVs invest considerable effort in the collaborative construction of new patterns of use and demand. This process can be supported by empowering interventions that identify suitable applications (creating multiple sub-niches within the niche) and facilitate the co-construction of new, competitive configurations around them. The models and networks created through this multidimensional, collaborative process translate into capabilities that give distinct advantages to pioneering adopters, allowing them to expand beyond their original niche and outperform the incumbents in mainstream markets

Exploring the epistemic politics of urban niche experiments

Urban experiments have been initiated in several locations to purposively initiate and shape transitions to more sustainable urban socio-technical systems, e.g. for energy, water, mobility. Although knowledges produced within such learning spaces are often presented as logical, technical and rational (Vanolo, 2013 ; Kitchin, 2014), the actors and mechanisms which shape decisions are far from obvious, involving cultures, power relations and multiple logics that are profoundly political (Machin, 2013). This research presents a case study founded in a phronetic perspective (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Avelino and Grin, 2017), unpacking the epistemological politics of an urban experiment taking place within a ‘smart city’ programme. A ‘smart transport’ application for mobile phones, ‘MotionMap’ was developed to transform the mobility system of Milton Keynes, an expanding city located 80 km to the north of London, UK. The case study recognises power relations and reveals how various actors engaged in the development of this application have further rendered the MK mobility socio-technical system an object of urban governance

Humans, robots and artificial intelligences reconfiguring urban life in a crisis

Autonomous urban robots were introduced in Milton Keynes (MK), UK, in 2018 to automate on-demand grocery delivery. Two years later the COVID-19 pandemic rendered routine activities such as delivering groceries or visiting the supermarket unexpectedly unsafe for humans. The ensuing disruption provided opportunities to investigate the potentialities of robotic and autonomous systems to provide cities with resources for coping with unexpected situations such as pandemics, heatwaves and blizzards and ultimately to transform and reinforce urban flows, leading to new ways of living in the city that arise as a result of emerging human-robot constellations. The crisis accelerated the ongoing transformation in human-robot relationships and made its tensions and potentials visible. The case of MK suggests that the cognitive capabilities of urban AIs are not to be found exclusively in computer bits and human neurons but arise from encounters and contexts, with institutions, policies, practices and even the materiality of the city itself being crucial to the emergence of urban AI

Exploring smart city atmospheres: The case of Milton Keynes

Smart cities are rapidly becoming the main form of urban development initiated in response to calls to address certain ills such as unsustainable cities. Often presented as rational responses to such challenges, there are affective dimensions which are political and impact their development in various places. We investigate these affective dimensions by using the concept of atmospheres -collective affects arising from encounters between places, actors, materialities and (hi)stories. Our work builds on the premise that acceptance of smart city initiatives relies on their supporter’s ability to disseminate compelling stories about smart urban futures. Atmospheres matter here because the stories that can be credibly told are not arbitrary – to be believed, urban stories must be embedded in and coupled to the materialities and affects of their environment. The aim of this paper is to investigate the deliberate cultivation of atmospheres by actors with urban remits, revealing how such atmospheres can become impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban futures. An in-depth case study of the English new town of Milton Keynes is presented to illustrate how atmospheres have been cultivated to selectively resist or reinforce the stories through which the smart city agenda is advanced. Narratives about rationality and data-driven efficiency were translated into specific versions of the future. The resulting encounters gave rise to atmospheres of reception, anticipation, innovation and progress through which urban spaces were rendered selectively receptive to specific forms of smart development in pursuit of local, contextually defined goals

Demand Responsive Transport: is Milton Keynes developing a post-Covid revolution in public transport?

Recently there has been a renewed interest in Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) and related service offerings as a system that can serve 21st century patterns of dispersed low-density travel. Numerous attempts have been made to introduce forms of DRT, but despite some limited applications, DRT has largely stalled amidst technological, regulatory, and economic barriers. Significantly, the impetus for DRT is now from technology-led companies that have already impacted upon taxi operations and have ambitions to develop their products and markets taking them into mainstream public transport, and some more innovative UK authorities are developing partnerships with these new digital technology operators. This has been accelerated by the pandemic creating uncertainty about how public transport use will change, coupled with local authorities seeking economic and social recovery amidst financial pressures on public transport support. This paper reports some results from an in-depth case study of one city’s radical shift towards replacing conventional bus routes with DRT. This is the partnership between the commercial DRT operator, Via, and Milton Keynes Council. In autumn 2020 an area served by one Council supported bus route was converted to DRT and from April 2021 eleven other supported routes in Milton Keynes were replaced with DRT, run by Via and largely operated using electric vehicles. With a growing fleet of 26 vehicles covering the whole of Milton Keynes Borough, this represents the most widespread urban DRT application in the UK. This paper draws on documentary evidence, operational data and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, focussing on the operational, business and policy aspects of the system and how it may develop. Key public policy issues are identified in the cost-effective use of DRT, user adaptations and understandings needed, the partners and expertise required, and practices and relationships needed between actors for DRT to have a socially transformative effect on how public transport is provided and is used

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

Exploring participatory visions of smart transport in Milton Keynes

This paper explores citizen concerns emerging in the design stage of MotionMap, a smart transport initiative developed in the context of a £16 million smart city programme. A city-wide sensing system integrated with other databases will provide real-time information about vehicular and pedestrian movement. The experience of a series of smart transport workshops in Milton Keynes suggests that citizens feel that they bear the cost of smart cities through potentially intrusive surveillance producing sacrifices in convenience and privacy, while the gains are captured by industrial and governmental actors. This distrust of surveillance through urban sensing systems is not inflexible. Such systems can gain legitimacy through a participatory approach where users legitimize the sensing system by taking an active role in providing transport data, as opposed to having it ‘harvested’ from them through passive or opportunistic mechanisms. Participatory approaches are challenging because users will engage only if the system can provide compelling benefits. A key contribution of this research comes from identifying that the benefits important to citizens are not necessarily measured in economic terms nor in terms of increased efficiency