The Politics of Mobility

Transport Planning, the Environment and Public Policy

Geoff Vigar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135157968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Transport issues are critically embedded in everyday life. For this very reason, ways of addressing such issues are almost always hugely politically contentious, as a quick glance at local and national media will testify. Such contentiousness is growing as ever increasing mobility for many in western society has led to a critical examination of the fundamental basis by which transport issues are considered in government and beyond. Despite the strength of this examination, the implementation of new approaches to dealing with transport issues has proved deeply problematic. The Politics of Mobility pioneers a methodological and theoretical framework derived from the social and political sciences to shed light on the complexities of dealing with these issues. It mobilises three case studies that highlight the realpolitik of dealing with such concerns for students, practitioners, researchers and activists.

Chapter 1

Transport, environmental sustainability and public policy

By the late eighties … every country in the world was facing a frightening new paradox. On the one hand, the growth in demand for traffic, and particularly for motorcars, showed no signs of abating. On the other, concerns about the consequences of unrestricted traffic growth, particularly the problems posed by vehicle emissions and congestion, were beginning to be recognised as challenges on a global scale. The task of reconciling the two is one of the most important we will all face in the Twenty-First Century. (Steven Norris, Minister for Transport in London 1992–1996, Changing Trains, 1996, p.179)

1.1 Introduction: transport policy and environmentalism

Transportation issues are critically embedded in everyday life. For this very reason, ways of addressing such issues are almost always highly contentious. In many Western nations in recent times, land-use trends alongside the opportunities afforded by past road construction efforts and the mass availability of private cars have led to the breaking of traditional relationships between home, work and leisure opportunities. Thus, in response to increased communications possibilities, people have changed the way they live and this has led to increased expectations over the potentialities of personal travel. The consequences of these changing geographies and sociologies of mobility are two-fold: first, increasing demand for travel throughout Western nations, particularly by car, a trend that no country has managed to arrest; second, the knock-on consequences of increasing travel demand on cities, local environments, social networks and ecological conditions.

For most of the twentieth century, nations dealt with continued increases in demand for road travel by building more roads. In the UK, for example, since the first motorway opened in 1958, the primary aim of UK inter-urban transport policy has been to facilitate the rapid, free-flowing movement of people by motor vehicles. Thus, although the level of road-building proposed by national governments fluctuated throughout the post-war period, the principal transport concern of governments, at least until the mid 1990s, was to roll out a roads programme, largely disconnected from considerations associated with other transport modes and from other forms of spatial development. This approach became known as ‘predict and provide’ where the demand for travel by various modes was extrapolated and then attempts were made to match the supply of infrastructure to that potential demand. Similar ‘predict and provide’ models were used independently in planning for public transport where declining passenger numbers in the immediate post-war period were frequently projected into the future and used to justify cuts in rail and bus networks.

In the UK in recent times, a belief in the intuitive logic of the ‘predict and provide’ approach underpinned the transport policies of the Thatcher administrations (1979–1990), which invested a great deal in road construction. These administrations also pursued the de-regulation and privatization of public transport with the consequences that it tended to become marginalized along with other aspects of the welfare state: becoming an option to those with no alternative. Road-building was used as the main policy tool to tackle traffic congestion, with the justification coming from some of the central tenets of the new right; those of individual freedom (narrowly defined as freedom to drive a car at virtually any point in space or time); and economic competitiveness, translated as the need for efficient road links for business (summed up perfectly in the title of the 1989 UK Transport White Paper, Roads for Prosperity (DoT, 1989a)). The policy emphasis was therefore on mobility rather than accessibility, with the benefits biased strongly toward those able to travel by private car.

However, the ‘predict and provide’ approach came under increasing challenge in the 1980s and 1990s as its theoretical underpinnings were undermined and the consequences of such a policy became more acute, widely known and understood. In its own theoretical terms, such an approach was judged to be deficient in three ways. First, it typically ignored the impacts of policy interventions themselves. Second, and relatedly, increases in supply were held to release latent demand (SACTRA, 1994). Third, long-run elasticities of demand for travel were proved not to be the same as short-run elasticities (Dargay and Goodwin, 2000). Put simply, technology, society and mobility are bound together in complex ways and people will change aspects of their lifestyles in the medium-and longer-term in ways that do not show up in simplistic modelling processes based on preferences and choices made under extant transport and wider social conditions. In addition, a growing awareness of a variety of physical, social, environmental and health related effects arising from unfettered growth in the use of private cars also contributed toward policy change. The consequences of increased car use for urban society have been particularly acute as the city has fragmented into a series of zones – of ‘edge cities’, extensive low-density suburbs, and often steadily declining inner-city areas. Recognition of the need to pursue a different trajectory to that suggested by ‘predict and provide’ thus led to the emergence of a so-called ‘new realism’ in the UK amongst a policy elite concerned with transport planning (Goodwin et al., 1991).

This ‘new realism’ became evidenced in UK transport policy wherein occurred ‘as profound a change as has happened in any department of state in any sphere of government over the last 30 years’ (Steven Norris, speaking on Panorama, BBC Television, 13 March 1997). Many academic commentators had also been talking of such a shift in transport policy both in Europe (Masser et al., 1992) and in the UK (Goodwin et al., 1991; Marvin and Guy, 1999) for some time. Certainly in the early 1990s, the Conservative government began to wind down its roads programme and look for alternatives, and there was considerable consensus amongst political parties and lobby groups that this was the way forward. Nevertheless, large-scale road-building plans continued to be tabled by both UK central and local government at various points during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century indicating a variable permeability of the ‘new realism’ within transport planning.

Such variation is explained in particular by two interconnected problems that have held up the implementation of alternatives to a ‘predict and provide’ approach. The first has been the effects of attempts to restrict car use on the ability and expectations of firms and individuals to meet their perceived travel requirements in the shorter-term. Consequently, the second has been convincing a sceptical public in ‘middle England’ of the efficacy of such a strategy. These issues were compounded by liberal land-use planning regimes that encouraged the location of many activities away from traditional places. Indeed the growth in travel is due to an increase in journey lengths, not the number of journeys made. Public scepticism also prompted concessions from the Labour governments of 1997–2001 and 2001 on in an attempt not to be seen as ‘anti-motorist’. These issues partly explain a heightened salience of transport policy issues in the UK in recent years.

A number of studies have sought to examine the ways in which these issues have been debated and worked out in particular decision-making situations (e.g. Bryant, 1996; Haq, 1997; Richardson and Heywood, 1996) and at national level (e.g. Banister, 1997; Goodwin, 1996, 1997). Other work has sought to conceptualize the broad policy shift taking place, and assess future policy directions (Goodwin et al., 1991; Owens, 1995; Banister et al., 2000). Further studies account for the machinery of governance in the transport field (Glaister et al., 1998). However, few recent accounts explore the everyday processes of local transport policy-making and implementation and situate them in a wider governance context. The ways in which such commonplace practices, the realpolitik of transport planning, come together with wider shifts in thinking among policy elites at both local levels and in national government are likely to be of considerable significance in understanding the recent and future trajectories of transport policy.

Such an analysis requires, after Healey (1997), a focus on both the ‘hard infrastructure’ of policy-making (the traditional political science focus on organizations, responsibilities, formal procedures and rules such as in Glaister et al.’s (1998) analysis), and the ‘soft infrastructure’ of policy-making (the routines, practices and relational networks of policy stakeholders). Such an assessment can highlight how policy change experienced in transport planning in recent years was the product of contestation among various stakeholders and coalitions. This book maps the contours of this contested policy terrain in order to understand the ways in which policy in this sector was constructed and developed through this decade. This assessment of the fine-grain of policy-making provides an explanation of the ways and speed at which the ‘predict and provide’ approach was displaced or remained powerful during the period 1987–2001

The rest of this Chapter first outlines the precise focus of this book and raises a set of research questions. It then moves on to map briefly the major issues driving policy change, focusing particularly on the role of environmental issues. It finishes by introducing the methodological approach employed to analyse this neglected field of study.

1.2 The focus of the book

The book’s main aims are to assess the likely direction of transport policy, given continuing increases in mobility for a large majority of the populations of ‘developed’ countries. Taking the UK as a case study, it looks at the ways in which transport policy changed and explores the factors that both promoted and resisted change over several decades. This analysis helps an understanding trajectory and the entrenchment of the ‘predict and provide’ approach in the soft and hard infrastructure that constitutes transport planning practice. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of environmental argumentation in influencing such a policy shift as these issues have occupied a key position in debates in the policy sector in recent times. These concerns are reflected in the detailed aims of this study, which are:

to explain the factors that were influential in national and local transport policy change in the UK from the 1950s onward and in the period 1987–2001 in particular;

to explore how policy change occurs and is resisted in policy systems and particularly to examine how new (especially environmental) agendas and discourses are opposed and promoted;

to examine the role of the institutional relations of transport planning in explaining processes of transport policy change and inertia;

to assess whether transport planning underwent a paradigm shift in the study period and to use this analysis to aid understanding of the dynamics of ‘policy paradigms’; and,

to use the above analysis to examine the feasibility of challenging existing patterns of mobility.

These objectives will be assessed through the mobilization of a sociological institutionalist approach to policy analysis. Such an approach is introduced below and a full rationale for its use is given in Chapter 2. Two specific contributions are offered as further research objectives that derive from this study as a result:

does a sociological institutionalist approach offer a useful way of understanding and interpreting policy change?

how might such an approach be developed to analyse policy change in the future?

These objectives necessitate: the development of a robust conceptual framework; a detailed exploration of transport policy in the UK in recent times and a long-run look at the development of the ‘predict and provide’ approach to understand its trajectory; an examination of the ‘micro-politics’ of local transport planning to understand policy development locally, both as a concern in its own right and in its relationship to central government policy development; and a full analysis of this material to address directly the research objectives detailed above.

The next section of this Chapter discusses how environmental issues became a major concern for governments and specifically in relation to transport planning. Such a discussion provides essential context for understanding the nature of transport policy change in recent years as environmental issues were widely held to be a critical factor in driving such change.

1.3 Issue expansion and the growth of environmental concern

Environmental issues have long played a significant part in transport policy debates, particularly relating to the impacts of road traffic on people and places. Such concern continues as people defend their communities against what they see as the continual incursions of traffic on local quality of life. While there is a complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their car use, and ‘other’ traffic¹ (see Burningham and O’Brien, 1994; and Chapter 8), it is certainly true that awareness of the impact of travel, and car driving in particular, on global ecological conditions provided new impetus to advocates of environmental concerns in the 1980s and 1990s. A direct action roads protest movement is particularly associated with promoting both local and global environmental issues together in a powerful set of argumentation (see Wall, 1999). Dudley and Richardson (1998) hold that these ‘new’ concerns entered transport policy arenas causing ‘issue expansion’ and thus fundamentally altered both the processes and nature of transport policy debates. This section briefly outlines why such concern arose. It first looks at the rise in public prominence of environmental issues generally, then turns to consider their adoption in government, and finally discusses trends in UK transportation and the impact of such trends on ecological conditions.

Environmental concern has its roots in the nineteenth century (Pezzioli, 1997, p. 550). However, its emergence as a widespread concern for governments and citizens alike is often traced to a variety of events occurring in the 1960s and early 1970s such as: the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962; the effects of pictures of the Earth from space; and the publication of the report of the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). These events brought to public attention the, often global, ecological consequences of human action. Awareness of global environmental issues amongst the public, and scientific knowledge of the impacts of human activity on the biosphere, thus increased dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Latterly, two major policy events shaped both public perceptions of, and national and local policy responses to, environmental issues. First, the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987) placed the term ‘sustainable development’ into the consciousness of policy-makers, and subsequently the public at large. It also greatly conditioned thinking over environmental issues in both the developed and developing worlds and is often thought to have signalled a re-awakening of environmental issues from the debates of the early 1970s. The second major group of events was the Earth Summit at Rio, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the climate change conventions at Kyoto, Buenos Aires and The Hague. These further highlighted the global consequences of the actions of government and citizens and sought to generate commitment for change amongst nations. Indeed, the 1992 Rio Summit placed particular emphasis on the damage road-based transport was doing to the biosphere, while discussions at Kyoto tied nations, albeit often somewhat loosely and with the subsequent opt out of the United States, to a series of carbon emission targets which focused attention on addressing transport demand among other measures. Policy-makers thus found themselves increasingly presented with evidence of the impact of transport activity on ecological conditions while concern for protecting local communities from the externality effects of transport and mobility was maintained from previous eras.

Thus, greater knowledge and awareness of issues such as acid rain, ozone depletion, and the greenhouse effect have all led to a reconceptualization of what the ‘environment’ means (Rawcliffe, 1995). Such a reconceptualization also blurs the distinction between environmental and social spheres of life (Harvey, 1996). There are questions about the nature of environmental change in that most assessments of environmental damage are decidedly anthropocentric. Thus Harvey argues that ‘it is materially impossible for us to destroy the planet earth …the worst we can do is to make life less rather than more comfortable for our own species while recognizing that what we do also does have ramifications (both positive and negative) for other living species’ (1996, p. 194). It is recognized that there will be positive benefits for many elements of human society and certain other species from the increasing environmental externalities arising from the maintenance of current transport trends. In this respect Harvey is right to point to the potential of certain ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Conceptual Framework and Historical Context
• Part Two: Transport Planning Practice: Three Case Studies
• Part Three: Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Index