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Operations of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) are expanding, leading to competition for airspace with other users such as the General Aviation (GA) community, i.e., sports and leisure airspace users, particularly in uncontrolled airspace. As a result, there is an increasingly urgent need for a shared airspace resolution, whereby drones become integrated harmoniously in unsegregated operations with crewed aircraft, providing equitable airspace access for all. The purpose of the study was to engage with the GA community and elicit concerns and issues regarding the shared airspace concept as an initial step in the co-development of the future form of airspace. The method used was an online, interactive workshop with participants (n~80) recruited from the GA community in the United Kingdom (UK). Data captured (verbal and written) were analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis, producing findings that summarised the issues identified on a range of different topics, grouped together under three over-arching themes: (1) operational environment; (2) technical and regulatory environment; and (3) equity and wider society. Almost a quarter of participants’ comments (27%) were related to the opinion that shared airspace would only be possible if aircraft were fitted with Detect-And-Avoid (DAA) systems for de-confliction, based on onboard Electronic Conspicuity (EC) devices. Findings suggested that airspace management policies that establish equitable regulatory and technology environments regarding shared airspace are needed, and that those policies should be inclusive, having as a key aim the involvement of the GA community (and all other stakeholders) in the development process. The study represents a first step in the involvement of the wider aviation community in the co-design of shared airspace to include drones.

In recent years, global studies have attempted to understand the contribution that energy demand reduction could make to climate mitigation efforts. Here we develop a bottom-up, whole-system framework that comprehensively estimates the potential for energy demand reduction at a country level. Replicable for other countries, our framework is applied to the case of the United Kingdom where we find that reductions in energy demand of 52% by 2050 compared with 2020 levels are possible without compromising on citizens’ quality of life. This translates to annual energy demands of 40 GJ per person, compared with the current Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 116 GJ and the global average of 55 GJ. Our findings show that energy demand reduction can reduce reliance on high-risk carbon dioxide removal technologies, has moderate investment requirements and allows space for ratcheting up climate ambition. We conclude that national climate policy should increasingly develop and integrate energy demand reduction measures.

Policy makers are keen to understand public and stakeholder concerns in relation to the greater deployment of drones within transport systems and studies have sought to quantify public acceptance of drones with common themes including worries relating to privacy and safety and a lack of engagement with the technology amongst some demographic groups. This paper critically examines the research on public acceptance of drones finding the conflation of a diverse range of drone applications has led to ambiguity in the prevailing concerns and that the absence of clear parameters for drone use in local transport environments limits scope to develop informed opinion. We find that studies which build familiarity and understanding of practical drone use demonstrate the potential for more positive and informed outcomes than do more generic surveys on attitudes. The paper raises questions about the role of public acceptance research and its use in policy and calls for studies that build understanding of drones within transport environments so that stakeholders can engage in more informed debates to shape future transport provision.

There has been widespread interest in the potential for the significant behavioural and policy adaptations rendered necessary by Coronavirus to act as a catalyst for radical longer term policy change in transport. However, this body of work to date has been limited in its consideration of how such policy change might be brought about. Translating the lessons from the Coronavirus response to other ongoing strategic challenges such as decarbonisation requires analysis of what the pandemic has revealed about processes of policy formulation and how institutions responsible for policy implementation actually work. This paper explores the extent to which rapid policy change has actually been possible in the transport sector in England and Scotland during the pandemic, and key examples of how such change has been both achieved and blocked. Two rounds of interviews with senior stakeholders from across the transport sector were undertaken in June and November 2020 to inform the analysis. We find that the pandemic has accelerated some policy commitments that were already planned, but at a time of huge stress on the whole of government and its partner delivery organisations, the potential to deliver radical policy adaptation was limited. However, Coronavirus is recognised as being a potentially path-changing disruption to existing trajectories in terms of the adaptations to business practices, industry structures, ways of working and the public finances. Paradoxically, whilst recognising these uncertainties, decision-makers are yet to deviate from pre-pandemic planning assumptions and policy plans and this risks missing the opportunities to steer how those changes unfold.

The Paris Agreement requires radical action across all policy sectors and at all scales of government. This paper argues that without a clear framework for sectoral budget setting which takes account of interactions across spatial scales, incoherent and inadequate policy responses will result. Using a case study of the transport sector within the UK, which has committed to a zero carbon pathway in law, we look at three key elements which have to be considered in setting out a new framework: budget coherence, accounting coherence and policy coherence. Using top-down and bottom-up examples emerging from practices today in the UK, we demonstrate that there are no ‘optimal’ solutions but a set of choices, all of which appear to be better than the patchwork of approaches emerging in the absence of a framework. A multi-scalar approach is essential as transport crosses spatial boundaries and the policy system places different levers at different scales. Transparency will be beneficial for honesty with the public and the difficult politics this rapid transition necessitates. It will also mitigate against blame shifting across governments between and within scales and the resultant inaction which characterized the previous decade of supposed ‘climate action’.

Since the 1960s, development of the transport system has been framed by the notion of forecasting future demand. Yet the past decade or more appears to signal some significant changes to the role of travel in society which are having a material impact on how much people travel (and may travel in the future). Coupled with the potential for major technological changes and a range of climate adaptation scenarios, the future of mobility presents today’s decision making on transport strategy and investment with a broader set of uncertainties than has previously been considered. This paper examines current mainstream practice for incorporating uncertainty into decision-making, through an illustrative case study of the highly codified approaches of the Department for Transport in England. It deconstructs the issue by first focussing on different ways in which there is an opening out or acceptance of new uncertainties and how this creates a (wider) set of potential futures. It then turns to consider how this set of futures is used, or not, in decision-making, i.e. the process of closing down uncertainty to arrive at or at least inform a decision. We demonstrate that, because the range of uncertainties has broadened in scope and scale, the traditional technocratic approach of closing down decisions through sensitivity testing is at odds with the greater breadth now being called for at the opening out stage. We conclude that transport decision-making would benefit from a rebalancing of technical depth with analytical breadth. The paper outlines a plausible new approach to opening out and closing down that is starting to be applied in practice. This approach must be accompanied by an opening up of the processes by which technical advice for decisions are reached and how uncertainties are understood and negotiated.

First paragraph: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought previously unimaginable change to the level of mobility in the economy almost overnight. People who have never before worked from home before were obliged to do so immediately, and business travel stopped almost completely in a matter of weeks. After the slow restart of many transport services, attention turned to understanding the implications of the unprecedented uncertainties about future travel demand exposed by the pandemic. Most obvious is the issue of how long some form of social distancing restrictions and/or other mitigations such as the wearing of face coverings will have to remain in place (and potentially be reintroduced in future) in advance of a reliable vaccine and/or therapeutics becoming available. These restrictions have profound effects on the capacity of many transport services, wider travel demand, and in turn the financial viability of the transport system as we know it. From these critical issues emerge subsequent questions including what a significant loss of confidence in the safety of public transport means for usage far into the future, whether the business model underpinning low-cost aviation can survive, and what the experience of working remotely en masse means for the future of commuting and the structure of our cities.

With governments around the world committed to radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and transport-related mobilities making up a significant proportion of current carbon emissions, questions of how to change mobility systems have become a pressing concern. Yet the urgency of this challenge cannot be met with more of the same – particularly in terms of narrow discussions of behaviour change that fail to draw upon the wealth of relevant social scientific research. New methods of collaborating and bringing together communities – whether policymakers, academics, or publics – will also be key. Greg Marsden brings a particularly interesting set of perspectives to the question of what future travel demand might look like, and how we can change practices to get there. While currently a Professor of Transport Governance at Leeds University, Greg has spent significant periods working with policymakers – both within Transport for London and supporting the UK Parliament Transport Select Committee, which scrutinises the UK Department for Transport’s (DfT) spending and policies. Our conversation looks at how spaces can be fostered for new ways of thinking, communicating and collaborating to address the challenge of rapidly decarbonising transport systems. Though largely focused upon the UK, the conversation highlights issues related to policy engagement, theory and evidence, and understandings of sharing that will have much wider relevance.

Theorising the relationships between information communication technology (ICT), travel and work continues to preoccupy researchers interested in multinational corporations (MNCs). One motivation is the desire to understand ways of reducing demand for and the negative consequences of business travel. Existing studies offer, however, little in the way of theoretical explanation of why situations that require travel arise in the first instance and how they might be avoided. To address this shortcoming, this paper analyses two case study engineering consultancy MNCs to develop a novel sociomaterial perspective on the role of travel and ICTs. It introduces the concept of the synthetic work mobility situation which highlights the way ICT and travel exert agency that constitutes ways of working and the organisational form of MNCs. The concept also recasts questions about ways of reducing demand for travel as questions about ways of reconstituting the sociomaterial organisation of the MNC.

Resilience is the ability of a system to adapt, persist, and transform as a reaction to threats, which may be external or internal to the system, while vulnerability is the state of being susceptible to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the inability to adapt. Based on a study of the threats that can affect urban mobility, we identified a gap regarding the analysis of the levels of resilience and vulnerability in the face of subsidy threats that can severely affect developing countries. This article measures the level of resilience and vulnerability due to the absence of public transport fare subsidies. For this purpose, we developed an approach based on fuzzy logic and applied it in 33 administrative regions (ARs) of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We obtained four matrices of the levels of vulnerability and resilience of each of the regions as an origin and destination. The results show that areas nearest to the downtown region and those with high-capacity transportation available (commuter train and/or subway, systems with many transfer points) are more resilient, while a high level of vulnerability is associated with low income, negative socioeconomic indicators, and the predominance of road transportation to reach jobs. The contribution of this paper is the method applied to analyse the levels of vulnerability and resilience of public transport, which includes a threat that can cause a rupture that impacts routines and job accessibility in a region.

Egalitarian thought has a long tradition in Chinese history. Synthesized with the socialist ideology, it was practiced nationwide in the first decades of Communist China. Alongside the well-reported quality of life improvements that the recent economic liberalisation reforms have brought about, Chinese people are experiencing an increasingly serious polarization between the rich and the poor. Consequently, an egalitarian tendency has represented itself within contemporary policy and popular discourse. This paper aims to explore how egalitarian thought has influenced public awareness of social inequities by using the case of public attitudes towards the Beijing congestion charge, which is currently still at its planning stage. Nine focus groups, with a total of 73 participants, were undertaken with residents living in different areas of the city. Results show that the perceptions of social inequities are significantly different between low-income and high-income people. Due to egalitarian thinking, low-income people expect the privileges of the rich to be abolished, however, they do not pay much attention to a wider redistribution of wealth and other social resources. By contrast, richer people tend to deny to a wider population the privileges they themselves received, and, to some extent, they are reluctant to accept policy outcomes that may favour those who are in lower social positions. The resentment against the rich, as another by-product of egalitarianism, considerably exaggerates actual social inequalities, thereby intensifying the feelings of being unequally treated.

This article analyses the transport policy record of the 2010–2015 Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition and 2015–2016 Conservative majority UK governments. We argue that the style of policy making under these administrations departed significantly from that of previous decades, which had been characterised by the ascendancy of specific technical disciplines and decision-making norms about how transport planning should be carried out. Our key contention is that despite abandoning the idea of a single, overall narrative for transport policy, these governments (perhaps unwittingly) gave new life to broader debates about what transport investment is actually for and how investment decisions should be made. We interpret this as a shift away from the longstanding idea of a ‘deliberate’ strategy of intervention to a more ‘emergent’ approach, which raises important new questions about the future of transport policy both in terms of the objectives it seeks to realise and the relative influence of professional/technical and political actors in the policy process.

The notion of ‘fuel poverty’, referring to affordable warmth, underpins established research and policy agendas in the UK and has been extremely influential worldwide. In this context, British researchers, official policymaking bodies and NGOs have put forward the notion of ‘transport poverty’, building on an implicit analogy between (recognised) fuel poverty and (neglected) transport affordability issues. However, the conceptual similarities and differences between ’fuel’ and ’transport’ poverty remain largely unaddressed in the UK. This paper systematically compares and contrasts the two concepts, examining critically the assumption of a simple equivalence between them. We illustrate similarities and differences under four headings: (i) negative consequences of lack of warmth and lack of access; (ii) drivers of fuel and transport poverty; (iii) definition and measurement; (iv) policy interventions. Our review suggests that there are important conceptual and practical differences between transport and domestic energy consumption, with crucial consequences for how affordability problems amongst households are to be conceptualised and addressed. In a context where transport and energy exhibit two parallel policy worlds, the analysis in the paper and these conclusions reinforce how and why these differences matter. As we embark on an ever closer union between our domestic energy and transport energy systems the importance of these contradictions will become increasingly evident and problematic. This work contributes to the long-term debate about how best to manage these issues in a radical energy transition that properly pays attention to issues of equity and affordability.

Bus Rapid Transit systems exist in over 206 cities and 45 countries around the world. They are seen to provide a much lower cost option of mass mobility than fixed rail or underground systems which developing countries struggle to afford. Whilst BRT systems have undoubtedly been seen to be successful from a transport system perspective, they are more than a transport system innovation. They are often introduced to replace what is seen to be a failing, unsafe and poorly regulated informal transit system. This paper therefore focuses on the process of BRT introduction as a governance reform. The paper draws on African experience where adoption of BRT has been slow relative to South America and South East Asia. Using an in-depth analysis of the introduction of a new system in Ghana and data on levels of governance maturity across the African sub-continent, the paper finds that to understand BRT implementation requires an understanding of how the incumbent transport regime could and will be able to be reorganized. The success of BRT systems that result will depend at least as much on how the reforms are achieved as it will on the usual design concerns which typically occupy transport planners.

Less car travel increases prospects of limiting transport energy. Policy attempts to reduce car use by encouraging people to choose other modes face criticism that travel needs are not simply about choice but are structurally influenced, especially by urban form. Mullen and Marsden extend understanding of travel need by showing how uncertainty in housing and employment further constrains people’s control over travel, resulting in needs for complicated journeys often at short notice. Some respond to uncertainty by running a car even where this presents financial problems. Those without a vehicle face lost opportunities and hardship. In the face of increasing employment and housing precarity, policy needs to rethink focus on choice and instead find ways of meeting complex travel needs without extensive resort to cars.

To understand the complex meanings of mobility and to engage in transport planning and management processes, a variety of disciplines, skills, and tools are potentially useful. Universities have a limited amount of time and resources to train future professionals though. This poses a problem: where should the teaching priorities be? By means of a web-survey, this study has asked academics based at a number of universities what the disciplines, skills, and tools that — according to their personal viewpoints — are the most relevant for practitioners in the mobility and transport sector. The respondents generally support curricula that facilitate a holistic, non-specialised, understanding of mobility and transport issues.

This paper reports on a study of current practice in policy transfer, and ways in which its effectiveness can be increased. A literature review identiï¬ es important factors in examining the transfer of policies. Results of interviews in eleven cities in Northern Europe and North America investigate these factors further. The principal motivations for policy transfer were strategic need and curiosity. Local ofï¬ cials and politicians dominated the process of initiating policy transfer, and local ofï¬ cials were also the leading players in transferring experience. A range of information sources are used in the search process but human interaction was the most important source of learning for two main reasons. First, there is too much information available through the Internet and the search techniques are not seen to be wholly effective in identifying the necessary information. Secondly, the information available on websites, portals and even good practice guides is not seen to be of mixed quality with risks of focussing only on successful implementation and therefore subject to some bias. Ofï¬ cials therefore rely on their trusted networks of peers for lessons as here they can access the ‘real implementation’ story and the unwritten lessons. Organisations which have a culture that is supportive of learning from elsewhere had strong and broad networks of external contacts and resourced their development whilst others are more insular or inward looking and reluctant to invest in policy lessons from elsewhere. Solutions to the problems identiï¬ ed in the evidence base are proposed. City to city policy transfer is a very active process in the ï¬ eld of transport. Not enough is yet understood about its beneï¬ ts or the conditions under which it is most effective. Such understandings should help to promote and accelerate the uptake of effective and well matched policies.

Understanding and controlling travel demand is one of the great challenges for the twenty-first century. This paper has been prepared in the wake of the first UK Transport White Paper for some 20 years which has sought to reconcile a multitude of requirements that society has from transport. The paper does not offer an alternative White Paper but aims to highlight the key themes that will shape the future of transport and to propose options and visions for the twenty-first century. In so doing, the intention is to deliver some fresh thinking into the transport debate that will serve as a catalyst for future, perhaps fruitful, discussion.