Prelims

Transport Economics and Planning

Alternative Understandings of Transport

David Hensher has developed a modelling procedure that tries to allow for a variety of different levels and complexities (Figure 1.1). Hensher's model is undoubtedly a huge step forward in terms of acknowledging complexity and sophistication, and it embodies the recognition that models are, themselves, vehicles for debate because of the assumptions that they contain. This is an example of a transport planning practice that is reflexive about the conceptual model it uses, as a prerequisite for improving modelling procedures and frameworks (Scott Armstrong, 2001).

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Figure 1.1

Functional relationships implied by complex decision-making framework

(Hensher, 1998)

However, what is missing in this type of paradigm is the inclusion of systematic understanding of the ways in which change can happen beyond and outside the exchange model of transport. There is still a need to develop an understanding of the cultural and institutional structures that play a role in determining what is acceptable, what is ‘chosen’ and what can be altered. Developing such a notion depends, partly, on seeing how language or models are part of a set of practices that either represents ‘the real’ as if it were fixed or unambiguous, or recognises the ways in which language itself is part of cultural practices that shape meanings. If we take the latter position, we are much more likely to see how transport models can reflect only part of what exists and that there is a need to develop an understanding of the context of choices as well as just describe the choices themselves. Institutionalist theorists March and Olsen also describe this:

Within an institutional framework, ‘choice’, if it can be called that, is based more on a logic of appropriateness than on the logic of consequence that underlies conceptions of rational action.

(March and Olsen, 1996, 251/2)

Thus the idea of choice as part of a programme for planning what people might want from transport, but as revealed by most econometrics models, is questionable.

This distinction, between language – and hence research practices - as a simple mirror of ‘the real’ or as part of a discursive practice, as narratives with material effects, can be seen in two philosophical revolutions developed by the Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein first outlined what later become know as logical positivism, that is the view of language as a pointer, or reference, to the real. Logical positivism suggests that the world is referred to via language which neutrally reflects objects and facts. Unsurprisingly, this is known as the picture theory of language. For example, take the following assertion from his exposition of this position, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that describes language as if it is just a tool for pointing: ‘4.022 A proposition shows its sense’, (Wittgenstein, 1976, 21,25, emphases in original).

Twenty-seven years later, Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to a new book, Philosophical Investigations:

What ‘determining the length’ means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meanings of the word ‘length’ is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length.

(Wittgenstein, 1986, 225, emphases in original).

Thus if meaning comes from cultural context, then transport models cannot capture all of ‘the real’ as if what they depict could attain objectivity and value-free status. The need is to be aware of the contexts in which particular models are applied and thus to be aware of the constraints and particular sets of meanings and practices that are implicit in them. Thus econometrics or CBA do not just describe ‘real’ situations, they represent a culturally specific appropriation of those situations along with assumptions generated by the modelling techniques. The information they generate is partial and relative, even given much greater levels of sophistication in the modelling techniques, not absolute. This is an important point. Some of our culture's most revered concepts such as ‘objectivity’, ‘unbiased’, ‘value-free’ and ‘scientific’ take their legitimacy from particular language games, such as the idea that facts and values are entirely separate³.

In mainstream transport studies and in allied disciplines such as econometrics, it is as if Wittgenstein's second philosophical revolution has never happened. These disciplines assume that the econometric models that they build to measure transport demand are representing empirically given objectivity, with derived demand as discrete variables, separate from the desire for mobility as a social and temporal phenomenon or construct. But these transport planning and engineering practices are specific to, in Wittgenstein's terminology, certain language games, they are self-fulfilling in terms of representing certain cultural and political practices and then catering for them.

If the cultural and institutional basis for models for transport is recognised, then it is easier to develop a vision for how and where transport could change⁴. Institutional factors describe what, in the last instance, can be changed or transcended. For instance, using a theoretical approach that could loosely be called institutionalism, and which has been developed with reference to social institutions electoral politics or property rights, Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes:

… a practice of social and historical explanation may fully acknowledge the tenacity of institutional orders; it need not degenerate into a voluntarist fantasy about the unlimited malleability of social arrangements. For even when we affirm the ramshackle character of institutional arrangements, we can also acknowledge how, once established, they gain a second-order necessity. The conceptions of group identity and group interest that they sustain begin to reconfirm them. Organisational and technological styles that cannot readily be changed, without risks and costs of transition, take them for granted. Influential doctrines, expounded as scientific insight in the universities of the leading powers, lend them a semblance of naturalness and necessity. Nevertheless, they remain, in the end, neither natural nor necessary.

(Unger, 1998, 23)

In other words, it is time to move beyond the idea that interests are fixed and immutable. There are many explanations of the idea of a vision or the secular idea of transcendence in social terms, but such an approach has not been widely explored in relation to the methodology of transport studies.

Conventional transport studies models do not contain a vision of what holds communities, aspirations together and what creates transformative possibilities. This question brings us back to the challenge of this book, that of posing the difficult questions of assessing what different groups want from transport using methodologies derived from the social sciences. Each of the pieces that follows poses that question in a way that includes contexts and that recognises that groups' interests are often tied to particular institutional practices, so are changeable.

Using a fuller range of the social sciences to analyse transport means that complex cultural changes can be analysed and interests that may have seemed fixed and opposed can be repositioned⁵. The chapters that follow open up new possibilities to challenge old means of holding interests as fixed and antagonistic and they provide the chance to move beyond old patterns and antagonisms, such as that between the traveller and the non-traveller.

New Dimensions in Mobility Discourses

This book, perhaps unusually for one that is looking at new methods for understanding transport in the context of arguing for sustainability, is starting from the recognition that most of us reading this enjoy some aspects of consumerism and gain from the opportunities for emancipation and new identities that contemporary forms of travel, communications and trade can bring. It would be foolish to try to deny the pleasures and benefits, such as new insights into different cultures, as well as greater scope for combining domestic responsibilities and paid work, that modern forms of travel can confer (Castells, 1997; Hewitt, 1993; Urry, 2001a; 2001b; Ward, 1991).

It would be equally foolish to try to deny the negative social and environmental consequences current ground and air traffic levels (Bendixson, 1977; Illich, 1974; Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 1994; 1997; Root, 2000; Whitelegg, 1993). Transport policies, at least in industrialised North Atlantic rim countries, often have seemingly contradictory goals – involving building more roads at the time as moralistic appeals to individuals to cut down on their car journeys (DETR, 1998). Consumers of transport are also frequently contradictory – and their ambivalence needs to be given more recognition (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). If judged by the criteria of curbing the continuing growth in travel these policies – and some people's best intentions - are spectacularly unsuccessful, except, perhaps, amongst a tiny minority, some of whom are able to reduce the need to travel by using information technology (DETR, 2001a; DETR, 2001b).

Potential alliances around sustainability are frequently stymied by technocratic debates about what the exact goals or targets should be. Hence, in what follows, sustainability will be given a relatively populist definition and used as a shorthand term for ‘environmental space’ which refers to ‘the area that human beings can use in the natural environment without doing lasting harm to essential characteristics’ (Sachs et al, 2000, 12). This covers utilisation of natural resources not being greater than regeneration rates, discharge of materials not being greater than environmental capacity to absorb them; utilisation of non-renewable resources being kept to a minimum and the time factor in human intervention being in balance with that of natural processes (op cit.). Transportation is the largest end-use energy sector (see, for instance, Peake, 1994; Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) 1994; Sperling and Shaheen, 1995; von Weizsacker et al, 1998). Transport is thus one of the most important sectors that need reform if sustainability is to be achieved.

The following chapters begin to build narratives and to provide material for debates that can be used to disrupt the current transport planning frameworks. The first section ‘Globalisation, Markets and Regulation – the Need for New Paradigms’ deals with existing transport planning paradigms, and critiques them and their limitations. The chapter by Cathy McKenzie takes a broad perspective and looks at how globalisation and other changes in economic relationships underpin transport. McKenzie argues that transport cannot be understood independently of its economic and social context, therefore it is important that transport planners and others understand the forces that drive transport demand before they start to try to influence them. The article by Kerry Hamilton focuses on policy issues and how there has been an assumption has been that mobility is to be encouraged and catered for. The chapter by Elliott Sclar and K.H. Schaeffer shows the limits of market forces. It illustrates, using economists' tools, how market forces alone cannot be relied upon to regulate transport for socially inclusive outcomes.

In the second section of the book ‘Post-Modernity and Reflexivity’, there is a chapter by Tom Turrentine which is a theoretical overview of many of the main traditions of social theory from the twentieth century as applied to the choice of cars and travel. He looks at the work of various members of what is know as the Frankfurt School and later theorists and also looks at how reflexivity, or self-awareness and reflection, enables the construction of identities and lifestyles that involve different travel and consumption choices. This is an innovative way of using these theories to explain the context of transportation choice. His article on the use of gaming interviews shows how an innovative form - the combination of use of travel diaries along with questions about changes to lifestyle - can be combined to provide insights that are radically different, but no less valid, than those derived from the more traditional survey. Suzanne MacDonald-Walker's chapter addresses the issue of the institutional framing of interests. She shows how the European Union's (EU) attempt to control bikers' behaviour allowed them to reflexively disrupt attempts at bureaucratic control.

Section Three, ‘Cultural Studies’, contains examinations of popular culture, and focuses attention on the context of sub-cultures and the creativity of subordinate groups. For example, by immersing himself in the detail (and reproducing the swearing) of a particular sub-cultural group of motorbikers, Paul Willis identifies some of the complex issues that determine how particular forms of transport are used and what they symbolise. This analysis shows how important the meanings of mobility accorded by particular sub-groups can be, significance that obliterates policy issues such as safety and noise reduction. The article on the mobility effects of spatiality by Elliott Sclar and K. H. Schaeffer analyses how changing cultural mores can interact with land-use and transportation to produce outcomes that are socially exclusive, not inclusive. Marco Hüttenmoser raises the issue of how lack of independent playspace fosters unhelpfully close and intense maternal relationships with preschool children. Starting from the premise that children develop social skills more easily if allowed independent play, his chapter challenges the view that the cost of heavy traffic can be measured by using the sorts of indicators used in most current transport studies.

In the fourth section contains examples of new policy relevant discourses. Juliet Solomon explores how mobility and accessibility can be evaluated and benchmarked as a contribution to social inclusion. Analysing usually overlooked links between policies, mobility, pollution and employment, John Whitelegg, Nick Williams and Jayanta Basu challenge the idea that motorization leads to improved quality of life for rickshaw pullers and the others in inner Calcutta. They construct their argument by combining interview data and survey material to raise issues usually overlooked in discourses about Western transport policies being transplanted into non-Western societies. The chapter by Mimi Sheller and John Urry shows how mobility and technology shapes civil society and political landscapes. Their chapter opens up new theoretical perspectives by showing how mobility can be treated as the basis of identity and social life, how it changes collective experience, technologies of speed and communication, relationships to time and space. This sort of analysis provides a crucial bridge between understanding mobility as a social construct and seeing its importance in policy terms. It invites the development of a new politics of proximity, mobility and communications in a framework that has yet to be fully explored.

This set of diverse methodological approaches is designed to show how the abandoning of simplistic methodologies, such as those modelling procedures based on seeing transport as an exchange relationship, is the only route to a more sustainable future. Acknowledging the ways in which debates have been constrained is probably the best way to move beyond acknowledging concerns about the social and environmental consequences of transport policies (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998; Stokes and Taylor, 1994). It is commonplace to see transport demand as affected by social and economic change. It is not yet easy to see how mobility also effects social relationships and political vision. When we learn to see transport as a morphing factor, an active force, it will become clearer how personally and politically important it is.