Research challenges in urban transport policy

doi:10.1016/S0967-070X(03)00039-8

Transport Policy

Volume 10, Issue 3, July 2003, Pages 157-164

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0967-070X(03)00039-8 Get rights and content

Introduction

Transport is one of the most significant sources of unsustainability in urban areas. In European cities alone, traffic congestion costs in excess of €100B each year, local pollution and the resultant health impacts impose costs of a similar magnitude, and there are around 20,000 fatalities on urban roads each year. Many countries are now advocating integrated approaches to these problems, in which the full range of transport policy interventions (infrastructure, management, regulation, information and pricing) are combined with land use, environmental and wider social policy instruments (European Conference of Ministers of Transport, 1995). Most of the constituent elements of these strategies are already available, but there is a serious lack of detailed understanding of the impacts of many of these policy instruments and of their transferability to different contexts. Even more serious is the lack of understanding of how to design integrated strategies which most effectively combine infrastructure, management, regulation and pricing.

Even where appropriately sustainable strategies are identified, there are serious barriers to their implementation. The recent ECMT report (European Conference of Ministers of Transport, 2002) highlights poor policy integration and coordination, counterproductive institutional roles, unsupportive regulatory frameworks, weaknesses in pricing and poor data quality and quantity as reasons for the failure of most cities to pursue the policies advocated in its earlier report (European Conference of Ministers of Transport, 1995).

The papers in this special issue of Transport Policy are a selection of those presented at the inaugural conference of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) of the World Conference on Transport Research Society, SIG-10, which focuses on these critical issues in urban transport policy. Membership of the SIG is open to anyone with an interest in research, teaching or practice in urban transport, and details can be found in the WCTRS section of the journal.

When the new SIG was launched at the Ninth World Conference in Seoul in July 2001, it was agreed that its objectives should be:

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to increase our understanding of the performance of transport policy instruments;
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to determine the principles of policy integration;
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to develop good practice in the monitoring and appraisal of policy instruments;
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to identify good practice in the design, implementation and operation of policy instruments; and
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to develop interactive information tools to aid the understanding of urban transport policy for students, practitioners and decision-makers.

The inaugural conference, held in Leeds in July 2002, included sessions on all five of these themes, with a total of 14 papers. Copies of the conference proceedings are available from the authors of this paper. The eight papers included in this special issue cover the range of themes, while in many cases addressing more than one of them. In this overview paper we have endeavoured to draw out the key issues from these papers, while focusing on the research challenges which remain to be tackled. The structure of the paper follows the five bullet points listed above, focusing in turn on the papers by Taylor and Ampt, Mackett et al. (Section 2); Geerlings and Stead (Section 3); Jones et al., Nicolas et al. (Section 4); Gaffron, Ison and Rye (Section 5); and Litman (Section 6); but bringing in ideas from other papers where appropriate. We conclude by highlighting our view of the key research challenges which lie ahead.

Section snippets

Understanding the performance of policy instruments

One of the most significant developments of the last decade has been the emergence of a much wider range of policy instruments available to the urban transport planner. In our own work we identified some 80 types of policy instrument, including those in related sectors which influence transport (May et al., 2001); we have since focused on a shorter list of 60 which are being included in our Knowledgebase on Sustainable Land Use and Transport (KonSULT) (Matthews et al., 2002), which is referred

Integration of policy instruments

While most authors consider the impact of individual policy instruments, many note that performance will be affected by any other instruments in place. Indeed, a package of policy instruments could be significantly more effective than any one instrument taken alone. This introduces the concept of integration, which has been interpreted in very different ways by different authors. Our recent guidebook (May, 2003) identifies the potential for integration at five levels:

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operationally between

Policy monitoring and appraisal

Monitoring the performance of policy instruments as individual measures or packages of measures is essential to overall policy appraisal. Monitoring enables trends in the problems, and in the performance of overall strategies, to be determined. Two other elements which may be relevant are the setting of targets, as considered by Gaffron, and the use of benchmarking, to which Nicolas et al. refer in passing. In all cases, as all authors recognise, the process needs to be based on the objectives

Policy implementation

As the political focus turns from policy development towards implementation, the research agenda has similarly shifted and research into policy implementation has begun to emerge. It starts from a recognition that the implementation of transport policy involves a wide range of individuals and organisations, and that there may be barriers to the smooth implementation of policy. As noted earlier, a number of concerns about the difficulties of policy implementation have been highlighted by the

Interactive information tools

Two new information tools were presented at the Conference: our own Knowledgebase on Sustainable Land Use and Transport, KonSULT (Matthews et al., 2002; www.transportconnect.net/konsult/index.html), and Litman's Online Transportation Demand Management Encyclopaedia (www.vtpi.org/tdm/). Litman describes clearly the reasons for the development of such tools; cities need to understand how policy instruments work, whether they can help tackle the problems which a given city faces, and whether they