Karen Lucas

Assessment of Capabilities for Examining Long-Term Social Sustainability of Transport and Land Use Strategies

The development of transport and land use strategies tends to rely, to a large degree, on inputs from large strategic models. Although it is commonplace for such models to assess the economic and environmental impacts of transport strategies, few provide any real understanding of their social impacts. This paper reports on a study that aims to improve how the social sustainability of transport strategies is considered. The study is part of a wider project conducted to improve the ability to assess the overall sustainability of transport decisions. It describes the four-stage method that was adopted. The approach is pioneering, focusing as it does on accessibility to key services and facilities as a primary measure of social sustainability. Nevertheless, the approach has a number of serious limitations in both selecting indicators and applying them in practice. It is also clear from the experiences with adapting the outputs of state-of-the-art models that the technical capacity for assessing the social implications of transport continues to fall well short of the technical capacity for assessing the economic and environmental impacts of strategies. A series of recommendations to improve the technical capacity in this respect is provided.

Putting the 'E' into LSPs: representing the environment within local strategic partnerships (LSPs) in the UK

Abstract This article reports the findings of a qualitative study with residents living in six deprived neighbourhoods in the UK and the front-line workers and local policymakers responsible for the renewal of these areas. The study was an attempt to raise awareness of local environmental concerns in the context of a national and local policy agenda, which has, until recently, largely overlooked the impacts of degraded environments on the lives and activities of the people who live in them. A key aim for the study was to raise peoples concerns with local decision-makers and examine how far these might be addressed through the existing financial, administrative and legislative arrangements for neighbourhood renewal in the UK, namely Local Strategic Partnerships. The research was designed to provide practical lessons and policy recommendations for others wishing to raise the profile of environmental justice in the context of neighbourhood level regeneration projects, in both the UK and elsewhere in the ‘developed’ world.

Qualitative Methods in Transport Research: The ‘Action Research’ Approach

Abstract Purpose — This paper explores the potential of ‘action research’ as transport survey method, with particular emphasis on critically assessing its utility in the resolution of major transport policy challenges, such as the mitigation of climate change and environmental impacts, transport-related social exclusion and intergenerational equity issues. Although not particularly novel within the social sciences, it is an approach that has been largely overlooked within the field of transport studies to date. Methodology/approach — The paper presents practical examples of where action research has been used to elicit information about peoples travel experiences and behaviours and discusses how it achieves different outcomes from other qualitative transport survey methods. It identifies appropriate contexts for action research and explores the skills and techniques to overcome some of the main criticisms of the method. It then evaluates some of the critical challenges of applying an action research approach and identifies potential ways for overcoming these. Finally, it discusses the key challenges for analysis, presentation and dissemination of their action research ‘data’ and potential ways of overcoming these. Findings — Action research has a long history within the social sciences, dating back to practical problems in wartime situations in Europe and the United States. It can be applied at either the level of individuals, small groups and/or ‘communities’ and organisations, with the expressed aim of bringing together research enquiry and future policy or planned actions (ibid). It provides a useful additional survey technique for policy-makers wishing to understand the detailed process of travel behaviours and barrier to travel at the individual level. Originality/value of the paper — The action research method is specifically useful for supporting and actively encouraging behaviour change as an integral part of the research process. It has only recently emerged within the literature as a transport survey method. It can be a particularly useful method for developing more collaborative data collection methods research participants enquires and thus enable us to identify their underlying motivations, intentions, perceptions and negotiations, as well as the micro-level impacts of smaller scale transport initiatives.

Actual and Perceived Car Dependence: Likely Implications of Enforced Reductions in Car Use for Livelihoods, Lifestyles, and Well-Being

A scoping study was conducted into the nature of car dependence in the United Kingdom. The primary aims of the study were to gain deeper insight into the changing nature and causes of car dependence over the past 20 years, to consider whether dependence was a useful way of characterizing the situation, and to identify the likely economic and social consequences of moving beyond the current voluntary interventions primarily being used to encourage people to reduce their car use and to adopt alternative, more sustainable modes. The new direction is toward more coercive and nonvoluntary future interventions, such as road pricing or carbon taxation. The study involved four interactive stages: a literature and policy review, time series analysis of data from the U.K. National Travel Survey 1995 to 1996 and 2005 to 2006, interviews with key local stakeholders, and exploratory focus-group exercises with selected members of the general public. Reported are findings of the literature review and exploratory focus-group exercises only. A full report of the study and supporting working papers can be found on the Royal Automobile Club Foundation website www.racfoundation.org.

UPWARDLY MOBILE: REGENERATION AND THE QUEST FOR SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY IN THE THAMES GATEWAY

Abstract This paper explores the potentially conflicting relationship between government regional policies for the regeneration of the Thames Gateway and local government attempts to reduce public reliance on the motor car as a primary means of transportation. A primary purpose of the paper is, therefore, to appraise the transport policy recommendations of RPG 9A (DoE, 1995) and analyse the extent to which they are consistent with the transport planning guidance set out in PPG 13 (DoE/DoT, 1994). Transport infrastructure has been identified as vital to the regeneration process, largely due to the characterisation of regeneration as dependent on high levels of access and rapid mobility, both within the regeneration area and to other economically active areas. Usually, this has meant the introduction of road expansion projects into local authority transport policies and programmes for the area. In recent years, however, a growing consensus has evolved amongst policy makers and local planning authorities, which recognises that increases in the capacity of the roads network, rather than solving the problems of traffic congestion, encourage increases in traffic growth. It is now generally accepted within the transport planning arena that these traffic trends are economically and environmentally unsustainable and that to attempt to meet increased demand with increases in road capacity is no longer viable. As a consequence of this recognition, demand management has re-emerged as the preferred transport planning option. Given this policy shift, it could be presumed that regeneration plans for the Gateway would require a planning framework which seeks to implement a more sustainable pattern of development, closely integrated with the introduction of a transport system which can contain or even reduce the increases in travel demand which have traditionally arisen from regeneration projects. This research, however, highlights an apparent shortfall between transport policy statements for the Gateway, which follow the rhetoric of sustainable development, and development proposals but will tend to increase volumes of traffic as well as the propensity to travel if implemented in their present form. The paper argues that if enhanced environmental standards through regeneration are indeed the aim of Thames Gateway planning proposals, a radical re-evaluation of the current transport strategy is essential.

Chapter 11 Transport and Climate Change Policy in the United Kingdom: A Social Justice Perspective

Purpose – The social dimensions of the relationship between transport and climate change are examined, in particular, the potential for unintended negative consequences to directly and/or indirectly arise from policies to reduce the climate change impact of the transport sector. It takes the example of current policies in the UK as its primary focus. Methodology/approach – A combination of literature, policy review and the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered through primary fieldwork research from a number of related studies. Findings – It is identified that different social groups can experience very different outcomes in accessing transport and adapting to changes to the transport system, whether these are uniquely targeted towards certain individuals or more systemically applied across the whole population. For this reason, it is essential that policy makers fully understand the potential vulnerability and resilience of different social groups to policies that are intended to address transport-related climate change. The key component of social impacts should be systematically analyzed, by income, potential vulnerability and their spatial and temporal distribution, as well as according to resilience/adaptability to the proposed intervention. This continues to pose an important future challenge for research in this area of transport policy making. Originality/value – This chapter highlights the potential for unintended negative social consequences to directly and/or indirectly arise from policies to reduce the climate change impact of the transport sector.

A critical assessment of accessibility planning for social inclusion

This book will prove an absorbing read for scholars, researchers and students working on accessibility issues across various academic fields including civil engineering, economics, geography, and the social sciences.

Building capacity through action research: reflections on working with low-carbon communities in the UK

ABSTRACT This paper describes a four-year programme of “action research” (AR) undertaken with six communities in the UK, referred to as the Evaluating Low-Carbon Communities (EVALOC) project. The research combined a programme of research events with phased household-level monitoring of energy and carbon-reduction interventions. The carbon-reduction interventions were funded by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change prior to the onset of the research. AR has recently been adopted within the context of environmental behaviour change programmes in the UK, with a number of methodological challenges. The EVALOC project’s challenges included developing a collaborative research design; building reciprocity between the researchers and research participants; dealing with biases and burdens in the research process; ensuring analytical rigour in the interpretation of the primarily qualitative evidence and dealing with the long-term and process-driven outcomes that arise from such interactions. This paper explores and discusses the challenges of AR in relation to selected research outcomes from EVALOC. We conclude by suggesting that the AR approach has helped to build capacity in the participating low-carbon communities (LCCs), through supporting the design, delivery and evaluation of their energy and carbon-reduction activities.