Iain Docherty

Purpose: In the broader context of the pursuit of a more sustainable transport policy in the United Kingdom, the paper aims to explore issues that emerged during the instigation, development and implementation of a national smart ticketing policy for England. Design/methodology/approach: The primary empirical information in this paper was derived from 51 semi-structured interviews with 61 key stakeholders in the process of developing and implementing a smart ticketing policy. Participants were identified through a purposive sampling approach designed to engage respondents because of the position they occupy and the quality of information they can provide. Findings: Difficulties emerged in the partnership approach to policy delivery made necessary by the privatised and deregulated operating environment, and a national smartcard scheme is still not in place. The Department for Transport appears to have struggled to resolve tensions between imposing the government’s will on the one hand, and not wanting to be seen to interfere with the functioning of the market on the other. Originality/value: A detailed insight into the difficulties of a previously unreported aspect of sustainable transport policy delivery in the UK, and an under-reported aspect of public transport smart card use internationally. The findings point to particular cultural and institutional difficulties that prevented successful policy rollout, and the implications of failure are considered in the context of attempts to promote modal shift from private cars to public transport.

Connected and Autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are championed by their advocates as a solution to many resilient problems of the current transport system. Whilst offering undoubted advantages, especially in terms of road safety, there are also many potential socio-economic risks to the widespread adoption of CAVs. These range from increased congestion to renewed urban sprawl and community dislocation. In considering how best to manage the transition to this new technology, governments will need to be focused on achieving genuine public value, and avoid the rush to embrace CAVs in such a way that undesirable policy path dependencies take hold.

This is a composite paper bringing together six personal reflections on being supervised as doctoral students by Ronan Paddison. It contributes insightful and poignant voices of experience to a special issue commemorating the academic contributions - here with wider implications beyond the immediately 'academic' - of Ronan Paddison (1945-2019), the founder and for many years Editor-in-Chief of this journal, Space and Polity. The six sets of reflections have been authored independently of one another, but their cumulative effect is to demonstrate the depth of 'hidden' academic (and related) contribution made by Ronan to nurturing early career academics formally (through the doctoral supervision process) and more informally (in numerous ways and sometimes continuing well beyond the submission and award of a thesis).

Real estate development is an intensely social process dependent on rich networks of relations between public and private sector actors. Previous work has explored how far such relations are formalised in large cities through shared coalitions of interest intended to promote urban growth. Relatively little attention has been given to networks in smaller cities, which is the concern of this paper. Drawing on detailed research in a small Scottish city, the paper explores how its local network was characterised by strong reliance on network construction and reproduction through trust and reputation. Significantly, within such local networks, competition and collaboration can exist side by side, without subsuming normal tensions into consistent agendas or formally defined ‘partnerships’. Controlling land for urban expansion provides a particular focus for these tensions, since it can allow certain interests to gain network dominance. These findings raise important concerns around whether small cities should rely on informal networks to promote growth instead of constructing formal coalitions that may attract more externally based actors. Such choices have profound implications for the capacity and transparency of development networks, and thus for the accountability of the urban development process.

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.

Reducing carbon emissions from the transport sector has become a critical imperative for public policy as our understanding of the impacts of the mobility system on the environment has developed. This paper contrasts policy development in three cities (Aberdeen, Bremen and Malmö) that collaborated as part of a European Union knowledge exchange programme designed to share innovative approaches to carbon reduction in the transport sector. We identify a number of critical aspects of governance, including the approach to policy formulation and implementation, and the status of consensus and cohesion, as key determinants of transport outcomes. We conclude that the degree of institutional alignment evident in each city’s governance network is crucial in explaining their appetite for the pursuit of low carbon policies, and in turn the real potential for policy transfer to occur as envisaged by European Union collaboration frameworks.