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. 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. 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. 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.

High Speed 2-the planned new railway from London to the north of England-is one of the largest and most controversial public sector investment projects Britain has attempted in decades. Much has been written about the huge cost overruns that the project has suffered, and why this led to the eventual cancellation of the line beyond its first phase now under construction. In this article, we explore two under-appreciated aspects of this story: first, the (unintended) consequences of those forms of professional expertise privileged by decision making machinery, and second how the politics of charisma are essential in understanding how the project both came to prominence and subsequently fell from grace.

This paper examines how the UK transport governance system responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and what this reveals about its capacity for transformative change amid broader societal challenges, or the “polycrisis.” Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset of interviews with senior transport decision-makers across four waves from 2020 to 2021, the study explores the tension between policy stability and change. While the pandemic disrupted travel behaviour—reducing commuting, increasing remote work, and shifting modal preferences—governance responses largely aimed to restore pre-pandemic norms and practices rather than seize the opportunity for systemic transformation.Despite recognition of significant behavioural shifts and the potential for substantial long-term behavioural adaptations, a combination of institutional inertia, rigid funding mechanisms, and entrenched professional norms constrained adaptive policymaking. Instead, a desire to “return to normal” dominated, driven by political, fiscal, and operational pressures, which has left the sector in a worse position than before in terms of its capacity to tackle longstanding policy challenges and achieve the non-incremental shifts required to address the critical problems it faces.The implications of the work are a need to move beyond the false “change versus stability” narrative and recognise that some societal trends are constantly in flux whilst others endure. Policy recognition of the change in the everyday is a pre-cursor to policy change in both more stable and turbulent times, rather than hoping that events will somehow conspire to unlock the more radical responses that are recognised to be necessary to respond to the polycrisis.

This chapter reviews the range of transport policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary focus is on responses in England but comparative perspectives are provided with the devolved administration in Scotland where divergence is becoming increasingly evident. In July 2021, with just under one-half of the population having received two vaccine doses, social distancing restrictions have largely been lifted. Continued high levels of infection are influencing a slow return to work, with ongoing implications for the viability of public transport. The chapter reflects on the policy interventions to date and looks ahead to the key challenges for the months and years ahead. In particular, the chapter focusses on public transport. While huge amounts of public funding have been used to support public transport; it seems inevitable that there will need to be a readjustment in patterns of supply given the changing nature of work and business travel.

Nicola Sturgeon's resignation as First Minister and leader of the SNP has thrown Scottish politics into flux. But beneath the superficial media coverage and frenetic party politics that followed her resignation, the fundamentals of the constitutional debate remain unaltered. One of these fundamentals, the extent to which Scotland is better or worse off being part of the UK political economy, is rarely debated in the depth it deserves. The parlous state of the UK economy and, in particular, the deeply entrenched territorial inequality that results from its extreme core-periphery structure that safeguards the economic dominance of London and South East England, holds the potential for a surprise shift in the debate over independence to emerge.

This paper highlights the extent to which a future mobility system dominated by Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) poses profound challenges to the 'publicness' of the transport and mobility systems of many cities. This is evident at different policy levels: the regulatory posture of governments, changing notions of the contributions of mobility to wider 'public value', and the underpinning shared experiences of urban life and citizenship or civitas. There is relatively little discussion of how widespread automation might reduce the 'publicness' of transport systems in terms of the range of mobility opportunities they offer, how changing patterns of mobility across neighbourhoods and social groups will contribute to urban restructuring, and the implications of this for public value and the character or civitas of cities. In particular, we note how the huge expansion in mobility choices made possible by CAVs might lead to circumstances in which the outcome of individuals exercising that choice is to change the nature of urban mobility profoundly. We identify a number of key challenges that policy makers will need to address in managing the introduction of CAVs in their cities, and how using the lens of 'publicness' might help them do so.

The concept of ‘inclusive growth’ (IG) is discussed in a political economy framework. The article reports comparative analysis of economic and planning policy documents from Scotland, England and the UK and findings from expert workshops held in Scotland, which identify four key policy areas for ‘inclusive growth’: skills, transport and housing for young people; city-regional governance; childcare; and place-making. These policies share with the ‘Foundational Economy’ an emphasis on everyday infrastructure and services, but add an emphasis on inter-generational justice and stress the importance of community empowerment as much as re-municipalisation. Factors enabling IG policy development include: the necessary political powers; a unifying political discourse and civic institutions; and inclusive governance and participatory democracy.

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.

Nine months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, it is startling to reflect on the profound changes to all aspects of daily life which have been necessary. Public policy has responded at a pace not seen for decades, and the general public has accepted restrictions to freedoms and changes to their everyday activities beyond what was thought acceptable before the pandemic. There have, of course, been hugely negative impacts of some of these changes to livelihoods, education and the mental and physical health and well-being for some. However, many of the adaptations we have seen in working and other practices such have shopping have shown the pandemic as an accelerant of trends that were already established. These changes have potentially profound effects on how we move about in the future and even where we live and work. This chapter critically reviews some of the big policy questions which we face as the prospect of an effective vaccine and planning for after the pandemic takes centre stage. Should we design for a morning peak or design out a morning peak? Should we encourage or challenge the flight to the suburbs and beyond? Can we maintain the momentum for reallocating space for people rather than vehicles which was brought into such sharp relief at the start of the crisis? All of these debates exist in the shadows of the climate crisis which points us in one direction. Whether they remain strong enough to withstand the calls to ‘get the economy moving’ remains to be seen.

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).

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.

Glasgow is a city of multiple transport contradictions. It has some of the lowest levels of car ownership in the UK, but has the most extensive urban motorway network and high car usage and congestion. It has the only underground railway of any age never to have been extended. Governance arrangements for transport have changed frequently, and have failed to deliver the kind of improvements taken for granted in peer cities. Can the city break out of this pattern and deliver the kind of transport it needs in 21 century context dominated by concerns over climate change and social inclusion as well as economic growth?

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.

The transition to a future of ‘Smart Mobility’ – a mobility system characterised by real time organisation via the internet incorporating technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles – has the potential to transform many aspects of everyday life. Many countries have evolved a system of ‘multi-level governance’ (MLG) to manage the formulation and implementation of public policies at different spatial scales. Whilst MLG has several potential advantages, such as providing multiple sites for policy innovation and de-risking the implementation of new policies by piloting them in particular places, the existence of many different governing tiers with different priorities and mandates requires skilful management and coordination. The management of any substantive, disruptive transition such as that to Smart Mobility is challenging for the policy system per se; for countries with MLG systems, the task is made more complex still by the need to achieve sufficient policy alignment between different tiers and entities of governance to implement new policy instruments in practice. The specific instruments of transport pricing and roadspace reallocation provide clear examples of these challenges and pointers to how implementation questions might be resolved in an MLG framework.

The continued failure to put transport on a robust low carbon transition pathway calls for new approaches in policy and research. In studies of transport systems and patterns of mobility, established approaches to data collection, analysis and subsequent policy design have focused on capturing ‘typical’ conditions rather than identifying the potential for substantive change. This focus on the apparent aggregate stability of the transport regime has reproduced a belief in policy circles that our current travel patterns are largely fixed and therefore very difficult to alter, which in turn has resulted in an over reliance on implausible assumptions about the carbon reductions that can be achieved through technological improvements such as low emission vehicles.This paper argues that there is potentially much greater adaptive capacity in the mobility system than currently allowed for. It illustrates this potential through the investigation of actual adaptations made during a set of specific ‘disruptive’ events. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can go further in reducing the demand for travel if we broaden the scope of intervention to take a wider view of when and how mobility matters to participation in activities across the population. This research pre-dates the Covid-19 pandemic but should help inform the policy responses in a period where a step-wise return to a ‘new normal’ is enacted.

We begin by considering why, how and how much transport matters, both in itself and in relation to a whole host of public policy areas including economic development, social inclusion, health and wellbeing, (im)migration, education, crime / law and order, housing and the environment. We set out and explain the aim of the book, and provide an overview of transport policy over the last 50 years by way of context for a summary of what follows in the remainder of the book. We conclude by considering key themes that emerged in authors’ discussions during the process of putting the book together.