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This paper responds to calls for greater empirical investigation of the interrelationships between depoliticisation and repoliticisation processes. It does so by applying the ‘three faces’ (governmental, societal and discursive) organising perspective to a longitudinal analysis of transport policy in the UK. This case is important because acceptance of the current dominant policy solution – infrastructure spending – appears to have come full circle over a 30-year period. The research finds that today’s focus on infrastructure is enabled through intersecting and reinforcing depoliticisation processes, supporting the ‘three faces’ perspective. However, the paper also highlights the need for greater recognition of the state as a meta-governor of depoliticisation and the need for clarity on which aspect of a policy solution or problem (or the connections between them) is being depoliticised and repoliticised to better elucidate politicisation processes.

Each year, 1.35 million people are killed on the world's roads and another 20-50 million are seriously injured. Morbidity or serious injury from road traffic collisions is estimated to increase to 265 million people between 2015 and 2030. Current road safety management systems rely heavily on manual data collection, visual inspection and subjective expert judgment for their effectiveness, which is costly, time-consuming, and sometimes ineffective due to under-reporting and the poor quality of the data. A range of innovations offers the potential to provide more comprehensive and effective data collection and analysis to improve road safety. However, there has been no systematic analysis of this evidence base. To this end, this paper provides a systematic review of the state of the art. It identifies that digital technologies - Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine-Learning, Image-Processing, Internet-of-Things (IoT), Smartphone applications, Geographic Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), Drones, Social Media, Virtual-reality, Simulator, Radar, Sensor, Big Data - provide useful means for identifying and providing information on road safety factors including road user behaviour, road characteristics and operational environment. Moreover, the results show that digital technologies such as AI, Image processing and IoT have been widely applied to enhance road safety, due to their ability to automatically capture and analyse data while preventing the possibility of human error. However, a key gap in the literature remains their effectiveness in real-world environments. This limits their potential to be utilised by policymakers and practitioners.

Energy resilience is a complex issue, encapsulating a diversity of factors. Such complexity makes effective policymaking difficult, and requires a whole-systems approach. This paper argues that the bottom-up participatory causal loop mapping method can be helpful in facilitating a shared understanding of the issues, and can help facilitate the application of a whole-systems approach to the design of effective policy interventions. Focusing on Nepal as a case study, this paper outlines the participatory approach, highlighting the method’s value in visualising the variables and interconnections affecting the resilience of Nepal’s electricity supply. Through the mapping, participants identified four interconnected groups of factors as important for resilience: governance, technology, economic and social. Within these, political leadership was noted as particularly important. Environmental factors were largely absent, which is an interesting result given the emphasis on renewable sources and clean technologies in energy policy in Nepal. The outcomes of our bottom-up participatory approach show the significant benefit of using this approach for highlighting context-dependent understandings of complex issues and represents a novel methodological innovation for energy research, which could be applied in diverse geographies and contexts.

With the plethora of smart mobility innovations, their applications, and their pace of change, it is easy to get distracted by what these innovations can (potentially) do, rather than what we want or need them to do, if we are to meet our societal goals. The focus of this chapter is therefore on the extent to which smart mobility can help create policy change towards the goal of low carbon mobility. The concept of policy is broken down into its component parts, to outline the relationship between policy goals and policy instruments, and identifies the key tools underpinning policy instruments. In turn, the chapter situates policy instruments within an understanding of policy change and triggers for policy change, arguing there are two key ways in which transformative change can occur; exogenously and endogenously. The chapter argues that the onset of smart mobility does not suggest an exogenous shock to the current policy system, in which smart mobility disrupts the authority and beliefs inherent within the current policy approach to mobility. Smart mobility therefore in and of itself is unlikely to lead to a radical policy shift towards low carbon. However, in understanding smart mobility innovations as policy instruments, it is possible to envisage smart mobility incrementally changing policy towards low carbon mobility, if opportunities for reflexivity and learning are embedded within local policy contexts.

Automated vehicles (AVs) have the potential to cause profound shifts across a wide range of areas of human life, including economic structures, land use, lifestyles and personal well-being. Most current social science on AVs is\ud narrowly framed. Research on public attitudes has focused on whether people are likely to accept and use AVs. We\ud contend that failing to anticipate a wider range of profound social implications may have serious negative\ud consequences, and that social scientists from a range of disciplinary perspectives can provide invaluable insights.\ud Our conclusions are the product of a workshop in London held in 2018 to discuss the place of social science research\ud in relation to the development of AVs. This paper summarises a core selection of our concerns, interests, theoretical\ud and substantive points of reference and aspirations for a constructive role in this field of research and development.

This paper critiques the state of the art approaches to studying transportation policy. It does so through analysing 100 papers sampled from the two leading policy journals in the transportation literature. On applying two different frameworks for understanding policy, the review finds that only 13% of papers consider specific aspects of the policy cycle, that 60% focus on ‘tools’ for policy, and that two-thirds of papers did not engage with real-world policy examples or policy makers and focussed on quantitative analysis alone. We argue that these findings highlight the persistence of the technical-rational model within the transportation literature. This model, and the numerous traditions and disciplines that have fed into it have an important role to play in developing the transportation evidence base. However, we argue there are important questions of governance; such as context, power, resources and legitimacy, that are largely being ignored in the literature as it stands. The substantial lack of engagement with governance issues and debates means that as a field we are artificially, but more importantly, disproportionately generating a science of applied policy making which is unlikely to be utilised because of the distance between it and the realities on the ground. The paper identifies analytical approaches deployed readily in other fields that could be used to address some of the key deficiencies.

This chapter focuses on equity from a subjective well-being perspective. It argues that it is in interrogating the inequalities in levels of subjective well-being and how these link to objective factors that subjective well-being can shed new light on the nature of transport equity and potential ways in which transport inequity can be mitigated. Subjective well-being is understood here as an individual's own assessment of how they feel their life is going determined by their positive and negative emotional responses and evaluations of their personal experiences. Utilizing subjective well-being indicators alongside objective indicators therefore enables researchers and policymakers to interrogate the relationship between the social environment (uncovered through objective indicators) and emotion (uncovered through subjective indicators). In this chapter we posit the day reconstruction method (DRM) as one means through which the effect of transport on subjective well-being can be analyzed. The DRM is used to assess how individual's spend their time and how they experience the various activities and contexts of their lives; combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Here we apply the DRM to understanding the levels of subjective well-being experienced by commuters using different transport modes and show how these levels of subjective well-being can be analyzed in relation to different demographics in order to understand the equity implications. This methodology and the findings it produces provide policymakers with a more holistic understanding of the effect of travel on the individual and in turn challenge policy assumptions about the most effective ways to improve well-being for the populations which they serve.

As with previous transport innovations, the transition to ‘smart mobility’ will occur in different ways and at different speeds in different places. Innovations such as Uber and trials of autonomous vehicles are already being welcomed in some places but resisted in others or left to the market. While the technologies may have the potential to be deployed globally, how this happens is, in part, down to the institutional settings and approach to governance amongst all of the actors (public and private) involved. Deciding who should act, how, when and at what spatial scale is, we argue, critical in setting the conditions in which new mobility systems can flourish but in a way which promotes the goals of local, state and federal governments and meets the needs of citizens as well as the industries that promote them. This chapter reports on an international scenarios exercise conducted in 2017 across nine countries. Key dimensions of uncertainty were the degree of governmental involvement in steering policy and the degree of social desirability for smart mobility innovation. Reflecting on the period up to 2035, the scenarios considered the implications for smart mobility transitions by asking which innovations are more likely to flourish and which falter. Strong state involvement is reported as a necessary condition for the most integrated and sustainable visions of smart mobility. Other pathways were suggested to favour some innovations over others but typically offer a smaller market and more atomized and less sustainable set of mobility options.

This chapter considers the book as a whole to draw out the key findings and link these to broader themes. In it we suggest that as we are in the relatively early stages of smart mobility adoption, there exists a key window of opportunity to think about to what end, and how, the transition can be steered. If this window is not seized, there is a heightened risk that governments will always be responding to, rather than shaping, events. Four key themes emerge from our reflection. First, while the current system is not equitable, there is a need to be cognizant of who the new winners and losers will be in the next transition. It is far from clear that commercial business models always align with notions of social provision. Second, while the early stages of the transition appear to be marked by technological optimism, reinforced by government industrial strategies, it seems clear that without politics with a capital P, the opportunity to engage the public and educate decision-makers will be missed. This leads to our third point: that a lack of pro-active state engagement in the early stages of these innovations will undermine the institutional capacity to engage later on in the transition. Without governmental steering, the transition risks representing what we are given rather than what we want or need it to be. Finally, we highlight the importance of context to how the transition will unfold, with some countries or cities already at arm’s length from transport provision while others are more hands-on. The chapter concludes with our reflections on what actions governments could take now to prepare better for the transition and on what the volume of work says for future research needs. While greatly enthused and rewarded by the debates we have had in assembling this book, we see these as the starting point for future agendas and very much open to contestation. We, therefore, hope this book acts to advance the study of the governance of smart mobility and to elevate its status relative to the significant body of work underway on the technologies themselves.

It is only recently that researchers have attempted to directly link transport to models of well-being and in turn try to map transport's linkages to well-being outcomes. This paper seeks to add to this new literature by introducing a dynamic model of well-being, which highlights the different domains that make up well-being, and in turn — through providing one of the most holistic and comprehensive discussions of the current well-being literature — provide an evaluation of our current understanding of transport's relationship to well-being. The paper also seeks to highlight the different dimensions and complexities of seeking to monitor and improve well-being through transport policy. It will in turn be argued that the varied and complex sets of outcomes that arise from transport policy interventions, and the multiple ways in which they affect well-being, make a well-being approach (that measures policy outcomes in terms of units of well-being) of particular value for policy-makers. However, due ...

Well-being has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in Britain and beyond, signalled most clearly by Prime Minister Cameron's announcement in 2010 that well-being measures developed by the Office for National Statistics would be used to guide public policies. Here we seek to explain why well-being has risen up the British political agenda, drawing on Kingdon's multiple streams approach. While this approach has considerable merit, it does not acknowledge the complexity of multi-level governance in which policy, politics and problem streams can operate at different territorial levels. As such, we argue that the match between policy, politics and problem streams has to be not only temporal, but also spatial. The consequence is that, while in relation to measurement a paradigm shift may be taking place, in terms of decisive action there is some way to go before well-being can be described as ‘an idea whose time has come’.

Governments in a number of countries have shown increasing interest in seeking to elevate happiness or wellbeing as an explicit policy goal. This interest has led to fierce debates both within and, increasingly, beyond academe about the appropriate role for government in this area. It is difficult to adjudicate between the various arguments surrounding the issue as they often take very different starting points, either metatheoretical or disciplinary. In seeking to steer a course through these arguments we take the distinction between ‘wicked’ and ‘tame’ problems as a reference point, arguing that wellbeing should be categorised as the former. The seminal discussion of this distinction (Rittel and Webber in Policy Sci 4:155–169, 1973) resonates sharply with current debates on wellbeing and indeed is located within similar debates in the past. We argue that understanding wellbeing as a wicked problem steers us towards deliberation and scrutiny as central to the agenda and cautions us against expecting to find a panacea. However, this understanding can take us beyond irresolvable disputes by pointing to the need for pragmatic and legitimate government action. In developing our arguments we ground them mainly in relation to empirical research on developments in the UK, where the connection between wellbeing and public policy is seen as relatively advanced. However, we suggest these arguments apply to other contexts where wellbeing is gaining increasing traction as a potential goal of government policy.

In the past decade there has been an increasing focus at both national and international levels on the extent to which governments can improve the wellbeing of citizens. At the core of these developments has been concern with GDP as the dominant indicator of societal progress, leading to a plethora of initiatives that have sought alternative or complementary measures of progress. A pivotal moment in developments was the report of the influential ‘Stiglitz Commission’ (CMEPSP 2009), which argued for the use of subjective wellbeing (SWB) indicators alongside more widely used objective indicators of progress, such as employment rates and life expectancy. This feature of developments has proved highly controversial and the issues it raises are central to our discussion here.