Transport Policy Learning Lessons From History

The key aim of this volume is to demonstrate ways in which an understanding of history can be used to inform present-day transport and mobility policies. This is not to say that history repeats itself, or that every contemporary transport dilemma has an historical counterpart: rather, the contributors to this book argue that in many contexts of transport planning a better understanding of the context and consequences of past decisions and processes could lead to more effective policy decisions. Collectively the authors explore the ways in which the methods and approaches of historical research may be applied to contemporary transport and policy issues across a wide range of transport modes and contexts. By linking two bodies of academic research that for the most part remain separate this volume helps to inform current transport and mobility policies and to stimulate innovative new research that links studies of both past and present mobilities.

From local bike-sharing initiatives to overhauls of transport infrastructure, mobility is one of the most important areas in which modern cities are trying to realize a more sustainable future. Yet even as politicians and planners look ahead, there remain critical insights to be gleaned from the history of urban mobility and the unsustainable practices that still impact our everyday lives. United by their pursuit of a “usable past,” the studies in this interdisciplinary collection consider the ecological, social, and economic aspects of urban mobility, showing how historical inquiry can make both conceptual and practical contributions to the projects of sustainability and urban renewal.

This book uses diaries written by ordinary British people over the past two centuries to examine and explain the nature and extent of everyday mobilities, such as travel to school, to work, to shop or to visit friends, and to explore the meanings attached to these mobilities. After a critical evaluation of diary writing, the ways in which mobility changed over time, interacted with new forms of transport technology, and varied from place to place are examined. Further chapters focus on the roles of family and life course, gender, income and class, and journey purpose in shaping mobilities, including immobility. It is argued that easy and frequent everyday mobilities were experienced by most of the diarists studied, that travellers could exercise their own agency to adapt easily to new forms of transport technology, but that factors such as gender, class, and location also created significant mobility inequalities.

This book provides an innovative perspective on migration, mobility and transport. Using concepts drawn from migration history, mobilities studies and transport history it makes the case for greater integration of these disciplines. The approach is historical, demonstrating how past processes of travel and population movement have evolved, examining the continuities and changes that have occurred, and arguing that many of the concepts used in mobilities studies today are equally relevant to the past. The three central chapters view past population movements through, respectively, the lenses of migration history, mobilities studies and transport. Two further chapters demonstrate the diversity of mobility experiences and the opportunities and difficulties of applying this approach in teaching and research. Extensive case study material from around the world is used, including personal diaries, which vividly recreate the everyday experiences of past mobilities. Population movement has never been of more importance globally: this book demonstrates how knowledge of past mobility experiences can inform our understanding of the present.

For the majority of us the opportunity to travel has never been greater, yet differences in mobility highlight inequalities that have wider social implications. Exploring how and why attitudes towards movement have evolved across generations, the case studies in this essay collection range from medieval to modern times and cover several continents.

Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.

This book explores the mobile ethnography of Dar es Salaam, where consultants and politicians have planned and implemented a bus rapid transit (BRT) system for two decades. It analyses the dual processes of assembling BRT in the Tanzanian metropolis and establishing BRT as a policy model of and for the Global South. The book elucidates how policy models are constructed and circulated around the globe and depicts the processes by which they are translated between, and materialise within, specific contexts. It presents the case of BRT to demonstrate how technocrats shape these processes through persuasive work aimed at disseminating and stabilising this transport model, and how local actors influence its adaptation in Dar es Salaam. The book adopts a ‘double mobility’ approach to show how this ethnography follows travelling consultants, circulating policies and moving buses to explore the fluidity of the BRT model. Linking key debates in policy mobility studies and Science and Technology Studies, enriched with postcolonial perspectives and geographies of transport and infrastructure, it offers new insights into the technopolitics of planning and implementing infrastructure systems. This book will appeal to academics and students of human geography, transport studies, science and technology studies, and African and development studies interested in the technopolitics of transport planning.

This book analyses the perceived legitimacy of health and safety in post-1960 British public life. Since 2010 health and safety has appeared to be in crisis, being attacked by press, politicians and public alike, but are these claims of crisis accurate? How have understandings of health and safety changed over the past 60 years? By exploring the history, culture, and operation of health and safety in contemporary Britain, this book provides a new assessment of an understudied, but surprisingly far-reaching, part of the British political and social landscape. Combining archival research with focus group, social survey and oral history testimony, the book examines the historical background to health and safety, how health and safety has been enacted in public and in the workplace, the impact of changing economic, occupational and social structures on the operation of health and safety, and the conflicts and interests that have shaped the area.