Transport Sociology

Transport Sociology: Social Aspects of Transport Planning focuses on the importance of an efficient transport plan in ensuring order in neighborhoods and social functions, as well as management and control of the environmental impacts of transport systems in communities and cities. The manuscript first offers information on the relationship of social impacts and infrastructure and a neighborhood protest of an urban highway in Brookline-Elm. Topics include project and environment in a process of development; assessment and aid; social character of Brookline-Elm neighborhoods; and effectiveness of protest. The text also reviews the problems and proposals in urban freeways and social structure, including the psychological impacts of physical disruption, social functioning and physical disruption, and the city as a social system. The publication discusses the social and environmental impacts of transport investments, as well as the conceptual model of environmental impacts, strategies for impact assessment, and comparative nature of impact assessment. The book also takes a look at the environmental quality of city streets and the sociology of car traffic in towns. Topics include traffic as a social system; restructuring traffic facilities; traffic and town planning; social interaction; and stress, noise, and pollution. The manuscript is a dependable source of data for readers interested in studying the social facets of transport planning.

Over the past ten years, the study of mobility has demonstrated groundbreaking approaches and new research patterns. These investigations criticize the concept of mobility itself, suggesting the need to merge transport and communication research, and to approach the topic with novel instruments and new methodologies. Following the debates on the role of users in shaping transport technology, new mobility research includes debates from sociology, planning, economy, geography, history, and anthropology. This edited volume examines how users, policy-makers, and industrial managers have organized and continue to organize mobility, with a particularly attention to Europe, North America, and Asia. Taking a long-term and comparative perspective, the volume brings together thirteen chapters from the fields of urban studies, history, cultural studies, and geography. Covering a variety of countries and regions, these chapters investigate how various actors have shaped transport systems, creating models of mobility that differ along a number of dimensions, including public vs. private ownership and operation as well as individual vs. collective forms of transportation. The contributions also examine the extent to which initial models have created path dependencies in terms of technology, physical infrastructure, urban development, and cultural and behavioral preferences that limit subsequent choices.

All too often, mobility is evoked as a preferred indicator in explanations of space-time compression and its impact. However, in failing to clearly distinguish speed potentials from their use, such analyses veer towards technological determinism, or else towards the normative domain. In order to avoid this trap, the motivations underlying mobility must be explored. This groundbreaking examination is carried out through a discussion of the following general question: to what extent can the speed potentials generated by technological transportation systems be considered as vectors of social change? It also provides an opportunity to study in greater depth the little-known field of the sociology of mobility. Following an examination of the existing controversies surrounding social fluidification, it proposes to rethink mobility using the new concept of motility. Current contributions to and research results in this new area are included and the book indicates possible new research directions, opening the way to a new form of general sociology.

Transportation research has traditionally been dominated by engineering and logistics research approaches. This book integrates social, economic, and behavioral sciences into the transportation field. As its title indicates, emphasis is on socioeconomic changes, which increasingly govern the development of the transportation sector. The papers presented here originated at a conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport held at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1999, under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines, including geography and regional science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, come from twelve different countries. Their subjects cover the consequences of environmentally sustainable transportation vs. the "business-as-usual" status quo, the new phenomenon of "edge cities," automobile dependence as a social problem, the influence of leisure or discretionary travel and of company cars, the problems of freight transport, the future of railroads in Europe, the imposition of electronic road tolls, potential transport benefits of e-commerce, and the electric car.

Based on the work of the STELLA (Sustainable Transport in Europe and Links and Liaisons with America) Focus Group 3, this volume brings together leading transport academics to discuss society behaviour and public/private transport. Theoretical and empirical research from across North America and Europe form the basis of this book, which is composed of twelve chapters that fall into four logical sections. Chapters in the first section provide a contextual overview and survey trends in mobility behaviour and prospects of sustainable transport in the two continents. Chapters in the second section provide comparative assessments of difficulties posed by contemporary transport systems for three particular user groups (low-income, female, and elderly), interventions indicated, and research needed. The third set of chapters survey recent developments in behavioural modelling that lend themselves to the study of the constellation of issues concerning STELLA Focus Group 3. The remaining chapters of the book address critical issues of equity and policy implementation.

This volume explores the governance patterns of three cities of the Americas, Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba, which all present different but interesting cases in dealing with sustainable urban transport challenges. The authors study empirical data from these three cities to analyze how specific governmental and policy instruments (planning, consultation and market mechanisms for example) were implemented in each case. Through concepts coming from policy studies and sociology, for example, such as path dependency, institutional culture and transaction costs, the three cities are also looked at in a broader perspective in order to better understand how they deal differently with their common challenges.

Despite being a relatively young sub-discipline, European environmental sociology has changed considerably in the last decades towards more interdisciplinary collaborations and problem solving. Current trends such as global environmental modernization and processes of economic, political and socio-cultural globalization, fuelled by developments of transport, environmental flows, scientific uncertainty, and information technologies, have fostered new conceptual approaches that move beyond classical sociological mind-sets toward broader attempts to connect to other disciplines.

Transport is the only sector that has not yet contributed to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand why sustainable transport has not been developed yet, Oliver Schwedes highlights the special features of the transport sector and describes the political conditions for a successful change in transport development. He makes clear that technical innovations alone will not be enough; rather, transport policy must be practised as social policy.