Sustainable transport and the city - Transport Climate Change and the City - page 344

quality of the experience rather than the speed of the trip from A to B. Much of the current
analysis, policy development, the investment and implementation in transport planning, does
not reach these issues or the 'the routines of practice' (Sheller, 2004; Sheller and Urry, 2004;
2006; Urry, 2007; Shove, 2010; Aldred and Tepe, 2011). This may be an important reason
in that the mobility regimes appear to be much more difficult to change than has previously
been thought. Societal values and travel cultures need to be well understood before change
is likely to happen. This wider appreciation can complement and assist the conventional
approaches to achieving greater sustainability in transport, such as investing in infrastructure,
redesigning the built environment, changing the pricing levels and encouraging cleaner vehicle
technologies (Banister et al., 2011).
In parallel, there are major changes that need to be made in terms of the development of
the theory and practice of transport planning, including in strategy development, modelling
and appraisal. The use of theoretical approaches 6 to help understand transport and travel
behaviour has been very limited in transport planning, certainly when compared to the progress
made in related disciplines. There is, however, some recent progress insofar as critiquing the
current practice and applying approaches from other disciplines to the transport planning domain
(Banister et al., 2011; Schwanen et al., 2011). This is perhaps a useful avenue to developing
the theory in transport planning, where consideration has been given to the theoretical
approaches used elsewhere and translating them in terms of a stronger ontological basis for
transport planning. 7 This is, however, again an emerging body of work, and there is much to
be done in developing our understanding. Transport, and travel behaviour, is often viewed
from the domain of natural science, and it is this that can often prove problematic. The
difference in subject content, but also approach and aspiration, between the natural sciences
and social sciences is important.
The important social science perspective is often overlooked within transport, as it is still
firmly entrenched in an engineering, economic and mathematics tradition. Engineering is used
to design and build transport systems, and the latter two to evaluate and model them. Natural
science considers the behaviour of physical objects, while social science considers the behaviour
of humans. These, of course, tend to be much more complex (Giddens and Dallmayr, 1982;
Flyvbjerg, 2001). Giddens (1984) develops a 'theory of structuration', whereby society is
based on social structures, such as rules, institutions and frames of meaning, and individual
factors such as identity, sense of self, and action (or 'agency'). All of these, in combination,
are important in determining the workings of society. Transport, as analysed from this angle,
is very different to the natural sciences, which largely ignore the human complexity. There
is no 'self-interpreting' entity or frames of meaning, simply the movement of physical objects.
This reliance on the natural science perspective, on the simplistic utilitarian theoretical
framework, becomes increasingly critical, not so much when the main task is to build a
highway network and develop car ownership and use (yesterday's problems), but when
behaviours need to be understood and changed, so that transport more effectively supports
sustainability goals and city life (the problems of today and tomorrow).
Similarly, the neo-classical framework, which extends into transport modelling and appraisal,
and indeed provides the conceptual underpinning for much of practice, seems very simplistic
and outdated. The practice of calculating time savings and comparing relative to the cost of
the transport investment, often the basis of transport appraisal, seems to analyse only part
of the debate. Comparing options between a road widening delivering 5 minutes of time savings
for 1,500 commuters in the morning peak, at a cost of £35 million; or a new motorway delivering
30 minutes of time savings for 5,000 commuters, at a cost of £150 million; or a new regional
public transport scheme for 20,000 commuters, at a cost of £2 billion; and using the highest