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For the first time in half a century, real transformative innovations are coming to our world of passenger transportation.The convergence of new shared mobility services with automated and electric vehicles promises to significantly reshape our lives and communities for the better--or for the worse.

Through an examination of transport planning in Australia, this book challenges conventional wisdom by showing, through original research, how 'car dependence' is as much an institutional as a technical phenomenon. The authors' case studies in three metropolitan cities show how transport policy has become institutionally fixated on a path dominated by private, road-based transport and how policy systems become encrusted around investment to accommodate private cars, erecting an impenetrable barrier against more sustainable mobility and accessibility solutions. The findings are applicable to most cities of the developed world, and to fields beyond transport planning.

Cities will continue to accommodate the automobile, but when cities are built around them, the quality of human and natural life declines.Current trends show great promise for future urban mobility systems that enable freedom and connection, but not dependence.

The transition towards 'smarter' autonomous transport systems calls for a rethink in how transport is governed/who governs it, to ensure a step-change to a more sustainable future. This book critically reflects on these governance challenges analysing the role of the state; the new actors and discourses; and the implications for state capacity.

Faced with intolerable congestion and noxious pollution, cities around the world are rethinking their reliance on automobiles. In the United States a loosely organized livability movement seeks to reduce car use by reconfiguring urban space into denser, transitoriented, walkable forms, a development pattern also associated with smart growth and new urbanism. Through a detailed case study of San Francisco, Jason Henderson examines how this is not just a struggle over what type of transportation is best for the city, but a series of ideologically charged political fights over issues of street space, public policy, and social justice. Historically San Francisco has hosted many activist demonstrations over its streets, from the freeway revolts of the 1960s to the first Critical Mass bicycle rides decades later. Today the city’s planning and advocacy establishment is changing zoning laws to limit the number of parking spaces, encouraging new carfree housing near transit stations, and applying “transit first” policies, such as restricted bus lanes. Yet Henderson warns that the city’s accomplishments should not be romanticized. Despite significant gains by livability advocates, automobiles continue to dominate the streets, and the city’s financially strained bus system is slow and often unreliable. Both optimistic and cautionary, Henderson argues that ideology must be understood as part of the struggle for sustainable cities and that three competing points of view—progressive, neoliberal, and conservative—have come to dominate the contemporary discourse about urban mobility. Consistent with its iconic role as an incubator of environmental, labor, civil rights, and peace movements, San Francisco offers a compelling example of how the debate over sustainable urban transportation may unfold both in the United States and globally.

Policymakers are regularly confronted by complaints that ordinary people are left out of the planning and managing of complex infrastructure projects. In this book, Sebastián Ureta argues that humans, both individually and collectively, are always at the heart of infrastructure policy; the issue is how they are brought into it. Ureta develops his argument through the case of Transantiago, a massive public transportation project in the city of Santiago, proposed in 2000, launched in 2007, and in 2012 called \"the worst public policy ever implemented in our country\" by a Chilean government spokesman. Ureta examines Transantiago as a policy assemblage formed by an array of heterogeneous elements -- including, crucially, \"human devices,\" or artifacts and practices through which humans were brought into infrastructure planning and implementation. Ureta traces the design and operation of Transantiago through four configurations: crisis, infrastructuration, disruption, and normalization. In the crisis phase, humans were enacted both as consumers and as participants in the transformation of Santiago into a \"world-class\" city, but during infrastructuration the \"active citizen\" went missing. The launch of Transantiago caused huge disruptions, in part because users challenged their role as mere consumers and instead enacted unexpected human devices. Resisting calls for radical reform, policymakers insisted on normalizing Transantiago, transforming it into a permanent failing system. Drawing on Chile's experience, Ureta argues that if we understand policy as a series of heterogeneous assemblages, infrastructure policymaking would be more inclusive, reflexive, and responsible.

A must-read for transit buffs, From a Nickel to a Token chronicles twenty specific events in the history of New York City's mass transit systems between 1940 and 1968, including large numbers of rare photos. Streetcars \"are as dead as sailing ships,\" said Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in a radio speech, two days before Madison Avenue's streetcars yielded to buses. LaGuardia was determined to eliminate streetcars, demolish pre-1900 elevated lines, and unify the subway system, a goal that became reality in 1940 when the separate IRT, BMT, and IND became one giant system under full public control. In this fascinating micro-history of New York's transit system, Andrew Sparberg examines twenty specific events between 1940 and 1968, book ended by subway unification and the MTA's creation. From a Nickel to a Token depicts a potpourri of well-remembered, partially forgotten, and totally obscure happenings drawn from the historical tapestry of New York mass transit. Sparberg deftly captures five boroughs of grit, chaos, and emotion grappling with a massive and unwieldy transit system. During these decades, the system morphed into today's familiar network. The public sector absorbed most private surface lines operating within the five boroughs, and buses completely replaced streetcars. Elevated lines were demolished, replaced by subways or, along Manhattan's Third Avenue, not at all. Beyond the unification of the IND, IRT, and BMT, strategic track connections were built between lines to allow a more flexible and unified operation. The oldest subway routes received much needed rehabilitation. Thousands of new subway cars and buses were purchased. The sacred nickel fare barrier was broken, and by 1968 a ride cost twenty cents. From LaGuardia to Lindsay, mayors devoted much energy to solving transit problems, keeping fares low, and appeasing voters, fellow elected officials, transit management, and labor leaders. Simultaneously, American society was experiencing tumultuous times, manifested by labor disputes, economic pressures, and civil rights protests. Featuring many photos never before published, From a Nickel to a Token is a historical trip back in time to a multitude of important events.

Every three years, researchers with interest and expertise in transport survey methods meet to improve and influence the conduct of surveys that support transportation planning, policy making, modelling, and monitoring related issues for urban, regional, intercity, and international person, vehicle, and commodity movements. This book compiles the critical thinking on priority topics in contemporary transport policy and planning contexts. The contributed papers cover two key themes related to types of decision-making of importance to the development of data collection on both passenger travel and freight movements: the first theme, Selecting the Right Survey Method, acknowledges the fact that transport survey methods are evolving to meet both changing uses of transport survey data and the challenges of conducting surveys within contemporary society. The second theme, Supporting Transport Planning and Policy, recognizes that the demands on transportation data programs to support decision-making for transport planning and policy making clearly have evolved.The chapters have been selected with particular emphasis on the challenges of the near and medium term future to the design of transport surveys. Rapidly evolving problems and policy contexts are compelling transport researchers to advance the state-of-the-art of methods, tools, strategies and protocols, while assuring the stability and coherence of the very data from which trends can be tracked and understood and on which important decisions can be made.

Car ownership and use is a main contributor to the deterioration of air quality in cities and to global warming. There is thus a pressing need to understand their determinants in this era of increasing demand for mobility. This paper studies car ownership and use decisions in a car-dominant developing country context, and quantifies the effect of public transportation availability on these decisions. A discrete–continuous modeling framework that estimates car ownership and use simultaneously is presented. People’s latent attitudes towards public transportation and the private car are also assumed to influence these decisions.The model is applied to the case of Lebanon, a developing country characterized by a high car ownership rate, a high percentage of trips made by car, and an informal public transportation system. Five policy scenarios involving potential improvements to the public transportation system, land use densification, or increase in fuel taxes were tested. The findings show that the current public transportation accessibility level has a minor impact on car ownership, but none on car usage. Only if major improvements to the public transportation services are enacted would a decrease in car ownership and usage be achieved. In such a case, model outcomes show that car ownership will be reduced in households with two cars by 5.88% and usage in general will be reduced by 15.22%. As a result, emissions and fuel consumption will be reduced by around 15%. Densification of zones outside Municipal Beirut is also a promising strategy for reducing car usage.

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.