Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter shows three evolutions in how transport planners think: economic rationality, mobility vs. access, the role of public input, and dashboarding of big data. These changes in technology and thinking take place in a political climate marked by polarization. Transport planners cannot remain neutral but must lead with facts they determine to support community goals, rather than carrying forward past practices and hoping for better results. This takes a critical perspective, critical realism, to be specific, looking at transport on the surface level of events, a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that lead to the events, and the underlying structures of law and economics that may or may not be immediately impacted by the transport planning process. Taken together, this new understanding of transport futures more closely aligns the way planners produce and disseminate knowledge with the natures of the phenomena in question.
This chapter reviews the findings across the case studies, suggesting a growing emphasis on a critical realism approach to knowledge production may emphasize qualitative and mixed methods in transport to address systems of power for social and environmental progress. However, it provides counterpoints that knowledge of wicked problems may never be fully uncovered, and that mixed methods may over-complicate and needlessly delay finding suitable answers in some contexts. This chapter provides practical tools to assess how transport research is used in policy-making, centered on how it is communicated.
This chapter is a case study of Interstate 35 in Austin, Texas, which began as East Avenue, and controversial plans include expansion of the freeway with a possible cover. This chapter shows how traffic engineers have used traffic forecasting as a version of quantitative storytelling, iteratively showing increases in future traffic demand when the facility has long stood at capacity. In opposition, local communities have upped their storytelling through digital media and moving film. I show the counter-stories of the government agency ‘My 35’ vision of mobility through added capacity against the local ‘Our Future 35’ approach of access by re-stitching Austin’s communities. Still emerging, this case shows the power of storytelling from quantitative and qualitative bases. Quantitative tools still result in stories—different approaches towards transport truths.
This chapter shows a context where adding airport capacity is critical for enabling growth and cultural connection in a region of West Africa with limited ground transport. Banjul is a critical historical case, as a site of colonization and enslavement, and now a growing industry of diaspora tourism, with strong local efforts to expand nature and heritage tourism sustainably, with an earned motto of The Smiling Coast. However, the country is dependent on outside capital for significant projects, including the expansion of The Banjul International Airport with a loan from the Saudi Fund for Development. As a transport site, the airport is a locus of culture and capital—the first impression of newcomers and the critical link, also contributing to the 1+million population in risk of climate-caused hazards along the coastline and River Gambia. Growth in hotels and resorts is primarily driven by external investment as well, limiting widespread benefits to local communities.
This chapter introduces new ways of seeing transport problems as intertwined social and technical issues, providing a brief grounding in the social construction of technology through an example of a severe micromobility collision in Texas. This chapter quickly describes and then dismantles how transport disciplines view knowledge production, focusing on the blind spots of each approach and why they cause problems in the project development process. A five-lens framework is introduced to assess planning processes—legitimacy, accessibility, social learning, transparency, and representation—LASTR. Briefly, this chapter introduces how ethical codes perpetuate disciplinary blind spots for different disciplines and offers an integrated ethical framework for transport planning. This introduction to the enmeshed relationships of technology and social processes, methods and ethics, shows how knowledge can be used and misused in transport planning.
Three paradigmatic changes in quantitative methods impact transport planning: big data, causality outside of laboratory contexts, and machine learning approaches. In contrast with other scholars, I argue that big data is not all data—digital transport traces track technological objects rather than people and their transport decisions. Because transport is such a complicated problem, guided by human decisions, simplified models are often burdened with causality—turning one knob such as transit fees shows a concomitant behavioral change. Machine learning is a set of approaches that may support more nuanced predictions through testing with multiple options and iterations, particularly when informed by structural equation models from measured behaviors. This chapter is intended to cool some excitement over recent advances in quantitative methods and chart a path forward for making transport methods align with reality and ethics. Part of these solutions includes technological advancement—programming research findings into digital planning solutions, and part is recognizing limitations of quantitative-only approaches.
The context for transportation planning worldwide—including social change, technology, and politics—has moved the goalposts for mobility and placemaking. Researchers explore new methodological landscapes of techniques for working with big data and storytelling for imagined futures. Practitioners seek ethical applications of emerging approaches. Advanced students look for guides that connect traditional toolsets with a changing world. Transport Truths provides a forward-looking guide to re-consider the nature and aims of transportation planning through in-depth (from Texas and The Republic of The Gambia) and secondary research from around the globe.
Transport Truths shows the ‘other side’ of how knowledge is constructed for transportation planning decisions, whether the reader comes from a background in engineering, the social sciences, or other fields. Assuming educated but non-specialist readers, the book shows how disciplinary training leaves gaps in how researchers and practitioners understand and communicate the issues while relying on interesting and critical cases to show how and why an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach can result in better planning decisions. As cities often grow, shrink, and re-organize with access provided by transport infrastructure, this book centers normative values and ethics to create lasting, positive impacts on society and the environment.
Reflecting on the case studies, this chapter first contrasts issues in sequencing data and findings, recognizing that prioritizing datasets has implications on later analysis and possibly, conclusions. The chapter includes a typology of mixed methods research designs, with a symbolic figure that will guide readers toward critical assessment with mixed methods. In co-production, local participants and planners are considered equals in the production of knowledge, development of solutions, and implementation—when the toolsets and power dynamics are shared. This approach can nonetheless result in conflicting answers to the same problems, which is why this approach for triangulating knowledge may be so powerful. Following recent guidance on integrating mixed methods, this chapter shows how researchers can construct meta-inferences from divergent approaches to transport problems.
This chapter provides antidotes and warnings of the limitations of quantitative methods through qualitative innovation. This chapter positions futures storytelling as a critical method for transport planners, using cogent and impactful examples from the Greater Philadelphia Futures Group. If contextual match is an advantage of qualitative methods, assessing findings is more of a challenge, which this chapter supports through reflective guidance on the limitations of reliability and generalizability and the time and resource requirements of qualitative study. Finally, the chapter shows how to assess qualitative analysis from the ethical framework, showing how the approach supports the multiple levels of analysis from a critical realism ontology.
Chapter 7 presents the conclusions of the book. It highlights that many regulatory problems related to diversity in cities are usually addressed by reference to two main conceptions of toleration: toleration-as-neutrality and toleration-as-recognition. Each conception provides different responses to practical problems that arise in the spatial regulation of diversity. However, both of them, when mobilized to analyse the legal and political geography of pluralism, reveal some shortcomings. Against this background, the chapter proposes a revised version of the neutralist approach, namely ‘variegated inclusive neutralism’. After identifying the characteristics of this approach, the chapter explains that it entails a conception of cities as made up of ‘spatial spheres of toleration’ anchored primarily to different tenure regimes. Each sphere is legitimately characterized by different prerogatives of exclusion – and, thus, by a different degree of toleration. From this perspective, cities can be regarded (not only descriptively, but also from a normative standpoint, that is, with a focus on public policies and rules) as mosaics of complementary spheres; their pluralistic character is not so much the sum of each individual sphere’s degree of pluralism as it is, above all, the result of the harmonious relationship among them within an appropriate ethical and political framework.
