Show Notes
Transit priority is controversial and its potential to unclog congested roads often goes overlooked. How can cities gain support for implementing priority measures aimed at improving the operation of transit and the efficiency of the road network?
In this episode of Researching Transit, James Reynolds of Monash University’s Public Transport Research Group explains the notion of incrementalism in the context of transport planning. Mixing engineering with public policy has allowed James to recognise that technical solutions without political will are destined to languish.
“It’s not just the amount of [transit] priority that matters, but the legitimacy, and how much is legitimate”.
James offers three main approaches – and some pragmatic strategies – to achieve legitimacy in transit priority. Drawing on case studies from Toronto, Melbourne and Curitiba, James explains how transport planners are already achieving success by using these pragmatic strategies to implement transit priority, and that the missing element has largely been a lack of links to public policy analysis and legitimacy theory, which provide the formal language and understanding to describe these types of approaches in transport planning.
For more on transit priority and related public policy research, James recommends: • Marsden and Reardon (2017) Questions of governance: rethinking the study of transportation policy, discussion to much techno-rationalism, and a lack of engagement with social sciences and politics, in transport research; • Lindblom (1959) The science of "muddling through", on incrementalism • Lindblom (1979) Still muddling, not yet through, refining incrementalism into three types • Reynolds et al. (2017) Moving beyond techno-rationalism: new models of transit priority implementation, applying public policy analysis to transit priority • Reynolds et al. (2018) Top-down versus bottom-up perspectives on streetcar priority, comparing the effectiveness of different policy implementation approaches in Melbourne
Videos of presentations about the research: o PTRG Transport Research Series: on pragmatic strategies for practitioners. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdKZm70C8JtUhxmdHtdcc_gZ0n6xsP68G o PhD project final review seminar: on three main approaches: (1) building legitimacy before implementation; (2) avoiding impacts on other road users; and (3) building legitimacy through implementation; and eight pragmatic strategies https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdKZm70C8JtUkhuBkq5Jt4pvRYIQitfpi
Learn more about the three different roles for public transport in a city’s transport policy of: 1) providing for social transport needs, 2) peak-period congestion relief, and/or 3) as a replacement for the car; in a chapter by Professor Graham Currie (2016) in Handbook on transport and urban planning in the developed world.
Theme music for this episode is from https://www.purple-planet.com
More from Researching Transit
In this episode Prof Graham Currie talks to Prof Marcela Munizaga from the Universidad de Chile. Marcela is Vice Dean at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, but also the Vice President at the Santiago Metro. Graham and Marcela initially talk about Marcela’s roles in administration, teaching and research at the University.
This episode’s guest is Associate Professor Jan-Dirk Schmöcker from the Department of Urban Management at Kyoto University in Japan. Jan-Dirk has been in Japan for 15 years, 12 of them at Kyoto University. He is part of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) group at the university and has a background in transportation planning and assignment modelling.
In this episode Professor Graham Currie meets with Professor Stefan Voß, who is Director of the Institute of Information Systems and (until the end of 2022 was) the Dean of the Hamburg Business School at the University of Hamburg. Stefan has a background in mathematics, computer science and related fields. He and Graham discuss this and the fields of operations and information management, including the application of artificial intelligence and heuristics to public transport and other scheduling problems. Stefan outlines research he has done on timetable synchronisation (sometimes referred to as timetable coordination). Much of this has been in partnership with industry, and Stefan and Graham briefly discuss some of the challenges of publishing research within the constraints of commercial confidentiality.
Researching Transit comes to you again from the Conference on Advanced Systems in Public Transport (CASPT2022) in Tel Aviv, Israel. In this episode Professor Graham Currie met with another of the conference organisers, Professor Avi Ceder. Avi is the Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Transportation Research Institute, Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He is also a former Zhi-xing Professor at Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU) and Honorary Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Our guest for this episode of Researching Transit is Professor Marcus Enoch of Loughborough University. Graham and Marcus discuss Marcus’ somewhat sudden commencement of his PhD studies at the Open University, with a research topic agreed to in the taxi from the railway station! They also discuss the 18 months of journalism Marcus undertook for Local Transport Today.