Modelling on the Move: Towards Transport System Transitions?

This seminar series will bring together researchers from different disciplines and practitioners to discuss innovative ways of responding to pressing policy problems. Twenty-first century societies face three interlinked and seemingly intractable energy problems: climate change, obesity, and oil depletion. The need for change is urgent: the UK has set legally binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets of 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. All sectors must decarbonise, but the transport sector is lagging behind, even though moving to a highly active, low carbon transport system would generate substantial health and environmental benefits.

Meeting this challenge requires new collaborations, new perspectives, and new combinations of existing methods. We are going to focus on transport modelling, which uses mathematical equations to represent how people, vehicles, and goods travel. Transport modelling plays a key role in policy development and policy choice, and whilst it is changing in response to the need for systemic transitions in transport, it is unclear whether changes so far have been fundamental enough. More profound changes may be necessary and we will respond to these challenges by creating new collaborations between modellers, social scientists, and population health scientists, in order to explore approaches to transport modelling that can help us understand, and bring forward, the necessary system transition.

Two seminars focus specifically on bringing in new approaches and new types of data (evidence). Transport models have traditionally used economic concepts of behaviour; the 'rational actor' operating in accordance with self-interest, within a system in equilibrium. However, behaviour is often not premised on this narrow instrumentalist rationality, and transport systems are in a constant process of change. To deal with these issues, and the pressing need for transport system transitions, our seminar series will bring in social and cultural theorists, to learn more about how we might model cultural and political processes shaping transport decisions and the development of transport policies. This will involve discussing how data might be used within new generation transport models, which can incorporate qualitative as well as quantitative data.

A key issue covered in the series is how to make models more participatory, involving practitioners and the public in contributing to model building. The seminar series is not only aimed at academics; policy-makers and other stakeholders will be invited to present and participate, particularly in the three seminars more aimed at addressing their interests and concerns. The first of these, the opening event, will launch the seminar series; it will introduce the key questions to be tackled and disseminate important background information (such as existing projects relating to this series, and key texts that will inform the seminar series as it progresses). The fifth seminar will also be particularly relevant to research users: it will focus on participation, and discuss the different ways in which models can be made more transparent and participatory, while also addressing barriers to, and problems with, user involvement.

The final event we are planning will form part of the annual ESRC Festival of Social Science. Currently entitled 'But Why Does the Model Say That? Beyond the Black Box', it will be aimed at stakeholders and practitioners, including people who engage with transport models as community members. The aim will be both to demystify modelling, and to explore how far new forms of modelling can be 'owned' or 'appropriated' as well as understood by research users. Examples will be drawn from work done at the earlier seminars and projects in progress or carried out by seminar group members. The event will seek to empower research users to understand and to challenge models, and to think about how modelling could be done differently.

This research fits well with the ESRC's three strategic priorities, generating impacts in a number of associated areas. Firstly, planning for and achieving transport transitions clearly contributes to economic performance and sustainable growth. Secondly, our seminar series is closely tied to understanding behaviour change (both individual and organisational change) with a view to planning interventions that will contribute to transport transitions. Thirdly, this proposal seeks to foreground a deeper engagement with issues of equity and fairness and a broader range of understandings of justice in transport modelling (drawing on, for example, the environmental justice literature, and work on health inequalities). This is particularly relevant in terms of our key theme of increasing practitioner and public participation, but has broader relevance in that transitions must be perceived by the public to be socially just and inclusive.

The proposal therefore delivers benefits in all three areas. It challenges academics and practitioners to think beyond traditional transport modelling, incorporating the need for profound social, technological, political, and cultural changes in the way we organise transportation. In contributing to the development of a low carbon, more physically active transport system, this proposal has the potential to generate substantial public benefits.

Key direct beneficiaries include transport professionals from local and national government, as well as from other types of organisation including NGOs (organisations that will be involved include DfT, TfL, Sustrans, CTC, and RoadPeace). This includes policy-makers, planners and engineers, who routinely use transport models to develop policy and infrastructural changes. These practitioners will be interested in learning about new modelling approaches and techniques (seminars 2-3), and in the opportunity to reflect upon the use of models in policy, how this might be improved, and how practitioners and the public can be involved in the development of a new generation of models (seminars 4-6). They will also be engaged in discussing to what extent the various developments in academic modelling discussed in the seminars can be transferred to policy and practitioner communities (seminars 4-6). Transport is a key interest of concern to the wider public, and we have identified key community groups and stakeholders who will be interested in attending (e.g. the Movement for Liveable London).

The public will benefit through transport professionals becoming more aware of different modelling approaches, and different perspectives and data that can be incorporated within transport models. There will be benefits related to our focus not only on participation, but also upon developing a reflexive understanding of the use of modelling in policy, including ways in which the public often find modelling evidence confusing or alienating. Through making choices about approaches, data, and underlying assumptions more explicit and encouraging the use of a wider range of modelling approaches, we hope to make modelling more accessible to the public. Discussions about visioning and visualisations, and understanding and handling uncertainty, can help develop the communication of modelling findings to the public and make questions about values more explicit (for example, in the weighting of different outcomes). Increasing public understanding of transport modelling has intrinsic benefit and the approach may be transferable to other policy areas using modelling.

These benefits will continue beyond the seminar series. The website will continue as a resource for information about new modelling approaches, remaining live for three years after the project and updated regularly by the PI with details of related publications and projects developed by participants. The new cross-disciplinary collaborations with research users will form the basis for follow-on projects.