Abstract
Cities are increasingly seen as the places where innovations that can trigger a sociotechnical transition toward urban mobility are emerging and maturing. Processes such as peak car, rail renaissance and cycling boom manifest themselves particularly in cities, and success stories of cities experimenting with specific types of low-energy mobility abound in the academic literature. Nonetheless, innovation is known to be a precarious process requiring favorable circumstances. Using document analysis and in-depth interviews, this study examines the nature of low-energy innovation in the everyday mobility of people in two UK cities with favorable conditions for a transition away from fossil fuels—Brighton and Oxford. It shows that clear differences exist between the two cities in the sorts of innovation that emerge and diffuse as a result of path dependencies, local politics, and financial support from supra-local governments and agencies. While low-energy mobility currently has substantial momentum in both cities, the majority of low-carbon innovations in urban mobility are incremental rather than radical in nature, and their future is often imbued with uncertainty. The autonomy of small- and medium-sized cities as agents in bringing about transformational change toward low-energy urban mobility should not be overestimated.
Highlights
Current transport systems for people and freight are environmentally unsustainable [1,2,3,4]
Across the global North, cities lead the way in moving toward low-energy mobility—here used as shorthand for types of everyday mobility that consume less fossil fuels and emit smaller quantities of Greenhouse gas (GHG) than do conventional internal combustion personal vehicles—for various reasons [15,16,17]: higher population densities make public transport, cycling and walking more practical and attractive compared to car use and ownership; populations are on balance relatively young, highly educated, environmentally conscious and willing to experiment with—or at least support—various forms of low-energy living; and governments are more likely to have the political, institutional and financial capacities to support low-energy mobility initiatives and experiments than are their suburban and rural counterparts
Financial support can come in the form of officer time, as exemplified by the time council staff spent on the preparation of bids to Department for Transport (DfT) funding streams to subsidize the purchase of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) by the main bus operators in Oxford and Brighton; and Initiator—they develop, lead, coordinate and are responsible for many of the innovations listed in Tables 2 and 3
Summary
Current transport systems for people and freight are environmentally unsustainable [1,2,3,4]. 602) measures yet appreciates the monumentality of the challenges ahead: the growth of transport volumes in non-OECD countries and of intercontinental movements of people and goods risks cancelling out the benefits from technological advances and behavior change occurring across parts of Europe, North America and Australasia In those regions, the growth of car use and ownership may have peaked [8,9] and a rail renaissance, both within cities (metro, light rail) and between cities (high speed rail) [10,11,12], and cycling boom [13,14] can be witnessed. This makes these cities useful sites to examine which local processes and circumstances facilitate, complicate or obstruct systemic transitions toward low-energy urban mobility
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