Transport, climate change and the city

Abstract

Transport, Climate Change and the City, Robin Hickman and David Banister, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 400 pp., £85.00, ISBN 978-0-415-66002-0Cities are the heart of economic activity, social progress and human mobility. But this comes at the price of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that they are both responsible for and exposed to. Unless something radically changes in the way we move within and between cities, we are set to make the Earth an unliveable place within a few generations. Concerns over the death toll of road accidents, the adverse health and well-being impacts of rapid motorisation, the consideration that energy resources are finite (even if somewhat weakened by recent reductions in energy demand and mobilisation of new conventional and unconventional energy sources) and - foremost and more than ever - the dangers of climate change have stirred ambitions and courage in a number of cities around the world leading to them taking bold actions geared at sustainable travel. While the aspirations of city leaders, who have formed an avant-garde of decarbonisation, are now backed up by pledges of national governments the main question still remains; if and how can these aspirations be fulfiled.Transport, Climate Change and the City provides insights into the state-of-the-art of urban travel, its effects on the environment, where it is heading, and what can be done to break the projected trends and achieve more sustainable travel behaviours. The book offers both a compelling account of how the urban world is slipping further into car dependency and an imaginative approach to thinking about and shaping future urban mobility. By taking a scenario approach to a very diverse set of cities - different in regards to size, demographics, urban form, geo-regional location, development opportunities and challenges, transport system characteristics and aspirations, and governance path dependencies - Hickman and Banister think about the impossible and how to make it possible.For this purpose Transport, Climate Change and the City offers a matrix of four scenarios - (i) business as usual, (ii) clean but intense mobility, (iii) progressive travel with limited technological innovation and (iv) sustainable mobility - positioned on the axes of (x) technological innovation and (y) behavioural change. The shared conceptual framework is consistently used in the book to shape scenarios along transport policy priorities and available policy families - for urban structure, public transport, traffic demand management, low-emission vehicles, public realm and walking and cycling facilities, and ICTs - to encourage the implementation of future policy measures, and to quantify their potential impacts. This turns Transport, Climate Change and the City into an indispensable guidebook for policy-makers and practitioners, which explains a rationale for scenario building, steps to be taken, potential pitfalls, and outcomes to be expected in the sustainable future-making endeavour. At the same time, by supporting a statement that various transport policies across the world do matter in making sustainable and unsustainable mobility happen, this book issues both a promise and a warning to communities of practice.What the interdisciplinary community of transport and mobility scholars will find in Transport, Climate Change and the City is a broader understanding of socio-technical change that moves beyond forecasting and capitalising on the impacts of technological innovation alone. …