The Organization of Transport

A History of Users, Industry, and Public Policy

Massimo Moraglio, Christopher Kopper, Massimo Moraglio, Christopher Kopper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317800651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: Business

Over the past ten years, the study of mobility has demonstrated groundbreaking approaches and new research patterns. These investigations criticize the concept of mobility itself, suggesting the need to merge transport and communication research, and to approach the topic with novel instruments and new methodologies. Following the debates on the role of users in shaping transport technology, new mobility research includes debates from sociology, planning, economy, geography, history, and anthropology.

This edited volume examines how users, policy-makers, and industrial managers have organized and continue to organize mobility, with a particularly attention to Europe, North America, and Asia. Taking a long-term and comparative perspective, the volume brings together thirteen chapters from the fields of urban studies, history, cultural studies, and geography. Covering a variety of countries and regions, these chapters investigate how various actors have shaped transport systems, creating models of mobility that differ along a number of dimensions, including public vs. private ownership and operation as well as individual vs. collective forms of transportation. The contributions also examine the extent to which initial models have created path dependencies in terms of technology, physical infrastructure, urban development, and cultural and behavioral preferences that limit subsequent choices.

1
Introduction

Christopher Kopper and Massimo Moraglio

Much like debates over technology, transport debates in academia and policy-making circles have largely been focused on innovation, production, and incremental trends. The ingenuity of inventors, the novelty of technologies, the organization of mass production, and the “progressive” impact of higher standards of mobility have been the focus of both researchers and political discussions. The history of transport was born, not by chance, as a subfield of economic history in which the main role was occupied by product innovations and producers’ successes, all embedded in a progressive story tracing development from “poor” and “inefficient” preconditions to “smart” and “proficient” outcomes (Edgerton 2010).

In the past two decades, transport studies have been a part of a broader “cultural turn” that has witnessed not only different approaches to the topic, but even a shift from transport research to mobility studies, a conceptual reorientation that highlights an agenda shift. This has led to a corpus of texts (Kaufmann 2002; Mom 2003; Divall and Revill 2005; Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007; Merriman 2012, just to mention a few) driving the field to groundbreaking approaches and research methods. Those investigations criticized and historicized the concept of mobility itself, and suggested that transport and communication research should be merged and the topic should be approached through novel instruments and new methodologies. Following, to some degree, the debate during the 1990s on the role of users in shaping transport technology, different perspectives from sociology, planning, economics, geography, history, and anthropology are begging to be integrated into the field. Such a development has not only affected academia. Planners, policy-makers, and students of transport economy are facing a paradigmatic shift, too. The classical view of transport as a demand-driven process is crumbling under pressure from a new wave of studies that underline the complexity of the relationship between transport supply and demand (Mees 2010; Metz 2008; Bergmann and Sager 2008).

Following the outcome of the debate on user agency in the history of technology (Van der Vleuten 2006), the transport field is also recognizing the relevance of users in forming, shaping, and changing the mobility landscape, well beyond the classical concept of transport as a pure consequence of individuals’ need to move from point A to B. Slowly, transport and mobility are becoming less and less dominated by engineers, planners, and research agendas related to large infrastructure projects. The role of users as full actors in the transport game is widely recognized not just in social science, but also by the industry (with respect to user involvement) and by policy-makers (with respect to public participation). Still, mobility remains a gendered space (Spain 1992) in which transport is too often misconstrued as a playground for enthusiastic “boys” and their “toys” (e.g., locomotives, big planes, or sports cars).

Users’ tastes, culture, and background can play a role in how transport systems develop (or fail to develop). And, even more radically, users can organize their own mobility by shifting away from large industrial apparatuses, big infrastructural investments, and omnipresent industrial organizations. In other words, the research agenda is shifting from mobility apparatuses to user choices (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003).

These issues were the focus of a workshop organized jointly by the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI), the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES), and the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, held in March 2012 in Toronto, Canada. The workshop, entitled “Models of Mobility: Systemic Differences, Path Dependencies, Economic, Social and Environmental Impact (1900 to tomorrow),” was convened by Matthias Kipping (Schulich), Christina Kraenzle (CCGES), and Christina Lubinski (GHI). This volume, which aims to examine the role of users, industry, and policy-makers in mobility development, not as separate agents with disparate outcomes, but rather as overlapping players with intersecting agendas and results, was one of its key outcomes.

It makes perfect sense to develop this topic in Routledge’s “International Studies in Business History” book series. Transport history emerged as a branch of economic history, and studies of industry and business have dominated this field for a long time. Their overrepresentation in the literature led—following the “cultural turn”—to a backlash, the result of which was that industry and economic issues are today largely underrepresented in the field. Not only has industry and other institutional and business operators’ role been under-researched, the entire sector of freight mobility seems to have been deserted by scholars, despite its potential and appeal for innovative scholarly investigations. We face the risk of throwing the baby (namely the role of economic factors) away with the bathwater (namely an obsession with industrial production).

In this vein, the title of this book, The Organization of Transport, should be read as part of a trend towards reintegrating forces that are currently marginalized in the transport debate. In other words, mobility studies has to avoid the epistemological pitfalls inherent to traditional approaches and to the field of new mobility studies. Traditional approaches to mobility held an essentialist view of transport systems and took for granted that they were used in a rational manner based on rational preferences. New Studies of Mobility invigorated the field of transport studies by taking cultural patterns and the agency of users into account. However, users’ opportunity structures proved to be too complex to be reduced to simplistic supply and demand models. Mobility researchers agree that information deficits and “irrational” behavioral patterns affect the individual choices of transport users. But the cultural turn in mobility studies confronts researchers with similar epistemological challenges as the cultural turn in history and the social sciences. Culturally oriented choices and lifestyles must be analyzed together with “hard” socioeconomic factors and material infrastructures of transport.

This leads us to another overarching question: What role should history play in a volume about mobility? Transport, traffic, and mobility require—often, but not always—expensive infrastructures that have been planned and completed over long periods of time. Transport infrastructures grow slowly, are physically durable, and can only be altered over the long term. Infrastructures create path dependencies with long-term effects lasting more than a generation. Recent research on mobility has demonstrated that socially and culturally determined patterns of mobility also change slowly and show unexpected degrees of persistence (Geels et al. 2012). The same long durée trends also play a role in institutional regulations of transport and traffic, such as domestic market regulations, freedom (or lack of) in international exchanges, and even mundane and seemingly self-evident regimes such as official—and unofficial—traffic rules (Seiler 2008). Understanding these conditions is thus essential for understanding the present situation, whether scholars are historians by profession and familiar with the methods of historiography or not.

We feel that this volume offers a significant contribution to these studies by providing a long-term and comparative analysis of models of mobility that addresses the transportation of both passengers and freight over long, as well as short, distances. The volume, finally, examines how these models were shaped by consumer choices, market structures, political preferences, and policy decisions. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how initial choices and decisions led to long-term path dependencies that limited subsequent options. We are not alone in our quest. In recent years, there have been a number of similar studies, but these have tended to be more limited in their geographic and temporal scope (Badenoch and Fickers 2010), have focused on a single means of transportation (Norton 2008), or have dealt with single rather than multiple actors (Schiefelbusch and Dienel 2009).

This volume, therefore, focuses on how users, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs have organized, and continue to organize, mobility, with a particularly attention to Europe, North America, and Asia. Taking a long-term and comparative perspective, the volume brings together thirteen chapters from the fields of urban studies, history, cultural studies, and geography. Covering a variety of countries and regions, these chapters investigate how various actors have shaped transport systems, creating models of mobility that differ along a number of dimensions, such as ownership (public vs. private), operation (individual vs. collective), technical mode (motorized vs. nonmotorized), availability (affluence vs. scarcity), and hegemony (dominance vs. fringe position). The chapters also examine the extent to which initial models created path dependencies in terms of technological progress, evolution of physical infrastructures, varieties of urban development, and cultural and behavioral preferences in the use of transport that limited subsequent choices.

Researchers from disciplines such as sociology, political science, transport engineering, economics, history, and cultural studies have turned mobility into a field of interdisciplinary research par excellence. The multitude of methodological approaches in this volume and the diverse backgrounds of its contributors mirrors the interdisciplinarity of mobility studies. Because true interdisciplinarity would exceed the intellectual capabilities of a single contributor, the challenge of interdisciplinarity is mastered by the collaborative effort of a group of authors.

By covering a wide range of regions, including North America, Europe, and Asia, and by combining a historical framework with an analysis of current and future trends, the volume therefore fills an important gap within the mobility studies literature. This volume is one example of the growing tendency to overcome the former national parochialism of transport studies through a comparative perspective. The international diversity of paths in transport policies and patterns in the use of transport, as well as the manifold forms of transnational transfers of infrastructural models, varieties of ownership, and regulatory regimes, is striking. Transnational transfers and translations of foreign role models into different preferential orders often shaped national infrastructure policies and influenced national patterns of mobility. International comparisons are created by the compilation of national case studies that often enclose implicit and explicit references to foreign role models, parallel developments, adaptations, variations, and modifications in other parts of the world. This volume also contributes to the ongoing renewal of transportation studies in business and economic history, where the role of regulatory policies, the transport industry, and technological achievements had long dominated the research agenda. More recent studies (Fava 2012; Puffert 2009) have taken a broader approach by including consumers of mobility—an approach also espoused by this volume.

With respect to its specific themes and objectives, in geographic terms, the volume covers both developed economies, which struggle to modernize and integrate their aging infrastructures and reduce the environmental, social, and economic costs of mobility, and emerging economies, which often have to build new transportation systems to accommodate rapid urban growth and changing user preferences. In terms of the temporal dimension, the volume offers comparisons between constraints of the past, such as population growth, increased urbanization, and growing trade flows, and current environmental challenges in the transport field. In this respect, many of the contributions show that progress sometimes does not follow a linear path, but often takes a cyclical evolutionary course contrary to the expectations of contemporary actors. The book will therefore not only contribute to a better understanding of the various consequences of different historical models of mobility, but will also offer important insights for ongoing policy debates about the most appropriate models for the future.

The contributions to the volume are subdivided into three parts: The first part, entitled “Framing the Issue: Manifestations of Mobility over Time and Space,” covers the evolution of general trends in mobility from a transatlantic prospective. It also touches on hidden histories and new trends in the transport field and in mobility behaviors. In his chapter, Gijs Mom gives new insights regarding the evolution of two divergent paths of mobility in the western world: the European and the American track. Mom demonstrates that major path decisions took place in the 1930s and should be primarily understood as representing cultural processes. Although Mom, like most transportation researchers, focuses on motorized road and rail traffic, the following two chapters by Jill Ebrey and Peter Cox highlight the importance and the potential of nonmotorized modes of transportation, namely walking and biking. Cox examines the long-term evolution of biking that began in the era before mass motorization. In his contribution, James R. Conley takes a novel approach, looking at mobility not based on the various modes of transportation, but from a spatial perspective by examining previously neglected conflicts between pedestrians and other users of urban street space. He shows, in particular, that, contrary to perceived wisdom, these conflicts existed prior to the rise of motorization.

The second part of the volume is entitled “Coming Together: Urban Mobilities in Comparison” and examines the influence of different modes of transportation on the evolution and use of urban spaces. Contributors adopt long-term perspectives and deal with parallel developments, knowledge transfers, and adaptations of transit modes. Comparing the origins of urban transport in London and Osaka, the chapter by Takeshi Yuzawa highlights how regional transport planning and the construction of mass transport systems were influenced by the international transfer of managerial knowledge and concepts. Based on the example of post–World War II Germany, Christopher Kopper demonstrates that mobility patterns and infrastructure concepts from the leading nation in individual motorization, the United States, were not implemented unchanged, but carefully and critically assessed and adapted to national conditions and preferences in West Germany. Steven Logan also looks at the role of ideas in shaping urban spaces by analyzing utopian concepts of mobility and urbanism developed by Czech intellectual Karel Teige and his contemporaries—a topic thus far overlooked by scholars of architecture and city planning. Taking a long-term perspective from the late nineteenth century to the present, Alberte Martínez and Jesús Mirás analyze the social construction of mobility technologies in a case study of urban transportation in Spanish cities. Examining changing perceptions of technological progress, Massimo Moraglio confirms the value of historical analysis by showing how a seemingly outdated mode of urban transport, the tram, underwent an unexpected revival due to its compatibility with the idea of pedestrian-friendly cities and the concept of shared street space.

The third part, “Moving Forward: Present Challenges and Future Perspectives,” focuses on the current challenges of urban sprawl and how these are being addressed in different contexts. It also draws attention to emerging models of mobility, in which people do not simply live in one space and travel to another but rather dwell in between defined spaces. In their contributions, city planners Pierre Filion and John Saunders offer their perspective on current trends in transportation and mobility policies in North American metropolitan areas, the latter using Greater Toronto as a case study. The chapter by Angela Jain and G. L. N. Reddy also looks at a specific case, the city of Hyderabad in India. Focusing on the day-to-day living practices of rural migrants, they go beyond conventional migration studies that analyze the movement of people from one place to another, instead arguing that many people are simultaneously part of the city in which they reside and part of their place of origin. In a similar vein, Hans-Liudger Dienel and Massimo Moraglio investigate the recent phenomenon of hypermobility and multilocality resulting from changes in the temporal and spatial organization of work and shifts ...