Time, Innovation and Mobilities

Travels in Technological Cultures

Peter Frank Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134198276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

In social theory and sociology, time and travel in technological cultures is one of the new and challenging research topics in the 'mobilities turn'. Yet surprisingly, contemporary practices of mobility have till now, seen only limited theorization within these disciplines. By analyzing historic and contextualized transit practices, this revealing book argues that travel cannot now simply be reduced to getting from A to B; it is an integrated part of everyday life.

In this area, researching how problems can be identified as dilemmas and reformulated as design problems helps create a new vocabulary; one which will not only change the agenda in the debate on mobility problems in the public domain, but will also suggest new ways of theorizing mobility innovations. In this fascinating book, author Peters:

• develops a conceptual framework to study contemporary transit practices and evaluate innovation strategies
• gives new insights regarding historic and contemporary design strategies and regarding innovations related to travel in technological cultures
• gives special attention to electronic timespaces and ICT based mobility innovations
• investigates cases of travel in technological cultures, car travel, air travel, and cycling in Dutch towns.

An original and provocative contribution to the emerging field of mobilities, this book will become an essential resource for advanced undergraduate, post-graduate, researchers and practitioners in the fields of sociology, geography, spatial planning, policy and transportation studies.

1 Reasoning with travel time

Introduction

In the main hall of the Traffic Information Centre (TIC) in Utrecht stands a two-metre-high video wall which displays in schematic form all the highways in the Randstad, the central western region of the Netherlands where most of the country’s largest cities lie.¹ The Randstad is one of the largest conurbations in Europe, with more than seven million inhabitants and one of the highest number of cars per square kilometre. The TIC’s video wall is covered with green, yellow, orange and red dotted lines, which indicate the average speeds of traffic on any given stretch of the region’s highways. Green indicates that the traffic is flowing without any obstructions, while red indicates total gridlock. This morning the A16 which runs from Breda to Rotterdam is coloured red. A truck containing hazardous fluids has turned over on the highway, causing a backup that has already grown to several kilometres. The national radio issued a warning to motorists to avoid this stretch of the highway. But backups have already begun to appear on all the highways that connect to the A16 growing to a staggering 400 kilometres by later that morning. Meanwhile, the TIC’s traffic manager sits stoically watching how the situation is developing on the screen. He explains that from the control room you can watch a traffic jam come into being, but you cannot intervene to solve it. This is the reason he remains ambivalent about broadcasting urgent traffic warnings that interrupt regular radio programming. ‘People want to know that there is a traffic jam, but they seldom choose alternative routes. This morning, the A16 is not the only highway which is blocked. The diverting routes are also silting up. Many people will be late for work, but that doesn’t seem to matter very much. A traffic jam is something that is not your fault.’²

The red dotted lines on the video wall in the TIC control room metaphorically represent congestion, scarcity and stagnation. The computer monitors that sit in front of TIC staff display the emergence of the unwanted delays. The hope of clear traffic flow, taken for granted in television commercials showing cars driving through deserted landscapes, will not be met today in the western region of the Netherlands. The traffic manager who is aware that there is a traffic jam, but who cannot do anything about it is like many policy makers who have tried but failed to solve the problem of traffic congestion. The number of car kilometres travelled in the Netherlands has risen every year since the 1950s, and traffic experts predict that it will continue to do so in the future. What can the Dutch government do to solve the problems caused by the increase in car mobility? It could do nothing at all and let the traffic jams get worse, forcing people to look for alternatives, such as taking the train or other means of public transport. But when the former Dutch Minister of Transport suggested taking this approach shortly after taking office in 1994, she caused an uproar among car users all over the country, and little has been heard of her proposal since (van der Malen and Pama 1994).³ Another solution seemed more reasonable: build new roads to create more space for the growing number of road users. But this approach cannot solve traffic congestion in the long run, because all of the people who decide in response not to use their cars and to use alternative means of transport instead, will be encouraged to get back on the road in the future. Apart from creating a ‘latent demand’ (Fischer 1997), as traffic experts call this effect, there are good reasons for exercising caution in using the limited space available in densely populated areas for constructing new roads to solve traffic congestion. A third solution lay in offering new alternatives for public transport, for example, adding a ‘light rail’ system in the Randstad. The combination of train and light rail would operate at high frequencies so that travellers would never have to wait very long. But the drawback of this solution is its cost. Some traffic experts also doubt that it would be effective, because cars and public transport are not interchangeable. A fourth option would be to distribute the available road capacity more equally over time by requiring car drivers to pay for road use during rush hours by implementing a congestion charge. Some economists have predicted that this approach would ease traffic congestion significantly. But Dutch transport ministers know from experience that asking drivers to pay for road use through taxes per kilometre driven instead of fixed and fuel excises taxes is like rubbing salt in an open wound. The introduction of a congestion charge has been proposed many times, but never realized.

The traffic problem which is schematized in the Traffic Information Centre’s video wall is complex. In the last three decades, politicians, researchers and policy makers have been occupied with making it a topic of both public and parliamentary debate, by analysing it, and by developing instruments to solve it, at least partially. In 2001, the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management organized an ‘innovation fair’, intended to introduce new ideas for building ‘roads to the future’, as the title of the fair expressed it. When asked for their favourite innovation, visitors to the innovation fair preferred the long distance, unidirectional wind tunnels for cyclists, electronic assistance for car drivers and a radical overhaul of the tax system.⁴ There was no shortage of wild ideas proposed to solve mobility problems. But if one looks at the progress that has been made on ‘the road to the future’ in the Netherlands over the past 30 years, what is striking is the persistent character of the problems and the lack of effective innovations in the proposed solutions. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the Dutch mobility policies have had no positive impacts. The number of traffic fatalities has dropped significantly since 1970. Cars pollute less, and restrictive parking policies in city centres have curbed the ubiquitous presence of the car. But any sceptic will observe that many of the problems caused by increasing mobility still exist. This is especially true for carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions, which continue to create the greatest number of problems in the most densely populated regions. Traffic noise is on the rise, despite the use of technical measures to abate it, such as sound screens along highways. And, because cars have become not only more fuel-efficient but also bigger, heavier and more numerous, fuel consumption is also rising. The different kinds of scarcity resulting from growing mobility remain largely unaddressed despite many innovations. The stagnation in effective innovation is the subject of this chapter. When it comes to mobility problems, the public debate has followed a predictable course, and the politics of innovative mobility tends to get in a jam. But why?

To answer this question and to provide a starting point for my analysis of innovation, time and mobilities, I begin with a short overview of recent Dutch mobility policies. In the early 1970s, the insight that the problem of scarcity could not be solved simply by building new roads gained ground. At the time, both policy makers and transport scientists defined solutions in terms of what they called ‘shifts’ – shifts from the car to public transport and the bicycle, from physical mobility to electronic mobility such as teleworking, from offices located near highway exits to locations which are more easily accessible by public transport, and from one travel behaviour to another. Transport science and economics have played a crucial role both in the design of transport policies and in explaining their success or failure. In the models transport scientists constructed to compare modes of travel, locations and travel behaviours, quantified travel time proved to be indispensable for creating a comparative perspective (Heggie 1976). In this chapter, I will suggest that arguments and models that rely on measured time have shortcomings for understanding and evaluating proposals for improving mobility problems.

The small margins of Dutch mobility politics

Until 1970, fast-growing car use was not conceived of as a complex, almost insoluble problem in the Netherlands. Far from it: mobility was the cornerstone of a widely held dream of a society which was growing in prosperity and individual freedom of movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, an increasing number of people traded their bicycles and mopeds in for cars. If traffic was related to ‘problems’, these problems were viewed largely in relation to passenger safety and the need to extend road capacity. Government initiatives for building new roads simply deduced the length of new roads that was needed from the expected growth of car traffic.⁵ There were occasional traffic jams, but only at the notorious bottlenecks, such as the Oudenrijn cloverleaf near Utrecht (Buiter and Volkers 1996). New roads and highways as well as urban designs were drawn up to accommodate car traffic. Urban planning often aimed at opening cities to the car by building large throughways that led traffic off the highway into the city centre. To accommodate these changes, more parking space was created, sometimes by filling in old canals. Increasingly, cars tended to dominate the street.⁶

In 1970, the Ministry of Transport issued a report called Future projection 2000, which predicted that the number of cars in the Netherlands would reach 7.5 million in 2000.⁷ Should the increase in the number of cars lead to problems, the ministry explained, they could be solved by technical innovations, such as cleaner car engines. But studies such as this one had a profound effect on progressive politicians, such as the leading social democrat, Ed van Thijn, who spoke of a ‘quantified phantom’. He argued that more attention should be given to matters like air pollution, increased fuel consumption, and the use of raw materials in the production of cars. In the public debate that followed the publication of the report Limits to growth (1972), commissioned by the Club of Rome, the growth of mobility in general, and especially car traffic, was considered an issue of scarcity in the Netherlands – scarcity of traffic safety, of space, of clean air and, increasingly, of mobility itself (Meadows et al. 1972).⁸ In the wake of this debate and the 1973 oil crisis – both of which had a strong impact on Dutch politics – a clear change occurred in traffic and transport policies. Car use should no longer simply be accommodated on the basis of projected demand. Instead, demand should be curbed by new policy measures, such as improving public transport and creating more space for slower modes of transport including bicycling and walking.

In the years following the publication of Future projection 2000, Dutch mobility policies were characterized by ambiguity. On the one hand, they authorized the extension of the national network of roads and highways and the decrease of the share of public transport in the total mileage travelled, which resulted in an overall shift towards car use. On the other, the government had succeeded in reducing some of the negative effects of fast-growing mobility. The number of traffic fatalities had dropped from 1973 and continued to decrease. Car engines became less polluting, and fuel consumption per car dropped slightly. The hegemony of the car in the city ended when parking fees were introduced, and metal and concrete posts were installed between roads and sidewalks to prevent parking on the pavement. The deep economic recession that hit the European market in the early 1980s, following the 1979 oil crisis, nearly succeeded in reversing the upward trend of mobility. But from 1986, total car mileage began to climb again. The progressive political climate of the mid 1970s was followed by a ‘no-nonsense’ approach of successive coalitions between Christian democrats and liberals emphasizing the importance of free-flowing traffic for economic recovery. The problem of congestion rose quickly on the political agenda and the reduction of car traffic was believed necessary to solve it. For the first time, research investigating different types of ‘road pricing’ began.

In November 1988, the Ministry of Transport presented a draft of the Second Transport Structure Plan, called the SVV II, to the Dutch parliament. It was an ambitious plan which was intended as a guide to traffic and transport policy beyond 2000. The white paper sought a multi-pronged approach that included improving accessibility, mobility and sustainability, also adding several measures directed at changing the mentality of Dutch motorists. Such changes in mentality were to be effected by the release of all sorts of public information. However, while the plan did emphasize the need to increase the use of public transport, it also called for more funding for building new roads. The SVV II had been the product of a policy vision in which the increase of car mobility had once again been accepted as an unalterable fact. But when the white paper was sent to the parliament in early 1989, public opinion was still heavily influenced by disturbing reports about the detrimental effects of acid rain. In December 1988, the public learned about the findings of a major study undertaken by the RIVM, the leading research institute on public health and the environment, which gave a very bleak image of the state of the Dutch environment (Langeweg 1988). The report had been leaked to the press, which had heightened the public’s sense of alarm and dismay. Just weeks after the publication of the study, Queen Beatrix reinforced the prevailing apocalyptic mood by pointing out in her annual Christmas radio speech that ‘life on earth is slowly dying’. Out of nowhere the environment was back on the political agenda.

The public’s dismay about the environment following RIVM’s report had a palpable influence on the direction of policy discussions on traffic and transport in the months following its leak to the press. Discussions about reducing auto emissions now targeted the growth rate of car mobility. In parliament, only the right-wing liberal party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), failed to acknowledge the urgency of taking strict measures to reduce demand for car kilometres. When the VVD opposed the abolition of a tax deduction for travel costs incurred while travelling to and from work in the spring of 1989, the Dutch Cabinet resigned. It was the first government in the world to collapse over an environmental issue. The SVV II was rewritten under the new coalition government between the Christian democrats (CDA) and the social democrats (PvdA). The new government took a stronger stand on the reduction of the increase in car use. It called for halving the expected increase of 70 per cent in car use from 1986 to 2010, which would be achieved through the implementation of a broad range of measures. Most prominent among them were the so-called pricing measures which aimed at making car travel less attractive by increasing its cost. Such measures included higher parking fees in city centres, higher duties on petrol and new road-pricing policies. As a general principle, reducing the future growth of car use by 35 per cent became the cornerstone of many of the mobility policies created in the early 1990s.

The new Minister of Transport, Hanja Maij-Weggen, had the task of implementing many of the new policies aimed at growth reduction. In an interview she gave shortly after taking office in 1989, Maij-Weggen claimed optimistically that the ‘tide has never been more favourable for a car-curbing policy’. However, the Dutch parliament ultimately proved to be ambivalent about following through with such policies. Politicians urged that new pricing measures be taken, but a majority always backed out when it came to seeing them through to implementation. Not only in parliament, but also in public opinion, the tide turned once again. In the early 1990s, the apocalyptic vision of the environment gave way to worries about congestion: traffic and transport policy was now perceived as the need to build new infrastructure. The image of the car was no longer that of a main cause of acid rain. Government-sponsored television commercials telling the public that ‘their cars could do without them for a day’ were cancelled, and travelling by car was reconceived as an integral part of a modern, mobile lifestyle.

The new focus on congestion as the most urgent mobility problem brought road pricing back onto the stage. Road pricing had been off the political agenda for some time but when it returned in 1994, it served a new role. It was now presented as an instrument for relieving congestion in metropolitan areas, rather than for reducing car mobility throughout the whole country. Confronted with tales of growing traffic delays around the four largest Dutch cities,⁹ Parliament urged the new Minister of Transport, the liberal, Annemarie Jorritsma, to stick to a tight implementation schedule. As a member of parliament she had opposed road pricing, but as a minister in a coalition government she worked toward its implementation. In a new policy report issued in 1996, Working together on accessibility,¹⁰ Jorritsma announced a market-oriented approach to problems related to mobility. The moral appeal to citizens, so characteristic of the debate around 1990, had vanished. Now corporate and public actions were to be understood as governed by an economic rationality, in which choices were matters that could be explained within the vocabulary of rational choice theory, and traffic and transport policies were to be designed according to it.¹¹

In marked contrast to 1989, in 1996 the national government no longer conceived of itself as the central directing actor in policy implementation. It was now deemed inappropriate for the national government to monopolize ‘problem ownership’. Instead, the national government believed it should embark on ‘interactive policy making’ in which all policy measures would be negotiated with a range of social institutions representing the public (Hendriks and Tops 2001). Policy making on mobility issues would cease being a matter of changing public behaviour through persuasion and political leadership. The new culture of policy making would be made up of package deals and trade-offs. Creating ‘win-win’ situations was to be the new objective. The vision behind this new approach was achieving shared goals through continuous interaction with the public. If the government was to build new lanes on a congested highway, it could expect that social organizations and corporations in turn would take measures to reduce demand. Alongside this emerging neo-liberal discourse on traffic reduction and new infrastructure creation, there was a strong belief in technological fixes. If people could not be convinced that it was better for the environment to drive less, technologies could be used to do the job of cleaning and economizing car use.

In 1997, preparations began for a new transport structure plan that would follow up on the SVV II. What had changed since the white paper had initially been presented to the public in 1988? First, the growth of mobility, and especially of car mobility, had been accepted. Mobility was no longer something to be discouraged. It was this change that created a break from policies recommending a reduction in the growth of car use that had been central to SVV II. As the increase in mobility began to be perceived as a phenomenon beyond the influence of politicians and policy makers, all they could do was target its consequences, such as decreasing accessibility, traffic safety and the quality of the environment. The definition of the problems related to mobility growth also changed. No longer did the accent lay on the harm done to the environment. Now the main problem was the reduction of accessibility due to congestion. The government also changed the way it approached citizens. Tactics such as moral appeals to citizens, symbolized in the slogan ‘The car can do without you for a day’, which achieved their persuasive power from images of dying forests and a warming globe, now gave way to a more businesslike approach, in which the road was viewed as a ‘market’. Citizens were now allowed to be mobile, but only at a price. Now the social costs of mobility had to be paid for by individual travellers. Another change was the distribution of responsibility between the national government and the provincial and municipal governments. No longer did the national government want to be the main ‘problem owner’. Decentralizing administrative power and responsibilities could, politicians at the nation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Time, Innovation and Mobilities
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Reasoning with travel time
• 2: Narratives On Travelled Time
• 3: The Passages of Thomas Cook
• 4: Roadside Wilderness
• 5: Airborne On Time
• 6: Sharing the Road
• 7: Smart Travel
• Conclusion the Art of Travel
• Notes
• Bibliography