Introduction: the stakes of transport policy in social science research.

Publication: German Policy Studies

Publication Date: 01-OCT-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Southern Public Administration Education Foundation, Inc.

Introduction

In a mobile world, transport affects nearly everyone. Accordingly, transport policy tends to be a rather contended field in politics at all levels, from small neighbourhoods up to the European Union. The reasons for conflicting opinions include questions of sustainability (air pollution), governance (privatisation, separation of infrastructure and services), as well as development of new infrastructures (urban public transport, motorways, airports) and social inequalities (access). Still, while vast amounts of research on transport issues have been conducted not only by engineers, planners and economists, but also by social scientists such as sociologists and human geographers, transport policy surprisingly enough does not appear so far to have been of fundamental interest to political scientists in the field of policy research.

The situation is in fact quite paradoxical. Authors as varied as Manuel Castells (1996), John Urry (2000) and Francois Ascher (2000) insist that the nature of mobility in Western societies is increasingly central. Each in his own way shows how this trend is being accompanied by the considerable development of speed potentials made possible by transportation systems that allow users to appropriate space--systems which in the eyes of certain analysts like Zygmunt Bauman (2000) constitute powerful vectors of social change. Despite the importance of this field, public action in the area of transportation--which is the direct source of the development of the above-mentioned speed potentials--receives a paltry share of attention from social science researchers in spite of recurrent and heated debates.

Overview and guiding question of this volume

This is the context in which this special edition of German Policy Studies aims at answering a simple question, namely the question of what is the gain of policy research for the specific needs of the field of transport policy. In this volume, we would like to cover a variety of themes on two...

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