Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this evening's seminar on reimagining urban mobility after covered 19.
This talk is part of the Oxford Martin School series on building back better the challenges and opportunities arising from the Cubitt 19 pandemic.
My name is Jim Hall. I'm Professor of Climate Environmental Risks in the Evangel Mental Change Institute.
And I'm also lead researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Transboundary Resource Management.
But this afternoon, this evening, we're talking about mobility,
how we all get around and the dramatic changes to transport behaviours have been really one of the most striking aspects of the pandemic.
Pretty much overnight, streets went silent. People noticed the impact on ongoings on air pollution, packed commuter trains and tube uninvented.
And now they're being bailed out to the tune of billions of pounds.
Many of the things that used to require mobility, like coming to a lecture in the Oxford Martin School, have gone online.
But people are also feeling, I think, some of the deprivation of mobility, mobility to visit friends and family and to go on holiday.
These are behavioural changes that all too, because they've they've studied for most of their careers.
But there are changes, dramatic changes that happened pretty much overnight.
So we're in very good hands to understand those changes and understand what the implications might be for the future.
We have Professor Tim Schwann,
who's director of the Transport Studies Unit in the University of Oxford and is lead researcher on the Oxford Martin programme on informal cities.
And Dr Jenny Middleton, who's a senior research fellow in Ability's than human geography in the Transport Studies Unit.
And before I hand do that to Tim and Jenny.
Let me remind you that this talk is being recorded. And this is very much a discussion.
Will be an opportunity to pose questions after we've had some opening remarks from Tim and Jenny.
And if you'd like to ask a question,
then please click on the ad question button at the bottom right hand side of the screen and I will try and navigate my way through those questions.
I think there's an opportunity to vote for them,
which will bump them up to the top of the list and will post them to are extremely well qualified speakers.
But first of all, from opening remarks, first from Tim Trunnion and Tim N-E has been absolutely dramatic, hasn't it?
But then, based on your understanding, take us through in your own words what has happened.
And the question I think many of us are asking is how much of this is going to stick in the future and what should policymakers be doing about it?
Well, thank you, Jim. There's a lot that can be said in response to the questions you're asking.
I'm going to highlight three aspects. One is that obviously what has happened is a dramatic reduction in mobility.
And there are now many studies being published in the academic literature from many different countries and cities.
But what they show is somewhat of a reduction of personal mobility between roughly 60 to 90 percent.
We did a study recently using mobile phone data for one and a half.
One point one million people in England, and it showed about 70 percent reduction.
That's the peak. And what we've seen is that gradually that reduction has come back in the sense it has become less.
People started moving more again and perhaps more important than.
Looking at the average picture, which we tend to do so often,
is that because what the media does is thinking about differences within or behind those averages.
And in this case,
one of the things that comes out quite strongly is that people with lower incomes and with more precarious jobs tend to have reduced their mobility,
much less so. They tend to travel more in relative terms after the lockdowns that have been commonplace in so many cities and countries.
And quite what that shows is that one of the things we've seen is that to an extent,
being able to stay at home, even if the government tells you so, is a luxury.
It's something that you have to be able to afford. Many people don't.
And that holds for cities in the U.K. that holds just as much for a city like Accra in Ghana,
where we happen to have been doing some research where you see that people who work in the informal economy,
people who are sort of relatively or have a low income, they just have to go out and work through exams.
So there is a big. I think one lesson that we really need to learn from this is that we need to focus on social differences,
spatial differences between people, rather than simply look at the average numbers.
Of course, we know that mobility is very important. And what the whole situation has shown, that's mobility is particularly important for economies.
We knew that. We know that for a long time. You can already read it, Adam Smith, for instance.
But it is also very important for our well-being and mental health.
Much of the discussion about. About knockdowns and the detrimental effects on mental health is because people can't travel.
It's not that travel necessarily in and of itself is bringing people health benefits, mental health benefits.
It is because of the activities. It allows you to access in destinations.
Lockdown, however, also has positives. Nothing. I want to highlight two.
One is that's what many people thought was not going to happen.
Governments putting in place radical restrictions on mobility has all of a sudden happens even in very liberal in advance liberal democracies.
And the interesting thing is that it shows us that if the urgency,
the perceived urgency is is strong enough, then governments are willing to do these kinds of restrictions.
And that opens up new ways of thinking about what might happen once climate in the climate crisis really comes.
It becomes much more urgent.
Of course, saving lives, saving a health care system is not quite the same at present as reducing or avoiding certain environmental changes.
But at least there's a precedent. And the thing that's something that's very interesting.
The other thing that's interesting is that for many people who've been locked into coal dominated lifestyles,
they've seen something that many transport experts is kind of the ideal scenario for the future,
where we walk and cycle much more, where our lives become much more localised, where we don't drive as much, we don't fly as much.
And whether we want it or not, when we look about.
When we look at the situation that transport on the global scale finds itself in is the third largest emitter of CO2 emissions,
then we need to think about radically, radically different ways of doing transport.
Technology is very important. And we've seen sort of a real increase in technological innovations and the real
uptake from automation to mobility as a service and digital payment systems.
But technology alone or even infrastructure developments are not going to fix the problem of transport.
Their contributions to CO2 emissions will have to reduce mobility.
However unpalatable that message is politically and also to many people.
So what this lockdown has shown is that actually we can lead lives not where mobility was not essential as it used to.
It doesn't necessarily have to be that bad.
The third thing I would say is that many governments have tried to seise on that momentum that the lockdown has created.
We've seen that in London where the low traffic neighbourhoods have.
Put in place and we see that in cities elsewhere, in fact,
that would say cities on the continent have been much more radical in pursuing these kinds of approaches and cities in the UK.
But we also see that now that's the pandemic is it's going on.
And then during I think we're seeing some of that early enthusiasm about low carbon mobility is becoming smaller.
I think we're actually in a situation where there's a risk that governments and other actors are going to stimulate any kind of mobility.
Once the pandemic is declared over simply because they believe this is the prime.
This is a very sensible way of increasing economic growth, increasing economic development.
Nothing. There's a genuine risk that we see the re re entrenchment of carbon intensive mobility going forward.
That's not the message I think I would like to we'd like to promote.
But I think there's a real risk there and we need to prevent that from happening.
The. Does that give you a kids point to start with?
Well, it gets this going very well. Thanks very much indeed, Tim.
And there are already a lot of questions coming up in the chat, a very wide ranging set of questions.
So thank you very much indeed for posing those.
Everyone in the audience here. And I'll come back to you in a moment.
Tim, with some of those questions. But before I do, let me ask Dr. Jenny Middleton, senior research fellow in the Transport Studies Unit.
To say a little bit more about active travel.
And in a moment, you can explain what you mean by that.
But I'm sure people in the audience will have their own thoughts about that right now.
But the in short, has Cauvin 19 actually been good for active travel?
That's a great question, Jim, and thanks. I'm going to say I'm going to answer that with some of the points I want to make.
With the help of a few slides song, I'm going to try and share my screen.
I'm delighted to be here. Just the lights on the invitation. So I cheque the school.
Can you see those slides? Yes, I can.
Go ahead. Brilliant. OK, great. So, as I said, I'm going to build a bit on the is just spoken about by talking about active travel and has,
you know, has the pandemic being a positive thing for active travel.
Now, debates around active travel have been central to the discussion of mobility and the pandemic.
But before I go further, I've got a couple of opening thoughts.
And the first one I know Tim has touched on this.
I think any discussion of urban mobility post pandemic needs to move beyond just focussing on infrastructure alone and by infrastructure.
I'm referring here to materials, stuff, hardware, etc. And relatedly,
I think we really need to take more seriously people's lived experiences and move these to the centre of power that mobility is planned for.
And imagine going forwards. OK. So as Jim said, you know what is active travel.
So it can take many different forms, but is essentially when human power is used to move.
And historically very strong links to sustainability and health agendas.
And there are many examples of that roller skating, skateboarding, but walking and cycling are very much the most prevalent.
I think an important distinction to make here is between active travel and Kovik, 19 active travel.
What does this mean? So I've got a few images here that many of you will be familiar with and things that happen
to the streets in the wake of that dramatic empting that Jim mentioned in the introduction.
So many streets were closed to cause priority given to walking in psych cycling.
And they were configured in particular ways to facilitate appropriate social distancing.
I've got two images here. One Glasgow, one in Budapest, but many, many more.
Several governments, including the UK and New Zealand, announced funding packages for walking and cycling infrastructure.
And in Paris, they use this as an opportunity to promote the notion of the fifteen minute city,
for example, a concept where residents live and work or within a 15 minute radius of their of their home.
And then just last week, the living streets, the former the former pedestrians association in the UK.
And that, you know, put this tweet out about, you know, what,
the new restrictions as we entered lockdown to meant for walking, you know, where, when and who were we allowed to walk with?
Now, I found this image and I'll leave you to guess which UK city this is.
I think it visually illustrates some of the points I want to make here today.
Now, I don't want to unfairly critique the image as it was produced in this way to illustrate something very particular about kov.
It's safe streetscape, you know, in relation to flows of pedestrians and social distancing.
However, I couldn't help be struck by the ways in which these pedestrians had been rendered.
If you look really closely, you can make out what I think is meant to be an older couple.
Someone pushing a wheelchair, mother with a child. But there's also a literal whitewashing of these bodies.
The image projects hollowed out white empty bodies, if you like.
And I'm showing this as I think it's quite a good representation of a broader,
dominant discourse around active travel, which I think we need to challenge.
And this is where historically understandings of walking and cycling often take little account of embodied experiences.
So a nondisabled, unencumbered white adult male is often assumed.
I want I want to say here is that actually it's important to challenge these assumptions and not all our experiences of active travel at the same.
Now, I came across this article in The Guardian a few weeks ago, and it talks about, you know, the many examples of where,
you know, restaurants and bars but onto the streets and, you know, priority was given to cyclists and pedestrians.
And in the article, they interview the mayor of the cycling mayor of Coventry, Adam Trancer.
And I don't trying to make it a couple of really interesting points.
And what the first one is that he says that for cities to continue prioritising walkers and cyclists.
The only thing required is political will and leadership. And this might be something to reflect upon a bit.
But then he moves on to ask a question, which I actually think is central to any discussion of post pandemic ability futures.
And that is, who do urban centres serve? Not to me, this is a vital question, particularly in terms of how certain uses are privileged over others.
And I think it goes back to your question, Jim, about, you know, has the pandemic been good for active travel?
And I think the question is good for who? And I'm not alone in making this argument.
And you know how certain uses are often privileged over others.
And this can be exemplified by some of the some of the low traffic neighbourhoods that we might want to talk about.
And in effect, you know, literally shutting the closing down of some streets has pushed air pollution and congestion to other areas.
And I think I've got a couple of other examples that I'd just like to talk through quickly.
One is sort of a bit closer to home.
Now, my family quite fortunate to have access to urban greens base near to our house and during the first lockdown.
Although the amount of people decreased. So, you know, it wasn't as busy.
It was still necessary to navigate a range of different encounters.
You know, managing you know, I'm sure everyone had very similar experiences in terms of going out for these walks.
But after a few days, I start to find these quite stressful.
And, you know, these were walk's that meant to contribute to our physical and mental wellbeing.
And I found myself barking at my children, you know, states the land don't go too close, know, like herding cats.
And the children were actually chastised several times by older adults for not moving appropriately.
And I felt this like pressure and weight of societal responsibility that began to make these books far from enjoyable.
And I've no doubt others had similar experiences. Now, conflicts between pedestrians and between pedestrians, cyclists are nothing new in urban space.
You know, these happen all the time. But I think in the wider context of the Kovik 19 pandemic,
these tensions of these encounters are heightened and a politics emerges from the restrictions placed on us by the viruses who is able to walk,
for example, and who isn't. And these expectations of what it is to be a responsible walker, maintaining acceptable social distancing.
And there's sort of been this societal repositioning of walking during the outbreak where our bodies
and our differential experiences of walking have really become magnified and sort of centre stage.
I think, you know, this this example I talk about with my kids.
I mean, that's nothing compared to sits in very stark contrast to the traumatic events
that unfolded as the Indian government announced a 21 day lockdown in March.
So as migrant workers fled the cities back to their villages, there was no space on the overcrowded buses still operating.
And that's left thousands of workers who now have no work, little choice but to walk, often hundreds of miles home.
Now, many died on these treacherous journeys, with others arriving in villages to find they were no longer welcome.
Due to fears of the virus being brought with them.
So the impact of the virus highlights even more acutely how the benefits and positive experiences frequently associated with walking.
And a lot the positive experiences that been talked about in the broader discourse are far from universal.
And then in the case of walking, it's not one thing to people.
I guess the question is how do we situate these examples in the broader discourse of the benefits of active travel?
And I think here Osborn and Grant Smith make an important point where they talk about the
significance of our intersectional identities to our experiences of an access to the city.
And I think the point I'd like to make here is that who we are and how we move or important are moving bodies matter.
And I cannot emphasise this this enough. So, I mean, you could take the example of Jay walking and the ways it's highly racialized.
So in twenty nineteen ninety percent of illegal walking tickets in New York
City were issued to black and Hispanic people before he was shot in Ferguson,
Missouri. Michael Brown was stopped for allegedly jaywalking.
The journalist Michael Sokoloff shared this memory in the summer of wants to be stopped by the police for cycling to flamboyantly.
And then we can go in the U.K. to discipline disability activists who have really
been sharing their concerns for several years about the dangers of shared space,
particularly those who are visually impaired.
Now, the many positive steps in making visible the experiences of more, I guess, more marginalised groups in transport planning processes.
So this is the new five year strategy for living streets in the UK.
And they're very clear about their commitment to engaging with what they term, all walks of life and the promotion, walking the streets for everyone.
And this is great. And then if you go across to the US, the work of the UN token and collective,
they address concerns with justice and equity in the transport planning process,
and they focus specifically on mobility, justice, and they understand this is how power and inequality shape mobility's.
In addition to how other actors, such as the state government control mobility.
And I think this is really a really important point. And so in the context of the pandemic,
they say that for those of us with the privilege to choose physical immobility or those have the privilege to choose
physical immobility must protect and uplift those in our communities who are continuing to be mobile mobility.
Justice calls for us to see our lives as interdependent with the movement of all other
people and to honour their stories and histories being rooted in a vision for mobility.
Justice in this moment means embracing the collective responsibility that we all have to
keep each other safe and to see mobility and immobility as an integral part of that.
I guess I'll just finish by saying, you know, how do we move this thinking, this focussing, this focus on mobility, justice?
How does that become more mainstream?
And I guess if we're thinking about what lessons can be learnt from urban mobility and how we move from just focussing on the stuff,
the hardware, the infrastructure in the context of active travel.
I think we really need to centre our differentiated experience says, and take more seriously our moving bodies, who we are and how we move matter.
So I'm just I'll finish then. I'm just going to try and.
Thanks very much indeed for those sorts, Jenny.
And in that, you've actually spoken very much to some of the questions about inequality of the
endemic and inequalities of mobility which have been posed in in the chatter already.
But I wanted to go straight to that, to the question, which is, is top of the list here about the 15 minute neighbourhood.
And I'm sure you've got thoughts of that because, I mean,
in some senses that the the idea of things being accessible is that is attractive to commuters,
at least that seems to based on inequality, more or less embedded in that 15 minutes, depending on how fast you walk.
So what do you make of the 15 minute neighbourhood, Jenny?
I mean, I think it's a I mean, it's a it's a it's a nice idea. And in an ideal world, I think, you know, great.
I think, again, it goes back to this question of who's included and excluded from such an idea, you know,
assumes that your your you're able to afford to live in a particular place and have access to, you know, your place of employment.
We all know that, you know, a lot of people's commuting distance is getting greater and greater,
and particularly with some of the economic fallout of the pandemic.
You know, employment, unemployment is going up. So and then, you know, you mentioned Jim.
Yeah. But it seems that you can maybe move in particular ways and, you know, it can assumes that sort of a.
At temporality teet, a rhythm to your movement. That that makes a series of assumptions.
So I think in as an idea, I think it's an interesting one, but I think in practise it excludes a lot of different groups.
And I know I know Tim has had some thoughts about. But this notion as well to get out.
Come in. Yeah. I think Jenny is making a really important points.
It is. It's a very static understanding of how life's unfolds.
I've been working for the same employer for more than 10 years now, but that is also because of the relative privilege that I have with you.
Working precarious jobs, temporary contracts is going to be very difficult to do that within fifteen minutes from from the house.
So I think we need to be very, very careful with these assumptions.
I would also say that the notion of the 50 minutes neighbourhood of a 15 minute city is sort of something that has
been bandied around in urban planning and time for decades is just a new way of thinking about self-contained.
And it's not mutually different as an idea from what in UK planning.
Post Second World, where the new terms, which were also mentioned and self-contained with the idea,
was that people were working and shopping and seeing their friends in the debateable place.
What the middle new community that was being built and we've seen the same in France and Swedes in Sweden and the Netherlands.
And what all of these developments have done is become anything but self-contained,
because what we see is people move a lot in and out because they work elsewhere, because they have their social networks elsewhere.
And so it's really it's a nice idea. But I think it's really more of a marketing concept and it works very nicely in a mythical context.
But it defies the complexity of mobility in our everyday lives.
Thank you. We've got a series of questions which are more orientated towards the the economics of urban mobility and the urban areas.
What does this mean? The planning of sustainable transport in transition?
And the question really is. Think with public transport revenues declining dramatically.
Public transport operators, local authorities have very little financial room to manoeuvre.
And how should they be navigating now,
particularly given that at the same time they're committed to reducing carbon emissions and that involves considerable investment as well?
Yeah, it's a really difficult question.
And I think more and more studies are now coming out that show what's actually mobility levels once a lockdown is.
And it's sort of bounced back quite significantly, quite easily.
But the one thing that really, like continues left behind is public transport use.
And I think we need this week there is something in The Guardian that was showing that attitudes towards
public transport in this country could have been set back by about 20 years because of what's happening.
And so it's not looking great. And I think what.
Will happen is that, well, we'll get new discussion about what we want from our public transport system and who should pay for that?
Do we see it as a genuine public service? Or do we see it as something that needs to be sort of privately funded and and sell funding in that regards?
And I don't know where these discussions are going. But I think we will have that discussion.
And the interesting thing is it's not just public transport. It's the same with shared mobility.
So car sharing. Bike sharing. The whole idea of mobility as a service.
I think a lot of all these things, quite optimistic ideas about how behaviours will change are sort of seriously at risk.
And going forward, I think that relates more.
Sorry. No, please. I was going to invite you for your thoughts on public transport, Jenny.
Well, I think it relates to the point I'm making about taking seriously our bodies and how we move.
You know, well, all of we've all adjusted our behaviour in terms of, you know, washing our hands hand sanitiser, you know, having to wear masks.
And, you know, I had to take a taxi the other week. And I it's the first time I've taken a taxi.
And I found it really, you know, quite a disconcerting experience saying when I first time I've been on a bus, you know, a few times now.
But it's it's you know, how how are our habits, our bodily habits.
And we need to sort connect those two conversations together of how, you know, what what is it about that is making you know,
it was the RNC that had done some of this study that Tim was mentioning that was
reported in The Guardian about people are still going to keep using their cars.
And it's about that safe space that the car being in the car protected from others.
If you have the privilege of not having to take public transport and can move in these ways.
And so there's this whole series of contradictions going on.
And I think it's when you start to look at sort of micro scale encounters that you can link these things together a bit and think how are sort of.
Yeah, how OP embodied habits and competences and how they have evolved through the pandemic and what that means for how we move.
And I think that needs to be a much stronger connexion between these two sides of the coin.
Jenny, if I can, can stick with you, because this is a question which Siddharta or posed one of several questions from Siddartha.
Thank you for engaging so enthusiastically. But in your talk, Jay, you referred to the importance of political leadership.
And that, Siddharta, is question. Here is where the.
Well, what types of democratic process might make a difference in this context?
Do we have examples where the transformations in political structures have significantly transformed cities?
I think I think I think it's the political will in a lot of places is there?
But again, it's this. I think there's a there's a lot of disconnect. And I think also, you know, the the funding, the economics of these things.
You know, although the government announced this massive debt, this big song and dance about, you know,
all this money for walking and cycling, it's nothing compared to what's been invested in other schemes.
Such I'm not going to mention which ones. But, you know, other skat, you know, this is a drop in the ocean.
So I think the political will and leadership is there in a lot of cases.
But I think, again, it's I mean, Tim and a former colleague at TSG, Denver Nixon, and he might want to jump in here,
have done quite a lot of work on grassroots organisations in walking and cycling.
And I think there's there's a lot of fantastic work going on at grass roots level.
So it's like, how does that link-up how do you upscale some of that work?
Because that there's some there's some brilliant work going on.
I don't know whether, Tim, you want to jump in here to say a bit about some of those schemes and how they potentially linked to broader schemes.
Yeah. There's a lot of activity at grassroots level around cycling and walking, particularly cycling.
And I would say much more in Latin America than in it than in Europe, but in U.K. And I think that has real potential.
And many of these schemes and activities are also very democratic in the way they are organised and the way they and the way they function.
But upscaling remains an issue. So it can't just be Bottom-Up.
There needs to be change Top-Down as well. And.
We've seen, at least in the U.K., a wave of citizen assembly initiatives and and I've been in a couple of them.
First, there was actually quite sceptical.
But if you look at the national one that was held just before the lockdown started, actually it ran, I think maybe through some of it,
some of them actually, they've come up with a set of very sensible recommendations for national policy.
And I would say they're much more. I wouldn't use the word radical, but to denote what they're saying.
But they're much more forward thinking than most of the policy, even nuts.
A lot of the city level policy, it's not a panacea.
It's not the silver bullet that will that will bypass some of the issues.
We have that decision. But they do show that if you take people Syria and you think really carefully about participation in decision making,
you can get two new sets of ideas and better policy.
Now, both of you have spoken quite a lot already about the inequalities exposed by the pandemic and the inequality.
And in some of are kind of framing or implicit in inequality in our framing of urban mobility,
that the top two questions we've got in front of us here kind of try to probe that a bit more deeply and in particular suggesting that a
lot of the the thinking about the implications of the pandemic from ability has been very much focussed on on middle class experiences.
That means do you want to do either of you want to say a little bit more about now?
Q I'm happy to to start this. I think that's that's the correct observation for a lot of the studies.
And I think part of the issue is that many of the studies that have been done rely on Smuts on mobile phone data,
where you know very little about who is owning the telephone. So you have to make assumptions.
But if you do it in a sensible way, you can guess.
And you can still draw some inferences about what is happening in lower income, the more disadvantaged groups.
There are a couple of studies that have unique access to unique data.
And I know of one that's been submitted to and I think it was science this week.
This is sort of using data from from Columbia that looks really, really great.
And we've been doing some work in some of the peripheral semi informal neighbourhoods in a magazine in Columbia.
And it's a project with low income mothers. And we've used quantitative methods.
Basically, it's kind of a panel study using multiple quantitative methods.
And each and what it shows is not hugely different from from what other studies have shown.
The one interesting thing I would highlight is that at least this group of mothers, some of the key issues,
some of the key concerns are about how can I get access to high quality food or food?
Then I can feed my family work. And how can I look after and care for my extended family members who may live in other other addresses?
And I'm, strictly speaking,
officially not allowed to visit because the imagination of the government of what is a household is the people who live on one address.
And they don't really think about households and extended family networks,
sort of groups that care for one another in a slightly more complicated with a more complex geography.
And the third thing is things around access to the church and being able to go to Mars because religion is such an important part of people's
spiritual wellbeing and also because the church is a very important place to meet your friends and undertake all kinds of social activities.
It has this very strong social. Well, I think what we see that there are we are certainly not the only ones who have these kinds of data.
Because qualitative research with qualitative methods in these kinds of communities takes more time to be undertaken and to be analysed.
It's not that it doesn't it doesn't get published as much as quickly as some of the studies that we have.
We have seen published in recent weeks and months.
Thanks to many news, thoughts from from from you, anything you want to add, Jenny, to those points?
One about the data.
And I think that, you know, there is an important point to make about the type of data that is informing a lot of the decisions that are being made.
And, you know, if we think about data that might be, as Temp's talked about, co-produced with communities,
you know, a lot of sort of more experiential qualitative dates are going back.
And and there's some work that's been done and ethno methodology where they've where they focussed on,
you know, people's you know, people's micro movements, how they might swerve in certain ways to avoid people.
And, you know, that data takes time to acquire.
And I think it's it it's it needs to have a bigger it needs to be more visible, have a bigger presence in some of these debates.
So that relates to the data. But going back to this point about social exclusion, you know,
women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in terms of caring responsibilities, and that cuts across multiple different settings.
So I think it's important that we don't think about, you know, active travel level of ability, whichever lens we're using in isolation.
And we need to take account of these broader inequalities and sort of join up the dots, I think,
rather than just focussing on his transport infrastructure, his his an infrastructure that's going to, you know, make social distancing easier.
But how does this relate to broader structural issues?
And I think that that's important about not focussing, you know, working in silos,
but bringing these things together and knitting them together I think is important, particularly around issues of social exclusion.
Thanks, and I'm definitely going to come back. Before we finish to the question of what sorts of things should we specifically be aiming to do?
Because so far, and perhaps not surprisingly, we've taken on a fairly critical tenor.
And I think we might get a bit more critical now because where I'm going next, this is I'm a seminar on urban mobility.
But it would be surprising if we didn't talk about aviation in the context of Konbit 19.
And in that chat, there was some some broad questions about the future of aviation, the viability of very large pieces of airport infrastructure.
One might not even mention a third runway, but also much closer to home.
The challenge for hyper mobile academics. And what we should be doing post pandemic in terms of aviation behaviour.
Who wants to start? I'm gonna to have to you.
Okay. Let let me start with that and then let me start with the academic mobility.
And there's nothing that is an important question.
I think many people are now quite optimistic about where we will be travelling, much less.
And we'll see lots of online conferences continuing once the pandemic is declared.
I have yet to see that because I think flying is really deeply embedded in how academia works.
It's really a central part of our practise. And.
I think we'll see much more goodwill,
but we'll see significant return to flooding and some of the other questions that were raised around what to do with with airports.
It's going to be very interesting. I think what we'll see happen is we'll see a really strong rationalisation of the service
providers and we'll see both at the will see some of the traditional carriers disappear,
the ones that were always already on the brink of of collapse.
And we'll see some of the low cost carriers disappear. I think that business model is really difficult to sustain going forward.
So we'll see. We we'll probably see more fewer operators.
And that raises the question whether we needs as much airport capacity as we have.
I think some airports will become stranded assets, which is maybe not that bad.
From an environmental point of view. But if we think about transitions and if we think about just transitions,
then we'll have to think very carefully about what to do with the people who are dependent on these airports for their livelihoods,
either directly because they work in the sector or we sort of indirectly because of the effects on the local local economy.
I would not want to be a policymaker in Crowley, for instance, at the moment.
That's a sort of area that we'll be hit very, very hard for for quite some time going forward.
Now, at the same time, there's also an optimism about new ways of flying.
I would call them more urban fly in the unmanned aerial vehicles, the Uber taxis, that kind of development.
And I think we'll actually see more of that going on.
And before we act, I think the sense 20, 19,
I think almost 60 percent of the media requests that I received and received in my role was about how long it will
take or how short it will be before we will be flying in in sort of Uber style taxis from one side to the other.
And this is a classic case of what in innovation studies are known as hype, disappointments, cyclists.
These are technologies that get hyped very quickly, too.
We have year two to getting more capital invested in the developments and to change regulation.
But what we'll see is that developments are unlikely to be able to keep up with the
expectations because they've become so unrealistic that at some point the moment of deflation,
deflation will will kick in. And if that doesn't end the development work, developments, words, you sort of continue in the way that some believe.
Then I think we should still ask what is the point of this and who is benefiting from this?
And that brings us back to the question about inequality, because flying by with Uber is not going to be for the majority of people.
It's not going to be for you and me. And I can't see that work.
It will be for a select few who will be able to to benefit from these kinds of technologies.
So I am quite critical about them.
And I think we should not expect that they will dramatically change how urban mobility is function.
And just to add to the point on academic flying, I mean, I don't it is just academic flight.
I think lots of other cities that rely on meeting up face to face.
And I think, you know,
the pandemic is shown in it's opened up spaces in play in terms of make the spaces available to people who wouldn't necessarily been able to it.
You know, people attending this talk, for example, you know, across across the globe.
And I think, you know, there's been a lot of innovation around how events are run.
But I think we still need to think quite creatively about that. You know what?
What is an event? And I think, you know, there's a sort of I guess, again, going back to the body and the importance of the body where social beings,
we we crave being what most people crave, being together and, you know, being in front of a screen and the fatigue sets in.
So I I'm sort of I'm craving, you know, more innovation around how we make these events more sort of interactive and include stuff.
Yeah. So I think there's a lot more to go. And I like TMI.
I'm not sure the flying is going to go away as as as easily as some would necessarily hope.
Yeah, interesting. I'm conscious of time here, and as I say, I wanted to end by asking a more normative question.
A what? What should we do at this point?
And it's summed up quite well by the by Robert Hickman in his question.
How would an equitable, low carbon response to coal would be different?
What would it look like? So, I mean, you've fantastically exposed some of the news and complexity of thinking about mobility.
But what do we do?
But first, Jenny, I'm going to I'm going to.
There's a range of things that need to be done, and that's I think you can rank them from from from the very practical to to the much more abstract.
And I'd prefer to start at that last because I think we need to have a fundamental and honest public debate about
what we want from our transport systems because we want too many different things from them at the same time,
because when historically transport planning was part of economic policy and it was about encouraging economic developments.
And we see a lot of that still coming through. Now, that has been expanded over time.
There's a lot of talk, of course, about the environmental aspects and the environmental externalities.
And that's really important. And I mentioned sort of the role of transport in CO2 emissions.
But I would say it at least over well over the last 20 years,
as soon as more and more attention being paid to the role of transport systems in in reinforcing and sometimes creating social inequalities.
And if you want policies that do all three of these. Well, good luck with finding them because they're not that many.
That would really do that with sort of very strongly still thinking in terms of a win win situations.
And we can't. We need to make some some some really hard choices about what we want from our transport systems.
And then my view is we need to think we need to privilege the social in it and sort
of the social dimension of the social inequality and the environmental aspects.
And that will mean that we will have to put in place policies that will reduce mobility, however difficult that is,
that we will have to do some of those and we'll have to have honest discussions that go beyond
thinking about transport and simply quantitative terms to think about qualities and think about,
OK, what kinds of transport I really need it and when, for whom and where, and do that in a much more equitable way than we do.
Not pleasant. So that's one ends. One set of things to conclude at the same time at the other ends.
I think we need to. We need to be critical.
We need to be careful not to put too much emphasis on weak prestige projects for changing mobility radically.
Whether that is major bus, rapid transit corridors or metros.
Of course, they are important and they need to be developed. But we need to think much more about what is really happening at a grassroots level.
And think about what we can do to change what we can do in terms of changing provision by not thinking everything through the street,
through the states, but think about grassroots organisations that do all sorts of things.
We need to think about how we imbeds and.
Transports and developing skills into the education system.
We need to think about so that, for instance, something like make cycling becomes much more than it already is part of how you grow up.
And it becomes sort of really second nature for people.
And we need to think about how we reallocates some of the priorities and the infrastructures that we already have,
because there's not going to be much money for building large infrastructures and we'll have to do different things with what we currently have.
And one thing that I think is actually proving to be really effective is to reallocate road space away from vehicles to other forms of transport.
And so that so it's not a simple measure because it's politically very sensitive,
but is not a measure that has to involve as much money as some of the big, shiny new projects.
New developments. Thanks a lot.
Tim, let me pass briefly to you.
Jenny, and I'm one thing implicit in Robin's question here is a question about place.
It's not just about practises and dynamics. It's about what places are like.
Yeah. And I think, you know, that geography has a geography.
Geography, of course, matters.
And I think I mean, just to build on what Tim said, Rob's question to two points, and I think it's this joining up of the dots.
And this isn't just academics tend. There's a lot of particular round walking.
There's a lot of academic work on walking that is quite siloed, for example.
And I'd like to see it joining up of those silos, but then not only just across academia.
So we run out the CSU and exact course where we bring policymakers and practitioners into dialogue with academics.
And this issue of translation is a really important one. How do you translate some of this rich work going on in academia?
And this fantastic work going on in policy and practise? How does that translate and how does that work?
How do you pull together these interfaces? And I think that's really important.
And then just building on what Temas said about about research with, you know, looking at grassroots stuff.
I think if we're going to send to questions of inequality and differential experiences,
co-produced research with local communities is really, really important.
And that produces very different types of data, which can then complement some of the more established and more traditional forms of data.
So I think that's that's. I'll just finish with those two points. That's that's great.
Thanks so much to Tim Schwann and Jenny Middleton.
I bet that the impacts of Konbit 19 on urban mobility have been so dramatic.
And we've we've all been observing them and interpreting them in in our own terms and through our own personal experiences.
So it and it's been wonderful to have these incredibly informed and insightful perspectives to help
us all to think through some of the implications of what's been going on and what might happen next.
And as Tim has suggested, to really engage in some form of debate about what the future holds or should hold for urban mobility.
So thank you all very much indeed. The next session in this series is with Professor Susan Jebb and.
Charles Godfrey in conversation on rethinking diet, weight and health.
Even after the Kobe 19 pandemic.
And that is taking place next Thursday, the 19th of November at five p.m. And you're very welcome to join that and to register,
please, apparently press the green button at the bottom of the screen.
And also, of course, keep an eye out constantly on the Oxford Martin School's Web site,
because there is a incredible wealth and variety of folks, not just in this areas, but on all sorts of topics.
But thank you all very much for joining us this evening.