Vetenskapliga artiklar

Many regions worldwide are struggling to create a mode shift from private cars to more sustainable transport modes. While there are many reviews regarding travellers’ preferences and travel mode choices, there is a lack of an updated review that provides a comprehensive overview of the factors that make public transport systems attractive.

This review aims to fill the knowledge gap by offering insights into the factors influencing travel behaviour and the demand for public transport. It has two primary objectives:

• Summarize general conclusions drawn from international literature reviews.
• Present specific insights on the topic pertaining to the Nordic countries.

The findings show that reliability and frequency are important factors for creating an attractive public transport supply. However, there is only limited evidence regarding the impact of improvements in these attributes on public transport demand, so this needs more research. This review highlights the importance of understanding the underlying motivations for travel mode choice and provides recommendations on areas for further investigation to understand the attractiveness of public transport supply.

Innovation platforms are new collaborative organisations in the urban development context that aim to support innovation. They assemble different organisations and actors and act as flexible intermediary links between the same. By being intrinsically flexible and adaptable in form and function, the innovation platform can be seen as an organisational accomplishment or enactment of adaptive planning. Central to adaptive planning is the balance between organisational flexibility and stability, which is also intrinsic to any public innovation work. Public sector innovations are often perceived to require open and experimental trial and error strategies – while their institutional setting simultaneously requires stability. The aim of this article is to analyse how individuals working in innovation platforms make sense of their organisation at the intersection of adaptability and stability. We describe the tension between adaptability and stability inherent to innovation platforms, as the platforms are set to facilitate relationships between actors while maintaining their role as an independent organisation. This article is based on an in-depth multiple-case study of 15 innovation platforms in the Nordic countries, consisting of interviews with representatives, as well as extensive desktop material and participant observations. By adopting an organisational and sense-making perspective, we analyse how people working in platforms enact their organisations and their environment through processes of belief and action-driven sense-making. We conclude that despite innovation platforms’ strong advocacy – and sense-making – in terms of adaptability and chameleon-like characteristics, stability is enacted through making sense of themselves as a legitimate and necessary position/node in urban planning and development.

The cost of public transport has increased more than the supply in recent years in Sweden. One of the main cost drivers identified is peak-hour traffic. The major operating cost factors are the need for a large bus fleet for short periods during mornings and afternoons and the scheduling of drivers for shorter periods than the minimum working hour restriction. The objective of this paper is to study the effect of the number of buses needed (and hence the operating cost) during peak hours when adjusting the bus departure times. The study also analyses the increase in public transport supply and the number of boarding passengers if the cost reduction is re-invested. The analysis is based on case studies and simulated scenarios of possible adjustments in departure times for buses. The results show that by marginally adjusting the departure times, fewer buses are needed which leads to decreased operating costs. Further, the results show that the reduction in costs can be used to improve public transport in the area by expanding the supply of public transport in the long run.

While transport and mobility studies have focused on diverse challenges related to improving the quality of public transport (PT) for its passengers, they have hardly examined the well-being and livelihoods of PT workers. To address this gap, we explore the work spaces and times of bus drivers employed in PT in Gothenburg and Stockholm (Sweden), where PT operations are procured from private companies to ensure service quality and financial efficiency. Drawing upon studies on capitalist temporalities of work, we observe that the bus drivers are obliged to perform fatiguing work tasks under constant time pressure, which generates daily conflicts between bodily, personal, and work rhythms. The drivers’ time wealth is severely constrained, as they have limited capacity to control their own time and experience a near-constant work-life imbalance. Our findings indicate that such hindrances are not simply a product of work rhythms marked by the rigidity of the PT timetable. Rather, they emerge from the operational and financial logic of procurement that contradicts the well-being and livelihoods of PT workers. We conclude with a plea to place workers as essential actors for future reflections on inequalities and injustices related to transport and mobility.

Transport policies in Western Europe are increasingly framed in terms of sustainable mobility. This is a response to an urgent need to tackle adverse consequences of the transport system and implies changes in discourses related to transport. Exploring sustainable mobility is a fruitful way of studying discursive development in a policy field historically connected to priorities radically different from sustainability. More precisely, what reasons are provided in favour of sustainable mobility in contemporary transport policies? What underlying norms and assumptions does the notion of sustainable mobility rely upon? And what subjects are emphasised in the discourse? The thesis argues that these questions can be answered by studying the social construction of sustainable mobility in the transport policy field. The thesis contributes to the emerging field of critical transport studies by empirically investigating a concrete sustainable mobility discourse. This is done through an in-depth case study of a Swedish national sustainable transport policy, the Urban Environment Agreement. The case allows for a study of how power and conflicts permeate planning and policy for sustainability. The thesis advances a discourse-analytical perspective that is hitherto lacking in transport research and develops a novel framework building on critical discourse analysis and critical realism. This framework is subsequently deployed to empirically map discursive patterns of statements related to sustainable mobility, to determine how these patterns interrelate, and to interpret the broader implications of the findings. The central claim of the thesis is that sustainable mobility needs to be understood as a product of naturalised representations of growth. Arguably, societal norms and assumptions about forms of growth govern how sustainable mobility is conceived and acted upon through policies. This constructs the continuous increase of mobility as a naturally occurring phenomenon and excludes alternatives to high-mobility society. Two dominant constructions of sustainable mobility are identified in the discourse: ‘sustainable mobility as a necessity’, building on ideas of managing growth, and ‘sustainable mobility as progress’, connected to ideas of promoting growth. The author proposes that a third way of constructing sustainable mobility, ‘as restriction’, in the sense of limiting growth, is silenced in the discourse. Although there are differences among these constructions, the discourse contains several naturalised representations that characterise the discourse overall. While growth is constructed as inevitable, sustainability is constructed as an imperative. As a result, a transition to sustainable mobility is constructed as a salvation, justified by several logics of sustainable mobility. These logics discursively link contradictory notions of growth and sustainability. The thesis develops a wheel of growth metaphor to capture such key elements and linkages of the discourse. Finally, the discourse in focus is contrasted against central features of the more ‘traditional’ transport policy discourse. This shows that the sustainable mobility discourse of the Urban Environment Agreement policy partly challenges the traditional focus on automobility. At the same time, the present discourse reproduces assumptions of ‘predict and provide’, travel time minimisation, and the emphasis on economic growth. The conclusions of the thesis contribute to the ongoing discussion among policy makers, academics, and social movements about how to respond to the societal challenge of a transition towards a more sustainable and just transport system

Recent transport equity literature has proposed a sufficientarian approach to transport planning, according to which all individuals would be entitled to a minimum level of accessibility deemed adequate or sufficient. The implementation of this approach would require the adoption of an accessibility standard as a key performance indicator guiding transport investments, land use planning and service provision. While accessibility measures are increasingly operationalised in professional practice, the adoption of actual accessibility standards is rare. In this paper, we explore the barriers for adopting explicit accessibility standards and identify conditions within which such standards could be acceptable to practitioners and policymakers. The paper draws on interviews with professionals in three city-regions in Sweden, complemented with interviews with practitioners from the Flanders region in Belgium and from the UK. We find that authorities are hesitant to define and measure accessibility and that where definitions and performance indicators exist, there is a lack of agreement within and across authorities. The prospect of introducing a standard across the board without attaching any conditions comprises a further reason for shying away from standard-setting. The (dis)integration of transport and land use and complicated administrative and governance structures are described as a further barrier, while demand responsive transport is in some cases considered a panacea to all accessibility problems, making it possible to avoid setting standards. Our findings suggest that standards for minimum accessibility could gain political support if their reach is clearly circumscribed, and their benefits are clearly understood.

The aim of this paper is to improve the knowledge of collaborative challenges when planning and implementing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Collaborative challenges are here understood as the barriers that may arise in BRT planning and implementation as a consequence of several formally independent actors, occasionally with different interests, participating in the planning. The results are based on an analysis of actor interactions in Swedish BRT projects. These projects are analysed in relation to the state of the art in the research field of collaborative approaches. The results show two main and interrelated collaborative challenges. The first category of challenges concerns difficulties for actors in creating a common understanding of what a BRT system is, the second category concerns details of bus priority measures, e.g. busways, priority at intersections, and how to handle and deal with conflicting interests when removing speed bumps or pedestrian and cycle crossings. In terms of policy is in the early stages of the planning processes. This can be generated by working practices and tools that facilitate agreements on how to handle different interests and trade-offs. BRT guidelines adapted to national transport policy, legal and organisational conditions could function as tools in assisting actor dialogue.

The transport sector is currently undergoing rapid development, which is to a large extent driven by innovation and technological changes initiated by various market actors. At the same time, public transport operations are largely framed by extensive procurement processes and a mature market where a few large companies compete for market share. In Europe, there is tension between rapid innovative development in the sector, on one hand, and stability given by regulation practices shaping procurement processes, on the other. This paper presents results from a study in which opportunities for innovation in procurement processes were examined. The findings are based on public transport authorities' and transport companies’ experiences from tendering bus transport in the three largest cities in Sweden. By using a theoretical perspective of innovation and institutional logics, the paper explains the restrictive role innovation has in procurement processes and discusses the conflicting views transport authorities and transport companies put forward. The paper is of general value since it raises questions related to the complexity of existing tendering regimes and the possibilities of facilitating innovation.