My research on transport has two parts. The first part is on buses, in particular children who not being on the buses. This has links to social mobility – if children cannot access the world beyond the streets they can walk to – then does this limit their opportunities in life? (Almost certainly, yes).
The second aspect of my research on transport is on highways, coming out of legal geography where highways are mapped “as”, using spatial and legal criteria to govern how they are used, both on the road as well as on pavements and verges. My conclusion from this research is that while sharing is hard, we need to understand how to use highways as a resource, to facilitate mobility as well as active travel and wellbeing for as many people as possible.
Buses
This research was part of a collaborative project with the children and adults amazing studio, Room 13, at Hareclive E-Act Primary School as well as with Ingrid Skeels (Bristol Child Friendly City), Finlay McNab (Streets Re-Imagined) and Phil Jones (University of Birmingham).
The best bit of the research was the studio’s video, created by the children, putting for their arguments for free bus fares in Bristol and those parts of the UK where bus fares are not free (e.g. in London until 16 or Manchester aged 16-18 and Scotland, since January 2023).
The project was prompted by Mia’s question the audience at Bristol’s Festival of the Future City in 2017:
“My family don’t own a car and the bus fares are so expensive. Lots of people can’t get into Bristol to experience the city centre. Some children have never been into Bristol yet they only live a few miles away. So I want to ask you: how can children grow up and enjoy their cities if they can’t get around them? Is it fair that some children can’t do this at all?”
We decided to see if we could understand the legal and. policy causes of these problems for children as well produce some, albeit limited, empirical evidence on the effects of “not being on the buses”. The research outputs were a (long) report Not on the Buses (2020) and a short briefing Not on the Buses: reduce inequality by subsidising bus travel for Bristolian children published by Policy Bristol.
This research underpins a research article Vehicles for Justice: Buses and Advancement published in the Journal of Law and Society, Vol 49(2), June 2022, pp. 406-429, available open access here.
The article was shortlisted for the SLSA Best Article Prize 2023.
Abstract: This article draws on the findings from The Bus Project (2018–2021) in Bristol, which found that children living in some of the most deprived streets in England cannot afford to visit the centre of their city. The article explains that the problem of children ‘not being on the buses’ is the consequence of a series of policy choices in bus governance.
Empirically, the article demonstrates that the causes of bus immobility – cost, fear of the unknown, unfamiliarity, and unreliability – have clear detrimental effects on children’s ability to access leisure and civic opportunities, independent travel, and education of choice.
Theoretically, it argues that discrimination and equality law – the dominant legal paradigms for addressing inequality – have limitations in this setting when they do not explicitly provide for socio-economic inequality.
The article suggests that we could develop a concept of ‘advancement’, drawing on aspects of Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 (still unimplemented in England, though in force in Scotland and Wales), moving beyond protected characteristics. As a policy, advancement could be implemented using administrative means, including existing data sets on free school meals or indices of deprivation. A concept of advancement could become a mechanism to enable us to address socio-economic inequality as a ‘vehicle for justice’, just as buses are vehicles capable of facilitating spatial justice in practical terms.
Highways
Highways – which include roads as well as pavements and verges – are some of the most important public spaces we have.
They are also some of the most contested as I explored in a chapter ‘The highway: A right, a place or a resource?’ (pp. 64-86) in Maria Lee and Carolyn Abbott, Taking English Planning Law Scholarship Seriously (UCL Press, 2022)
The whole edited collection is available for free as a PDF from UCL Press.Abstract: There are three ways of thinking about a highway’s governance: as a resource, a place or a right. The lack of clarity over which concept best describes a highway unsettles our understanding of the regulatory label that is attached to a strip of land enabling users to travel along it, whether by car, bicycle or on foot. This chapter suggests that while the concept of place and a right to passage are critical to highways governance, understanding the highway as a resource to be allocated is the most important aspect of the three. Allocation facilitates shared roadspace so that all can exercise their right of passage whilst also recognising the spatial distinctiveness of different types of highways. It connects highways authorities’ broader network management duties with facilitating travel along individual roads as well as emphasising a highway authority’s liability for maintenance and the risk for users, particularly drivers. Understanding highways governance as an allocation of resource also acknowledges that what is being regulated is the space itself, rather than people or modes of transport, echoing planning governance more broadly.