Automated Mobility Transitions: Governing Processes in the UK
Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2018, 10(4), 956; https://doi.org/10.3390/su10040956
Received: 14 February 2018
/
Revised: 13 March 2018
/
Accepted: 14 March 2018
/
Published: 26 March 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transport Policy)
Contemporary systems of mobility are undergoing a transition towards automation. In the UK, this transition is being led by (often new) partnerships between incumbent manufacturers and new entrants, in collaboration with national governments, local/regional councils, and research institutions. This paper first offers a framework for analyzing the governance of the transition, adapting ideas from the Transition Management (TM) perspective, and then applies the framework to ongoing automated vehicle transition dynamics in the UK. The empirical analysis suggests that the UK has adopted a reasonably comprehensive approach to the governing of automated vehicle innovation but that this approach cannot be characterized as sufficiently inclusive, democratic, diverse and open. The lack of inclusivity, democracy, diversity and openness is symptomatic of the post-political character of how the UK’s automated mobility transition is being governed. The paper ends with a call for a reconfiguration of the automated vehicle transition in the UK and beyond, so that much more space is created for dissent and for reflexive and comprehensive big picture thinking on (automated) mobility futures.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
automated vehicles; autonomous vehicles; governance; post-political; Transition Management; socio-technical transitions
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Hopkins, D.; Schwanen, T. Automated Mobility Transitions: Governing Processes in the UK. Sustainability 2018, 10, 956. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10040956
AMA Style
Hopkins D, Schwanen T. Automated Mobility Transitions: Governing Processes in the UK. Sustainability. 2018; 10(4):956. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10040956
Chicago/Turabian StyleHopkins, Debbie, and Tim Schwanen. 2018. "Automated Mobility Transitions: Governing Processes in the UK" Sustainability 10, no. 4: 956. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10040956
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
