Unlocking Transport Innovation: A Sociotechnical Perspective of the Logics of Transport Planning Decision-Making within the Trial of a New Type of Pedestrian Crossing
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Date
2018-06-01
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Building Better Homes, Towns, and Cities (BBHTC) National Science Challenge
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Abstract
This paper considers the proposal to install a novel type of pedestrian crossing, as part of a neighbourhood intervention, to investigate the architecture of decision-making that influences the delivery and outcomes of our urban environments. While political and policy-making directions often signal a movement towards providing better active transport options and safer urban environments for pedestrians and cyclists, delivering projects that achieve such goals can prove challenging, time-consuming and be marred by conflict. Innovative projects can stagnate, diminish in scale or fail to be
realised entirely. The exact causes of these less than ideal outcomes are difficult to determine as they involve a complex sociotechnical assemblage of various actors, institutions, resources and logics. The architecture of decision-making that surrounds these projects is created through a myriad of de jure and de facto actors that, in concert, affect the material construction of neighbourhoods and shape our homes, towns and cities
In Auckland, the regional Road Controlling Authority (RCA), ‘Auckland Transport’ (AT), dedicates a chapter in its ‘code of practice’ outlining its commitment to enabling innovative solutions where appropriate. Yet, as political demands for a modal shift towards active and public transport have gradually intensified, the organisation has sometimes struggled to adapt from ‘business-as-usual’ practices that prioritise goals associated with the private motor vehicle, such as road network capacity and flow efficiency (particularly, alleviating peak hour congestion problems).
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Opit S, Witten K. (2018). Unlocking Transport Innovation: A Sociotechnical Perspective of the Logics of Transport Planning Decision-Making within the Trial of a New Type of Pedestrian Crossing. i-40. Building Better Homes, Towns, and Cities (BBHTC) National Science Challenge. https://betterdecisions.goodhomes.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BBHTC-Smarter-Sreets-Working-Paper-Final.pdf.