Tim Schwanen

University of Oxford | OX · School of Geography and the Environment

A lack of charging opportunities is cited as one of the main barriers to the adoption of plug-in battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Charging opportunities are even more limited for the millions of households across Europe without the space to charge a vehicle at home, but research has not previously targeted these households. This study aims to fill...

Community transport comprises diverse local, not-for-profit, and primarily volunteer-run transport schemes that operate across the United Kingdom. These schemes support the travel needs of thousands of people, most of whom are older, live in rural areas, and have few other transport options. Further, this transport sector is unique in that most sch...

Nation‐wide cuts to bus subsidies have led to reduced service in rural communities in the UK, leaving those who do not have access to a car – most of whom are older, have a disability, or have a low income – with few other options to meet their travel needs. This has resulted in greater demand on community transport, small‐scale, local, and communi...

Ridesourcing has undergone a magnificent development pre pandemic and has had a transformative impact on travel behavior and urban mobility. While an individual's travel behavior has been found to be inevitably influenced by the pandemic, how COVID-19 influences the utilization of ridesourcing has rarely been discussed in previous studies. Understa...

The relation between digitalization and environmental sustainability is ambiguous. There is potential of various digital technologies to slow down the transgression of planetary boundaries. Yet resource and energy demand for digital hardware production and use of data-intensive applications is of substantial size. The world over, there is no compre...

Torsten Hägerstrand's career can be understood as a protracted experiment in thinking creatively about space and human–environment interactions. He continually sought to abstract – select, simplify and exclude – from the complexity of spatiotemporal processes in ways that differed from customs at a given point in time. This article argues that Häge...

Vehicle automation is one of the most researched topics in transport studies but much remains uncertain about the speed of adoption and potential impacts, including if and how it can contribute to greater environmental sustainability. This study adopts a Delphi approach to examine the speed with which 15% of new vehicles will be automated (SAE-3, S...

Transport and mobility systems need to be transformed to meet climate change goals and reduce negative environmental and social effects. Despite EU policies having targeted such problems for more than three decades, transitions have been slow and geographically uneven. For effective change to happen, transport and mobility research needs fresh pers...

Low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) are designed to remove motorised traffic from residential streets, while leaving them permeable to pedestrians and cyclists, and they have become a popular means to promote active travel. During the recent pandemic, the government introduced the Active Travel Fund in England to facilitate the rapid implementation o...

In Malate, a district of Manila, flooding is a frequent occurrence. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with Malate inhabitants to approach urban floods as more than discrete disastrous episodes which interfere with a pre-existing normality. The paper employs a Levebvrian conceptualisation of rhythm and entrainment, while also offering reflecti...

Much research is dependent on the willingness of participants to give up their time – whether renumerated or not – and engage with the activities we have designed such as interviews, surveys, writing diaries, and taking photos. We talk about social research being dependent on ‘self-selection’, but we say less about what happens when the people with...

This editorial introduces and contextualises the Special Issue on informalities in urban transport and mobility in cities across the Global South, East and North. It identifies a mutual misrecognition between the urban studies literature on informality and research on transport and mobilities, and proposes that urban mobility be understood as a cri...

In this study, we investigate the preferences for private electric vehicle (EV) charging among households without a private residential charging option. We seek to understand which attributes of a residential neighbourhood charging service would offer an attractive substitute to charging an EV on private property overnight, as is most common among...

Cities across the global are looking for structural systemic solutions to mobility related problems such as congestion, pollution, and lack of (public) space. Electrification seems to accelerate and address (local) environmental problems, but not necessarily contributes to just mobility by opening up public space, creating broader access to mobilit...

The pressures on urban local authorities to deliver mobility strategies highlight both their need and ability to connect problems and solutions, and then successfully implement the schemes. These difficulties are compounded by other distinctive pressures, from both above and below. From above there can be pressures from national government to deliv...

Car sharing could support a transition away from private vehicle ownership and use. Attempts to understand participation in car sharing have primarily focused on minor and major disruptions which catalyse change in practices. This paper examines how processes of entering, continuing or exiting car sharing systems unfold in Norway, the Netherlands,...

Energy and transportation researchers can contribute to the realization of just transitions to low-carbon mobility in cities across the planet by elaborating and enacting broad conceptions of justice that consider distribution, procedure, recognition and knowledge generation.

In this paper, we propose to use a relational lens to understand walkability by acknowledging that what constitutes a walkable environment may vary considerably between pedestrians who have different needs, capacities, and purposes. A multiple-scenario approach is developed for assessing walkability, which recognises that in valuation, major compon...

The associations between objective and subjective dimensions of the built environment and walking behaviour have been examined extensively in existing studies. However, the interaction effects of those dimensions of the built environment on walking behaviour are understudied and may be more complex than hitherto suggested. Apart from the subjective...

Automated vehicles have become a popular topic of conversation. Initially, these conversations were limited to technology developers, innovators and engineers, as they worked to progressed the various technologies and systems that are required to create automated vehicles. Then, over time, these conversations extended to other communities; lawyers,...

Vehicle fleets are considered an important context for the deployment of innovations such as electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. Fleet vehicles constitute a significant share of vehicle registrations, yet little research has been conducted into how the make-up of the changing fleet market could influence upscaling of innovations...

Borders and practices of bordering are undergoing substantive symbolical and material changes, at least in/around the UK (Hagen, 2018). The EU has a unique relationship with borders between individual countries; transport networks unite territories, and 'freedom of movement' enables frictionless bordering. The June 2016 UK Brexit campaign and refer...

Seen as the most sustainable transport mode, people’s walking has been well investigated in relation to its environmental correlates and benefits to physical and mental well-being in current transportation and public health literature. Much of this research has considered that environmental features determine people’s responses, behaviors and level...

Seen as the most sustainable transport mode, people’s walking has been well investigated in relation to its environmental correlates and benefits to physical and mental well-being in current transportation and public health literature. Much of this research has considered that environmental features determine people’s responses, behaviors and level...

Most existing healthcare accessibility studies ignore the travel time uncertainty that are commonly encountered in road networks. This study aims to examine the impacts of travel time uncertainty on healthcare accessibility. A reliability-based two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is proposed to evaluate healthcare accessibility under tr...

The landscape of grocery shopping is changing fast. Online retailing via home delivery or ‘click and collect’, convenience stores and various hybrid shopping channels are gaining popularity with some consumers, but not with others. The central premise of this paper is that focusing on the ‘average grocery shopper’ is not very helpful if the objecti...

The sustainability transitions research network research agenda reflects the impressive growth and diversity of sustainability transitions scholarship, premised on an ethos of interdisciplinarity and openness to other research traditions and informed by increasingly diverse empirical case studies. Nonetheless, an inclination to integrate concepts,...

The evaluation of social impacts of transport policies has been attracting growing attention in recent years. Yet studies thus far have predominately focused on developed countries and overlooked whether equity assessment of transport projects is sensitive to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). This paper investigates how investments in publi...

This article contributes to the geographical understanding of how mobile online presence enabled by smartphones transforms human spatial practices; that is, people’s everyday routines and experiences in time and space. Contrasting a mainstream discourse concentrating on the autonomy and flexibility of ubiquitous (anywhere, anytime) use of social me...

Users are increasingly acknowledged as important actors fostering those fundamental socio-technical innovations needed to achieve a sustainable society. In the literature, users have so far been portrayed mostly to play a role in early phases of technology formation. However, more recently users have become important players in the upscaling of var...

New technologies are playing an increasingly important part in shaping the development of city transport and the wider built environment. Relatively litt le att ention has, however, been given to how the technologies evolve in social and political terms, so that the public are not just seen as the passive receivers of new technology. Technological...

Previous studies have indicated that travel satisfaction-the experienced emotions during, and cognitive evaluation of, a trip-can be affected by travel mode choice and other trip characteristics. However, as satisfactory trips might improve a person's attitude towards the used mode, persons may be more likely to use that same mode for future trips...

Since it erupted in 2015, the so‐called “dieselgate” scandal has revealed severe shortcomings in car manufacturers’ efforts to reduce the impacts of driving on both global climate change and local air quality. In the European Union context, this controversy has raised questions about the trustworthiness of carmakers, and about the accuracy of the e...

For centuries the transport of people and goods across the globe has been shaped profoundly by Western and other colonialisms. Impacts on the development of infrastructures such as roads, railways and ports as well as transport flows within, to and from origins and destinations are increasingly documented. This essay proposes that expert knowledge...

As they go about everyday life, members of households negotiate complex arrangements around mobility and immobility, which continue to change over time. Mobility biographies research has made an important contribution to our understanding of these dynamics. At the same time, mobility biographies often rely on limited definitions of the household an...

There is renewed and increasing interest in understanding the part that infrastructures play in societal transformations, especially in response to the various challenges of climate change. Studies that focus on these issues tend to examine infrastructures in isolation from each other, and tend to work with evolutionary accounts of incremental chan...

Background: Physical activity has long been considered as an important component of a healthy lifestyle. Although many efforts have been made to promote physical activity, there is no effective global intervention for physical activity promotion. Some researchers have suggested that Pokémon GO, a location-based augmented reality game, was associate...

Improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in energy demand are expected to contribute more than half of the reduction in global carbon emissions over the next few decades. These unprecedented reductions require transformations in the systems that provide energy services. However, the dominant analytical perspectives, grounded in neoclassical...

This article introduces the background and contents of this forum, which includes six articles based on presentations in the opening and closing plenary sessions of the featured theme on “Context and Uncertainty in Geography and GIScience” at the 2017 American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston. The purpose of the featured th...

Although various forms of uncertainty have been examined in studies of how geographical contexts influence mobility in recent years, this article argues that greater attention should be paid to those types that cannot be tackled automatically with better data or analysis techniques. Using cycling adoption and levels as an example, it reflects on so...

Background: Physical activity has long been considered as an important component of a healthy lifestyle. Although many efforts have been made to promote physical activity, there is no effective global intervention for physical activity promotion. Some researchers have suggested that Pokémon GO, a location-based augmented reality game, was associat...

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 g...

This study focuses on imagined futures of personal mobility in the United Kingdom in the context of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Focusing on two innovations, electric vehicles and car clubs, the study investigates how people, behaviour and mobility are imagined in a range of visioning documents about the future up to...

Effective mitigation of climate change will require far-reaching transformations of electricity, heat, agricultural, transport, and other systems. The energy studies and modeling research that so often dominate academic and policy debates provide valuable insights into these transitions, but remain constrained by their focus on rational decision-ma...

More than ever is Geography surrounded by interdisciplinary movements claiming expertise with regard to the interconnections among nature, society and technology. These movements ask questions from Geography and geographers about if and how they can contribute to those movements and what form collaboration might take. This paper analyses Human Geog...

Accelerating innovation is as important as climate policy

The evaluation of the social impacts of transport policies is attracting growing attention in recent years. Yet, this literature is still predominately focused on developed countries. The goal of this research is to investigate how investments in public transport networks can reshape social and geographical inequalities in access to opportunities i...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are widely regarded as a promising solution to reduce air pollution in cities and key to a low carbon mobility future. However, their environmental benefits depend on the temporal and spatial context of actual usage (journey energy efficiency) and the rolling out of EVs is complicated by issues such as limited range. This pa...

Over the past years an increasing number of studies have investigated the link between travel and subjective well-being (SWB), often focussing on the effects of trip characteristics on satisfaction with particular trips. Two elements not frequently addressed in this research domain are (i) how trip satisfaction affects the mood during – and the eva...

This paper uses econometric analysis of aggregate time-series data to explore how different factors have influenced the demand for car travel in Great Britain since 1970 and how the rebound effect has changed over that time. Our results suggest that changes in income, the fuel cost of driving and the level of urbanisation largely explain travel tre...

The ride-hailing company Uber has achieved extremely rapid global expansion by means of outmanoeuvring governments, regulators and competitors. The rise of the company has been based on a deliberate strategy of acting as a market disruptive innovator through a user friendly technology and making use of the ‘sharing economy’. These attributes are no...

This third report in the series reviews recent research on the geographies of transport in Africa, Asia and Latin America to reflect on the spatialities of knowledge production and the question as to whether a post/decolonial turn is occurring in geographical scholarship on transport. A simple and heuristic classification scheme is developed and de...

Despite a surge of multidisciplinary interest in transition studies on low carbon mobilities, there has been little evaluation of the current state of the field, and the contributions of different approaches such as the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), theories of practice, or the new mobilities paradigm. As a step in this direction, this paper bring...

Both analytically inclined geographers and mobilities scholars have examined the interrelations of transportation and information technology (IT) use. Over time research interests have broadened from a strong focus on substitution of physical movement by IT use to the myriad ways in which IT use and travel practices have become integrated into mobi...

Over the past years an increasing number of studies have investigated the link between travel and subjective well-being (SWB), often focussing on the effects of trip characteristics on satisfaction with particular trips. Two elements not frequently addressed in this research domain are (i) how trip satisfaction affects the mood during – and the eva...

Over the past decades, transport researchers and policy-makers have devoted increasing attention to questions about justice and equity. Nonetheless, there is still little engagement with theories in political philosophy to frame what justice means in the context of transport policies. This paper reviews key theories of justice (utilitarianism, libe...

pre-print of paper published in the journal Transport Reviews.Pereira, R. H. M., Schwanen, T., Banister, D. (2017). Distributive justice and equity in transportation. Transport Reviews, 37(2), 1–22. doi:10.1080/01441647.2016.1257660http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01441647.2016.1257660

We report from a project on the futures of personal mobility in the UK, in the context of sustainable mobility and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. This paper looks at how people, behaviour and mobility are imagined in visioning documents (forecasts, pathways, etc.) in the future up to 2050, a timeline with great emission...

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subje...

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subje...

This essay introduces the special issue and explains its rationale. It argues that, while the residential location and neighbourhood remain significant, urban segregation needs to be understood and examined in terms of everyday activities, social networks and mobility within the context of broader social and political-economic processes. This broad...

Geographical scholarship on transport has been boosted by the emergence of big data and advances in the analysis of complex networks in other disciplines, but these developments are a mixed blessing. They allow transport as object of analysis to exist in new ways and raise the profile of geography in interdisciplinary spaces dominated by physics an...

This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend...

Now resilience has become one of the decade's buzzwords, urban scholars cannot afford to renounce or abandon it; they should reclaim it for critical purposes. This piece offers one way of doing this, by moving away from socio-ecological systems thinking and reworking some concepts elaborated by Alfred North Whitehead. It proposes that resilience be...

Previous studies have indicated that travel satisfaction – the experienced emotions during, and cognitive evaluation of, a trip – can be affected by travel mode choice and other trip characteristics. However, as satisfactory trips might improve a person’s attitudes toward the used mode, persons may be more likely to use that same mode for future tr...

The term ‘automobility’ is often used to denote the practices, materialities, institutions, and landscapes centered on the private car. This article introduces recent thinking on automobility in sociology, human geography, political science, and other fields. It describes different conceptualizations of automobility as a system and a regime, review...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often proclaimed to facilitate the fragmentation of activities, a process whereby a certain activity is divided into several smaller pieces, which are performed at different times and/or locations. This study analyzes two-day combined activity, travel and communication diaries collected among Du...

The rise of smartphones and mobile applications (apps) is of major importance to multiple recent innovations in sustainable urban mobility, including car sharing schemes and real-time information provision in public transport, as well as the recent surge in urban cycling. Yet, exactly how apps feature in these innovations and trends remains largely...

This short introduction to the themed issue on ‘geographies of wellbeing’ first outlines the rise to prominence and power of wellbeing as a concept, and then summarises the diversified ways in which geographers have examined wellbeing. It argues that geographers have a key role to play in interdisciplinary and non-academic debates about the governa...

Against a background of discourses that link economic vitality of city-centres, consumption and safety to greater need for surveillance and policing, the current study takes particular interest in the city-centre night-time economy (NTE). This is a distinctive space-time where significant increases in surveillance and policing can be witnessed acro...

Cities are increasingly seen as the places where innovations that can trigger a sociotechnical transition toward urban mobility are emerging and maturing. Processes such as peak car, rail renaissance and cycling boom manifest themselves particularly in cities, and success stories of cities experimenting with specific types of low-energy mobility ab...

This paper provides a critical review of the progress in understanding the linkages between transport disadvantage and social exclusion. It follows earlier work in proposing social capital as a concept that mediates those linkages but argues that transport researchers must not confine themselves to conceptualisations of social capital as predominan...

Previous studies have indicated that travel satisfaction – the experienced emotions during, and cognitive evaluation of, a trip – can be affected by travel mode choice and other trip characteristics. However, as satisfactory trips might improve a person’s attitudes toward the used mode, persons may be more likely to use that same mode for future tr...

Direct rebound effects result from increased consumption of cheaper energy services. For example, more fuel-efficient cars encourage more car travel. This study is the first to quantify this effect for personal automotive travel in Great Britain. We use aggregate time-series data on transport activity, fuel consumption and other relevant variables...

Countries and regions vary substantially in transport related physical activity that people gain from walking and cycling and in how this varies by age and gender. This study aims to quantify the population health impacts of differences between four settings. The Integrated Transport and Health Model (ITHIM) was used to estimate health impacts from...