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Walking, cycling and using public transport: how the UK government offers to develop urban mobility

By katerynatsybenko, on 16 December 2020

Kateryna Tsybenko is an MPA candidate in Science, Engineering and Public Policy

Recently, the Ukrainian Minister of Infrastructure Vladyslav Krykliy announced that Ukraine plans to replace all public transport with electric transport by 2030. It will take place within the framework of the implementation of the National Transport Strategy.

I currently study in the UK, and I researched the UK’s urban mobility strategy; and in this blog, I want to share urban mobility trends in this country. The key in it is the emphasis on inclusiveness, encouraging citizens to use public transport instead of individual transport, ride-sharing, walking and cycling, and broad support for all these means of transportation, including through open data.

Image of trams and bus

Anne Burgess / Integrated Public Transport

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Coordinating Innovation (Policy): an Introduction to my PhD Research Topic

By Andreas P Kopp, on 11 August 2020

Andreas Kopp, a final year PhD candidate at UCL STEaPP and UCL IIPP and member of the Digital Technologies Policy Lab, elaborates on his doctoral research project and explains what’s so difficult about governing innovation. 

The challenge of innovation policy is coordination

There are no simple, prescribed solutions to such global issues as mitigating climate change or ensuring sustainable urban mobility. Instead, these require long-term contributions of many different economic sectors, governments, public agencies, and individual stakeholders. Increasingly, governments avert to drafting ‘mission-oriented’ innovation policies, i.e. systemic policies that cut across sectors in an attempt to enable the purposeful innovation of technologies towards a desired direction, rather than prescribing a closely defined solution. In other words, governments are ‘tilting the playing field’.

Shared, sustainable autonomous vehicles at Lindholmen Science Park, Gothenburg, Sweden (Kopp 2019)

Shared, sustainable autonomous vehicles at Lindholmen Science Park, Gothenburg, Sweden (Kopp 2019)

This often results in innovations that are not only technically highly complex, but also re-define human behaviour – so called socio-technical systems. They also span across different policy areas and therefore pose a new challenge for policy makers and policy implementers: they trigger coordination problems across policy domains and across government authorities, as existing policies might contradict each other, or relevant policies and regulations might be missing entirely.

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