Abstract
This chapter gives the general context within which transport research takes place today and examines the increasing interest in international cooperation in tackling transport related problems and challenges. After referring briefly to the most important previous studies and reports on this subject, the chapter addresses the relevant key concepts and global challenges that seem to be the main forces driving transport research and transport research cooperation. One of the key issues examined, is the strong emphasis in all current transport research funding to satisfy short-term priorities related to increasing the industrial competitiveness of the respective country and serve as a means to expand technological influence and market-control. Researchers are normally asked to keep a mostly national focus, but whereas in the past that focus was dominated by tangible—though purely domestic—priorities, the new focus is on providing justification to claim the technological superiority of national industrial products at the global level. The chapter discusses the consequences of this approach and the merits of expanding cooperation at international level in order to reconstitute the traditional distinction between policy-oriented and industrial/technological research and the need to strengthen the contribution of social science disciplines, economics, and systems considerations. It further discusses the case of “legacy” versus “transformational” (transport) systems research and the top-down versus bottom-up approaches in triggering change in the transport sector. It argues that the current trends in forming transport research agendas are increasingly dominated by topics identified by the industry incumbents complemented by a bunch of policy topics intended to provide justification for a regulatory environment and political priorities that usually have a strong national focus. The chapter also discusses the general factors triggering international research cooperation in general and in transport in particular. It categorizes these factors in two main groups: Those related to policy makers or to government at large, and those related to researchers. The first results in a top-down process, in which government officials from different countries establish a collaborative framework, usually on the grounds of economic or diplomatic objectives, and offer it to researchers. The second results in a bottom-up process, in which personal networking is progressively institutionalized by research organizations, so that the research communities in the countries concerned lobby their respective government for support and resources. Finally, the chapter looks at ways in which the particular model of international cooperation in transport research can increase its disruptive innovative capacity and concludes that this can be done primarily through stronger leadership and involvement from governments and other multinational organizations as well as through a more collaborative approach and making researchers more influential in decision making.
All views expressed, are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Organisation he is associated with.
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Research Technological Development and Innovation.
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European Conference of Transport Research Institutes.
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This ECTRI/TRB report was influential in strengthening cooperation between the EU and US. Since 2009, several initiatives promoting international cooperation in transport research were launched. They included:
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Several EU-funded research projects focusing on promoting international cooperation on transport research have been launched, such as EUTRAIN and HERMES;
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Four annual EU-US symposia, which were organized by the US/DoT in cooperation with the European Commission (EC/DG RTD) on the topics of logistics, research implementation, automated road transport, and climate, change adaptation; these symposia are to be continued.
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The first Joint programming “INFRAVATION” initiative, with funding from the US/FHWA and FEHRL (The Federation of European Road Research Laboratories) and the European Commission;
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Twinning actions between EU and US funded transport research projects in the area of road infrastructure.
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The major European and US transport research data base portals have been unified since 2010. This resulted in the TRID data base which now collects information from the Transport research data base of the TRB (formerly TRIS) and the one of OECD (formerly ITRD); at the EU level, only, the Transport Research & Innovation Portal (TRIP) collects information on transport research from EU and national programs.
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“Innovation” refers to the market exploitation of Research results and creation of value through the production of marketable products.
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According to philosopher Karl Popper, “causal factors” refer to independent variables that are posited by scientists to cause a change in the dependent variable with falsifying the null hypotheses as the key philosophical objective of positivist science. Systemic factors are best viewed as political, cognitive, or institutional structures that constrain, delimit, or “tamp-down” policy behaviour.
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The “barriers” identified in the ECTRI/TRB 2009 report were:
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Limited interaction amongst transport researchers and limited dissemination of new research ideas and paradigms; to this, we note that the exchange among researchers is expanding, at least in terms of attendance and presentations at international conferences. In addition, the number of indexed publications has grown and so has the number of co-authoring. Nevertheless, the exchange remains at the basic level of research projects and results and is far away from reaching a “strategically satisfactory” level yet.
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Limited resources for shared research efforts at an international level; it does not seem obvious to what extent the lack of such resources has played a significant role in promoting international cooperative efforts given the fact that the resources required in transport research are relatively modest, compared to other disciplines.
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Lack of common policies for international research cooperation; this can be seen as a pervasive barrier, as illustrated by the difficulties to push forward an ambitious emission-reduction roadmap at ICAO or IMO. In the last year, the international landscape has improved, as COP-21 and the UN 2015 Sustainable Development Summit have established a reasonable basis for a long-term vision, which the transport community could now translate into a more concrete global transport agenda. Furthermore, the priority areas for transport innovation in many countries around the world are covering similar topics, such as automation, electrification, or climate change adaptation and mitigation. An obvious asset of the transport sector is the wealth of international and multilateral agencies active in the field (IMO, ICAO, UNECE, ITF…) as well as a good number of international organizations like IRU, UIC, UITP, IATA, and others.
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Lack of cooperation in setting the agendas for transportation research addressing global problems (health, climate change, energy, travel behavior…); this barrier raises the additional question of the difficulties to define a global transport agenda as a standalone vision and the relatively lack of visibility of transport whenever global challenges are discussed.
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Lack of global standardization and harmonization of research knowledge including the sharing of available data. The most obvious obstacle here refers to the potential collision of interests among the industrial interests of countries under conditions of a global economic downturn.
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In its annual meeting of 2016 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland (https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2016).
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The “frontier approach” is a method with which economists have tried to use efficiency measurement techniques to measure the productive performance of a certain process or utility. “Frontier” efficiency measurement techniques use a production possibility “frontier” to map a locus of potentially technically efficient output. To the extent that a process or utility fails to achieve an output combination on its production possibility frontier, and falls beneath this frontier, it can be said to be technically inefficient. As transport is not significantly involved in “frontier research”, it has benefitted from the increasing focus for near-market applied research (Science Europe 2015). In the particular case of the EU, transport has benefited from its status as one of the “common European policies” to be funded within the successive European research programmes. Frontier research is mostly a bottom-up, long-term exercise. It goes beyond one discipline, and beyond current fundamental knowledge. It also requires particular funding rules and decision makers tolerant with uncertainty and even failure, as a high-risk effort. These conditions are mostly lacking in the transport sector. In spite of the long tradition of interaction between engineering and social sciences, which is also a remarkable asset for transport research, transport has not developed a “frontier” approach thus far (Science Europe 2015).
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Global challenges can be seen as associated to recent UN declarations, like the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, approved in September 2015, and containing 17 sustainable development goals, including objectives such as industry innovation and infrastructure (#9); climate action (#13), which can be naturally associated to the need for research and innovation in the transport sector, etc.
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(https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/smart-green-and-integrated-transport, accessed on 8 Sept. 2016).
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It could probably better be framed as “sustainability” but this overused concept has lost precise significance. Low-carbon, on the contrary is clearly related to climate-change, which is probably the main challenge for the future of transport, and is consistent with the social, economic and environmental dimensions usually attached to “sustainable transport” before the latter lost a clear meaning and became a common place.
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Aparicio, A. (2018). The Changing Context of Transport Research. In: Giannopoulos, G. (eds) Publicly Funded Transport Research in the P. R. China, Japan, and Korea. Lecture Notes in Mobility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68198-6_2
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