Blue sky, or mission-led? Setting the right research agenda

WHEN BUDGETS are squeezed, and priorities are set, some things are always going to be seen as more desirable - or expendable - than others. And that depends on your point of view. This can apply at both aggregate overall levels, and in more detailed areas of expenditure like research and development. Especially so if it is funding about conceptual and behavioural matters with ‘soft’ or uncertain outcomes, that is being considered.

On the national high-level agenda, the big message now is that more resources seem set to be devoted to defence-related spending, putting further pressure on other departmental areas. This comes on top of the prioritisation of economic growth, against which objective everything at the moment seems to being judged.

The resulting priorities in the field of transport remain unclear, but setting an effective pathway to Net Zero must surely still be one of them, and rather more than just a ‘nice to have’ category. The new report from the Climate Change Committee we cover in this issue again raises challenging issues in that regard, though perhaps in considering the period from 2038-42, are ones a bit too far ahead for the government to be ready to bite on just yet. But surely a research agenda ought to be aimed at addressing its concerns, rather than seeing technology as an alternative to them.

Meanwhile experimentation and innovation seems most in favour as justifiable for ‘tech fixes’ in this area, just as it is in others regarded as chiming with current favoured ideas of harnessing new technologies for their economic and industrial impacts — automation and AI applications, driverless vehicles, drones and aerospace in particular. Though, as we also report in this issue, an enthusiasm for the prospective economic and user benefits of driverless vehicles is not universal, nor the realisable benefits of enhanced efficiency and productivity they may theoretically promise.

This ‘tech first’ paradigm certainly seems to now apply to tackling climate change and decarbonisation, where the favoured efforts are to invest in cleaner energy generation and supply, and the application of new power systems to both land transport vehicles and in aviation. Carbon capture is another field of technology in which effort is felt to be justified — even if the prospect of success is still uncertain.

Has the alternative of behaviour change become unmentionable? Would it not be prudent to support those transport researchers able to look at this?

In this context it is encouraging to see the funding just announced, as we report in our front page lead story, for a new £42m Healthy Low-carbon Transport Hub (HLTH) project led by four UK universities, to research the potential to maximise the health benefits of the transition to low-carbon transport. This is original and potentially greatly beneficial cross-disciplinary thinking that aims to identify barriers, incentives and accelerants to implementing healthy low-carbon transport schemes, and propose and evaluate new solutions towards maximising the health co-benefits associated with related transport interventions.

Prospecting, and blue sky research activity of this kind is often less easy to justify against specific objectives, certainly if public money is involved. It is even more difficult if this is social and economic research rather than scientific and technological. The trick here with the HLTH project has been to leverage money from the health sector to tease new societal health-related benefits out of transport-related activity, rather than the obvious economic and journey time saving ones.

In transport, the landscape of research is not an area that is easy to map. Obviously, there are a number of dedicated research agencies which fund mainly academic activity, plus individual grant-aided projects within universities and in some cases other institutions. Alongside this, there are the industrial innovation bodies like Innovate UK and the Catapults, plus some research budget within the Department for Transport itself, and maybe even elements within larger public bodies like Transport for London, National Highways, and in the rail, aviation and maritime industries. But privately-funded non-mission related research (and development) activity is these days rare.

A core agency is UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), launched in 2018, as a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). It comprises the seven research councils, each focusing on a different area of research and innovation, several of which regularly fund transport projects. These include the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC),Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Medical Research Council (MRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). UKRI also looks after Innovate UK which focuses on business-led innovation and supports industry collaboration with research institutions, and Research England which oversees university research funding and supports research infrastructure in England.

As each council plays a crucial role in shaping the UK’s research landscape by funding projects, supporting researchers, and driving innovation, the remit of UKRI is very significant is setting the direction of research activity, and how it receives funding. As part of the government’s Spending Review it must submit an overview on how it plans to spend money to DSIT, which considers this within the department’s overall spending plan that goes on to HM Treasury, and then to the Prime Minister and Chancellor as they decide how to allocate funding to departments in line with government priorities.

UKRI’s mission seems to only partially embrace genuine blue sky thinking on ideas and innovation as there is a clear implication in the message which heads the organisation’s website that more economic deliverables are required. This states that “We invest in research and innovation to enrich lives, drive economic growth, and create jobs and high-quality public services across the UK.”

In that connection it is interesting that Science Minister Lord Vallance, in just announcing that Professor Sir Ian Chapman, currently the CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), is becoming UKRI new Chief Executive this summer, again stressed that “Growing the economy is this government’s number one mission, and taking full advantage of the innovative ideas, talent and facilities across our country is key to reaching that goal and improving lives across the UK”. He predictably continued that a key objective was innovations that will unlock new benefits for the UK’s people and “drive our Plan for Change.” Might not we have heard that catch all mantra somewhere before, in relation to a government scheme or two?

Back in the specific world of transport, meanwhile, little has been heard so far from the Department for Transport’s recently-installed new Chief Analyst, Ian Mulheirn, on the priorities he is setting for the department’s Transport Analysis and Strategic Modelling division and the wider economic and social research activity he heads. We must presumably await that thinking in the new Transport Appraisal and Modelling Strategy it has been promised will be published during 2025. This will ‘reflect the mission priorities and economic and social values of the new Government’. Let’s wonder if it will perhaps mention the primacy of achieving economic growth, and supporting the Prime Minister’s Plan for Change...

Any concerns there may be about a narrowing in the direction of government resource allocation for transport research in the UK, would however, seem to be relatively mild compared with what is happening in the USA, where critics claim the new Trump administration’s approach to government expenditure includes taking aim at transportation research.

Researchers warn of a “chilling environment” as studies examining road safety and other topics are killed off and layoffs hit federal agencies like the Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In January, the White House issued two executive orders calling for the termination of all “‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities.” Those orders, which are being challenged in court, have prompted federal scientific agencies,in transport and beyond, to kill programmes and purge public language.

As an example, barely a week after the new president’s inauguration, TRB ended a two-year, $500,000 project led by University of Texas urban planning professor Alex Karner, which explored the equitable access to goods and services across the US. The letter from TRB stated that the subject area ran foul of Trump’s executive orders removing federal support for programmes that support diversity, equity and inclusion, an article on Bloomberg by David Zipper reports.

The Trump administration has also launched a multi-pronged assault on scientific research across an array of fields, and sharply reduced the federal contribution to universities’ “research overhead”, he adds.

Since its founding in 1920, TRB has been seen as a pre-eminent global hub for studying the movement of people and goods. With a budget exceeding $90 million, the organization manages cross-sectoral committees on various transportation topics and provides a robust platform for networking, job searching and idea exchange. Every January, some 13,000 transportation experts descend on Washington, DC, for TRB’s annual meeting, the most high-profile such convention in the world.

Zipper points out that transportation research has previously typically occupied a comparatively non-partisan and uncontroversial position, but the new administration’s early moves have clearly seen the area as political. TRB, a long-time bridge between academia and government, now faces existential questions about its future, he says. “The tumult has stunned many transportation veterans, leaving them worried about the US’s ability to ensure that its mobility network — from roads, bridges and rails to maritime and aviation infrastructure — grows more productive, affordable and safe in the years ahead.”

“It’s going to have a decimating effect on transportation research — at every level,” Sandi Rosenbloom, also a planning professor at the University of Texas and a previous chair of the TRB executive committee, is quoted as saying. Apparently vulnerable are government institutions such as the US Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, whose mission is “advancing transportation innovation for the common good.” Layoffs have hit the Volpe Center, as well as the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, a USDOT division that maintains an important library of information.

The vast majority of US transportation studies are directly or indirectly supported by the federal government, which contributes around $1.6 billion annually. Federal funding pays for projects undertaken directly by USDOT, as well as those conducted externally by University Transportation Centers.

A good example of their alumni would be the late UCLA professor Donald Shoup, whose market-based approach toward parking policy is now widely embraced by urban planners. For decades, Shoup relied on federal funding as he honed his original ideas (as raised in LTT’s editorial in the last issue).

Historically, changes in presidential administrations have not triggered major shifts in transportation research or policy development. Conventional research is not the only target, but even innovative practice, with the Trump Government seeking to unwind the recently-introduced congestion charging scheme in New York, as David Metz references in his LTT column this time.

As is the case in so many areas, the new Trump administration quickly shattered any expectation of a smooth transition.

USDOT staff have also apparently been told that “work it supports should be aligned with the Administration’s priorities”. Whether this would include studies examining other topics disparaged by the Trump administration — such as climate change — is as yet unclear

Modern politics seem to point to the climate for research in both the UK and North America being given much greater determinist direction, when the future of the transport system itself and the role it should play are arguably worthy of more discussion and research than at any time since the post war automotive and aviation revolutions of the 1950s and 60s. Uncertainty about the future itself is something important to now study, along with questions about emergent technologies and their second order effects, behavioural change, resource availability and allocation, system resilience, and new ways of charging for and funding transport provision. A focus on near term horizons would seem the very definition of ‘short-sighted’ - and worse if that is merely to reflect the programmes of current incumbent politicians.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT910, 5 March 2025.