A Social Problems Framework for the Critical Appraisal of Automobility and Sustainable Systems Innovation

This article examines the relationship between the technologies of communication and mobility and the geography of everyday life. Centered on the period from the Industrial Revolution to the present, stories about machines contribute biographies of several technologies leading to contemporary intersections among communications, transport, and geography. The advance of technology has recently been marked by the production of hypermobility where, in some places, the numeric majority access and make use of a nearly ubiquitous supply of communication and mobility infrastructures and devices. Data from the International Telecommunication Union, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, and the Canadian Internet Project support observations regarding the rise of hypermobility in the United States and elsewhere. The geography of action and activity continues to evolve within a hypermobile present where information and communication technologies intercede between people and place, producing digitally augmented met...

Wired People in Wired Places: Stories about Machines and the Geography of Activity

This paper positions time in the center of spatial economic analysis, with a particular view on travel speed in transport behavior. The issue of ‘slow motion’ is at present very timely and has led to a new concept in transport analysis, viz. ‘time pioneer’. Such a person is prepared to give up part of his scarce time for other, as yet unknown purposes. This attitude might generate ‘slow motion’ behavior. The paper aims to critically review the concept of a time pioneer from a broad perspective on the socio-economic meaning of time in our globalizing society. The viability of time pioneering behavior is next empirically tested by means of an extensive survey among travelers in the Netherlands. A new modeling experiment, viz. rough set analysis, is carried out in order to deal with empirical survey data in a smallsample context. On the basis of the empirical results, it is concluded that, while ‘slow motion’ is seemingly an appealing socio-psychological travel mode, the share of time pioneers among actual travelers is rather low.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/85697/1/97132.pdf

Time pioneers and travel behavior. An investigation into the viability of 'slow motion'

Can we import the high‐performance team theory developed in the private sector into the public sector in order to improve the success rates of information technology (IT) projects? This article proposes that public organizations can create effective workgroups (weaker than the private sector’s high‐performance teams but stronger than the weak committees that typically manage public IT projects) in order to improve the chances of concluding IT projects successfully. Two remarkably similar Internet projects in Israel’s Ministry of Trade and Commerce and the Jerusalem Municipality are described, compared, and analyzed. The first adopted the workgroup project model and was concluded successfully. The second adopted the committee project model and ran into problems and delays. Lessons are gleaned from these case studies on how to staff, structure, and supervise public IT workgroups.

Creating winning information technology project teams in the public sector

This exploratory paper aims to map out new research challenges centring around the theme of sustainable transport. The research needs on mobility behaviour and policy measures are also described. The paper concludes with an outline of new thinking in a largely unexplored research area.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1062798700004476

Sustainable Transport: New Research and Policy Challenge for the Next Millennium

Modern concepts of time, space and man have stimulated the development of mobility as a means of enhancing access to social places. In the current development, however, a tendency towards hypermobility is observable. Hypermobility is excessive mobility that impacts negatively on the actual functioning of the transportation system. Problems of sustainability, accessibility and the quality of life may be viewed not only as limits to the expansion of mobility but also as symptoms of a distorted development affecting the quality of the transportation system itself. In exploring possibilities to overcome hypermobility, this paper implies a challenge for systems thinking and government policy. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Bas Kee

Papers

Hypermobility as a challenge for systems thinking and government policy