44 Second, High-Speed Rail (HSR) projects - and HS2 more specifically - are relevant to investigate because of their scale, sustainability implications, and timing:
1) Scale: High-speed rail has been shown to alter space-time geographies significantly (Givoni 2006;
Spiekermann and Wegener 1994). This brings significant impacts of relevance to the national level, which is the intended scope of this thesis.
2) Sustainability implications: Because of the scale of high-speed rail, it is expected that such projects generate a wide range of significant impacts across all dimensions of sustainability and for the foreseeable future. This may be particularly true in the context of compact geography of the UK.
Although rail is often seen and expected to be ‘more green’, not all impacts are necessarily positive.
HS2 is therefore interesting to study from a sustainable transport appraisal perspective, both for assessing whether or how it can in fact serve as a stepping stone towards a more sustainable transport system in the UK, but more importantly in this thesis, for assessing the assessment tools themselves.
3) Timing: Contributing to the overarching trend of diversification in transport, HSR has become a ‘hot topic’ in Europe and also worldwide28. At the time of writing, the first phase of the HS2 project (from London to Birmingham in the West Midlands of central England) was in the final stages of parliamentary approval. However, the assessment tools as well as the project itself have faced much criticism29. There is therefore a potential to bring out insights from this case for improving STA processes, for example, in Denmark where negotiations over stepping stones to a high(er) speed rail network are currently taking place.
45 Studying high-speed rail is therefore relevant from a sustainable transport appraisal perspective because its impacts are potentially disruptive, complex, and long term which, as was already demonstrated in the HS2 case, pushed the ‘state-of-the-art’ appraisal processes beyond its capabilities (Dudley and Banister 2015).
Overall, the appraisal of HS2 case can be viewed as a critical case according to Flyvbjerg’s topology (2006):
if the open, comprehensive and well-established decision-support processes and assessment tools in the UK fail to deliver an adequate and comprehensive appraisal of the impacts of HS2 from a sustainability
perspective, it is considered unlikely to succeed elsewhere.
1.6 Presentation of the articles
46 In this section, I present in more detail each of the articles contained in this thesis. I also refer to the three challenges introduced earlier to qualify where needed the contributions of each article. I also explain some the research choices that led to these research topics.
28 The EU’s White Paper on transport calls for tripling the length of the high-speed rail network by 2030 and for shifting the majority of medium-distance passenger transport to rail by 2050 (European Commission 2011). China has been catching up with massive investments in HSR in the last decade (for more see the special issue by Marti-Henneberg 2015)
29 For example, although the UK transport appraisal process was praised as “close to best practice in many areas”, the need to adjust values of time and quantify wider economic benefits for HSR appraisal was already highlighted by the consultancy Steer Davies Gleave in 2004 (Steer Davies Gleave 2004:p69). It is these two factors that played to undermine the credibility of CBA tools in the assessment of HS2 (Dudley and Banister 2015).
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47 This thesis addresses the problem of implementation gap in transport planning and decision-making from a sustainability perspective by contributing to the following overarching research goal:
How can sustainability be transformed from general ideals to corresponding decision-support processes and assessment tools that genuinely support sustainable development in the transport sector?
48 This goal has been the key driver during the course of the thesis, and therefore underpins all the research work and articles contained here. Figure 3 illustrates the aspects of transport research relevant here, which helps narrow down this goal to the more specific research I conduct in my articles.
Figure 3: Contributions of the five articles in this thesis to the field of Sustainable Transport Appraisal (STA) research.
49 All five articles address some specific issue of sustainable transport appraisal. A key decision in pursuing my research was to look beyond indicators and investigate sustainability impacts as well as the STA tools dealing with them. Therefore articles II to IV shift focus to analysing impacts in appraisal context, as opposed to analysing indicators representing these impacts30. Figure 3 summarises this, showing that this research takes a starting point in Sustainable Transport Indicator Frameworks (STIFs – article I)31, then expands to decision-support processes and assessment tools (articles II, III and IV), and finally explores issues relevant for the wider field of transport planning and decision-making (article V and partly article IV).
50 There are also a number of underlying foundational notions which are relevant to all articles, but for lack of space were not fully addressed in them. I develop these in chapter 2, namely: understanding of sustainability (section 2.1); definitions of sustainable transport (section 2.2); challenges of using indicators and indicator frameworks in the context of STA (section 2.3); and finally potential for stakeholder involvement to be an improvement in STA (section 2.4).
30 However the two concepts (impacts and indicators) remain tightly connected, as illustrated by the use of the word
‘impact’ in article I’s metacriteria. I explain further in chapter 2 the various ways in which indicators can be used to represent impacts (e.g. quantitative vs qualitative indicators).
31 Independently of whether indicators are used to represent impacts of transport or goals towards a more sustainable transport system, indicators and indicator frameworks are placed in the centre in Figure 3 because they represent a lowest common denominator in STA – indicators are seen as a type of ‘currency of knowledge’.
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1.6.1 Article I – The state-of-the-art in STIFs and research needs
51 Article I, “Building a Metaframework for Sustainable Transport Indicators - Review of Selected
Contributions” focuses on key challenges associated with the effective development and use of indicators to assess sustainability in the transport sector. With the expectation that learnings from the indicator
frameworks literature can also serve to inform other types of decision-support processes and transport assessment tools, I analyse first the state-of-the-art with regard to the design and use of STIFs. One
implication from the findings of article I is that the three metaframework functions also served to inspire the analytical framework – the three challenges - presented earlier. I refer to these below to further qualify the contribution of each of the remaining articles.
Purpose
52 The purpose of article I is first to clarify the key functions of indicator frameworks, and second to develop a metaframework for what should inform the analysis and eventually the design of STIFs (independently of whether they are intended for application in ex-ante, monitoring, or ex-post measurement).
53 Many sets of indicators have been proposed to assess sustainable transport, and the literature points to specific weaknesses, but it does not provide a broad or systematic approach for assessing STIFs. Context also matters: despite the overarching concern for sustainability, different contexts have different goals, different needs, and access to different data. The premise is therefore that it is preferable to develop guidance – a list of criteria - for analysing or designing indicator framework rather than attempt to provide a single, universally applicable indicator framework. There is therefore a need for a type of overarching frame – a metaframework32 - to assess STIFs.
Method and findings
54 By analysing the research results from seminal literature on STIFs, the three functions of conceptualization, operationalization and utilization were found to provide a logical structure for analysing existing or
emerging indicator frameworks, and therefore to produce a set of metacriteria to fulfil that purpose. Starting from an initial list of seven ‘characteristics for robust indicator frameworks’ by Pei et al. (2010), the article identifies and describes a total of 21 ‘metacriteria’ that are grouped based on the framework function they are (most) contributing to.
55 Conceptual criteria include for example “Adopting an explicit, comprehensive, and holistic view on sustainability”, “Allowing a long time horizon” and “Ranking of sustainability impacts” – all essential characteristics of a robust STIF. The research emphasises the need for embedding STIFs in a strategic sustainability planning process that would incorporate dimensions and aspects of sustainability from the start, rather than trying to adapt already existing indicator frameworks (e.g. for system optimization or government performance) to assess ‘sustainable transport’.
56 Operationalization criteria used to inform the design and selection of indicators in general is a
well-researched field. For assessing sustainable transport, long list of impact indicators are readily available (Hall 2006; Litman 2015; Marsden et al. 2005) and conditions for their selection has been covered elsewhere (Gudmundsson et al. 2016). The criteria raised here are applicable to indicator frameworks in a more general
32 As De Neufville (1978) points out, there is a risk of ‘infinite regress’ in creating a framework to validate another framework. Yet this is needed because there are no commonly agreed set of criteria for how to measure and report on transportation sustainability.
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sense (e.g. “Ensuring cost-effectiveness or monitoring”) rather than specifically addressing sustainable transport indicator frameworks. These are nevertheless important as a type of sanity check, and they informed the methodological decisions in the later articles.
57 Utilization criteria examine the use and influence of tools in the context of transport planning and decision-making. For example the criterion “Engaging with stakeholders and context” is found to be particularly relevant in a wider process of sustainability appraisal. This also becomes a key concern in the following two articles of this thesis.
Selected research paths
58 The metaframework also opened up wider issues relevant for other assessment and decision-support tools33. This led me to focus on examining primarily issues related to the conceptualization of sustainability in STA, namely: prioritising sustainability impacts (articles II and III); adopting a comprehensive view on
sustainability (article III); identifying and capturing trade-offs between impacts in the long term (article IV);
and informing strategic sustainable transport choices (article V). In other words, the metacriteria found in this research opened up new research avenues, both for indicator research but also beyond it.
59 One avenue for further investigation is the actual application of the metaframework to assess existing frameworks e.g as used by transport agencies, to review how well they reflect and support different aspects of sustainability. More operational criteria for such a task were not developed in the thesis, but could be a topic for future research. This work can for example consist of examining empirically existing, state-of-the-art STIFs (such as CEEQUAL in the UK or INVEST in the US) in order to further develop the theory and the applicability of each metacriterion.
1.6.2 Article II - Operationalising a sustainability viewpoint in STA
60 Based on one of the research gaps found from the review in article I, in article II “Applying Sustainability Theory to Transport Infrastructure Assessment Using a Multiplicative AHP Decision Support Model” we investigate the prioritisation of impact indicators by the use of Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) methods.
Purpose
61 There is yet limited literature on the issue of prioritising impacts from a strong sustainability perspective in integrated assessment of transport projects. Holden et al. (2013) offer one such recent contribution based on principles from the Brundtland report. Jourmard and Nicolas (2010) suggest an approach based on the nested model that avoids substitution between the three traditional pillars of sustainability, where they also single out irreversible impacts on biodiversity and the climate. Robèrt et al. (2016) develop a stakeholder
engagement approach based on the Natural Step sustainability principles (see Chapter II for more details on these foundational sustainability theories). Article II contributes to this topic by developing a method to integrate explicitly strong principles of sustainability as a means to inform the weighing of transport effects in a real appraisal context.
33 The idea that metacriteria relevant for STIFs could also be relevant for decision-support processes and assessment tools in STA in general emerged at the Transportation Research Board general conference in January 2015. The Sustainability Research Subcommittee suggested we present the metaframework as a basis for framing future research on knowledge tools, guidance or even standards for how to incorporate sustainability in transport governance.
http://www.trbsustainability.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/ADD40_Sustainability_Research_Subcommittee-_MinutesFinal.pdf
20 Method
62 This research examines a specific transport infrastructure project (a bridge in Denmark) using an existing set of eight assessment criteria drawn from this specific case. In this article, we operationalise sustainability by providing a simplified model of strong sustainability where each of the three conventional dimensions (economic, social and environmental) are nested. We compare this model to the principles set by the
Brundtland report to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. We then devise and apply a MCA procedure to make explicit a sustainability viewpoint using both the nested model and input from a green think-tank to use as comparison. Part of the procedure involves the assessment of complex impacts using a pairwise comparison technique to assess the relative performance of various options to the main scheme proposed.
Findings
63 The nested model is found to be a useful approximation of strong sustainability when used as guidance for prioritising impacts (at the condition that the impacts assessed are all relevant, as is the case here). The outcome is however not intended to be used ‘as is’, but instead to provide a type of benchmark for comparing preferred project options between ‘virtual sustainability advocates’ and the perspective
represented by the interests of decision-makers in this particular context. Two more practical conclusions are of particular relevance for the research that follows in article III. First this case raised the need for a wider (and perhaps standard) set of assessment criteria to be used in sustainable transport appraisal. Second, because of the need to involve experts, decision-makers and stakeholders as part of the assessment process, the approach showed the potential for the communicative role of MCA-based tools in a process of appraisal.
1.6.3 Article III – Expanding the sustainability viewpoint in STA
64 Article III “Incorporating a sustainability viewpoint into multi-actor MCA – the case of HS2”, is motivated by the conclusion from article II for the need to expand the assessment criteria to a wider and more
comprehensive set of impacts. We develop this research path by examining a different type of transport infrastructure project (high-speed rail).
Purpose
65 The main focus and contribution of this article is to develop and test a STA process on a large transport project. This article is a core part of this thesis both in terms of breath and depth: by developing a full STA method, we seek to incorporate sustainability by: 1) developing a comprehensive list of sustainability assessment criteria; 2) adapting and applying the multi-actor MCA (MAMCA) procedure; and 3) making explicit a sustainability viewpoint in three different ways34. One main objective of the research is to expand the instrumental rationality of assessment tools by integrating various stakeholder perspectives in a
systematic manner. Therefore the article is mainly concerned with exploring the various methodological trade-offs that have to be made while still addressing conceptual challenges (validity of the data both from a scientific and a sustainability perspective), operational challenges (transparency, ease of use and cost-effectiveness), and procedural challenges (potential for reflexivity and influencing decision-making)35.
34 This paper is longer than a single journal article. It describes a substantial research project that represents a major portion of my doctoral research which, we think, has the potential to contribute to several publications. A shorter version of this paper is currently in the review process.
35 These criteria are a subset of those developed in article I, adapted and simplified for this case.
21 Method
66 The first phase of the HS2 project (between London and the West Midlands) is selected as a case study for a number of reasons. A high-speed rail project of the scale of HS2 has potential to alter the space-time
geography of the UK significantly, which brings a number of wider environmental, social and economic impacts that are difficult to assess with standard assessment methods. For this reason HS2 is an opportunity to examine sustainability in the context of transport appraisal in more detail. In this case, the existing state-of-the-art appraisal guidance of the UK was stretched and substantially discredited, leaving the actual decision-making of HS2 to a more arbitrary political process (Dudley and Banister 2015). On the other hand, a vast amount of data and documentation is readily available from the actual appraisal that took place, making it easier to reproduce and test, ex-post, an alternative appraisal process.
67 The method we develop draws from the MAMCA approach, a MCA method that gives an explicit concern to various stakeholder perspectives (Macharis, Turcksin, and Lebeau 2012). We follow and adapt standard MCA appraisal steps, which are summarised here:
1) The definition of the project objectives and options are predetermined based on the case study itself;
2) The list of criteria (impacts) was developed iteratively and interactively in the first phase of the research with interviews and by the research team;
3) The research team developed criteria for grouping stakeholders by interest; all stakeholders interviewed are transport professionals familiar with HS2, and a future generations viewpoint is obtained by eliciting the views of sustainability experts;
4) The selection, prioritisation and assessment of the criteria is done by conducting structured interviews based on an online questionnaire. The choice to carry out the response elicitation in person is motivated by the need to address known biases with this type of methodology (e.g.
motivational bias);
5) The data analysis is conducted by the research team based on the multiplicative analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique;
6) Robustness of the results is tested by varying consistency thresholds and the minimum number of assessments per criterion to be considered valid;
7) Project preferences are computed for all stakeholder groups, but they are not aggregated. For purpose of comparison, ‘virtual’ sustainability viewpoints are computed by applying weights for weak and strong sustainability (as was done in article II).
Findings
68 The key contribution of this paper is the incorporation of a ‘future generations’ stakeholder into the
MAMCA process. In this case, neither the ‘bottom-up’ sustainability expertise viewpoint nor the ‘top-down’
virtual sustainability viewpoint comes out in favour of HS2 when compared with the option of upgrading the existing network. At a methodological level, the research demonstrates the usefulness of conducting semi-structured interviews in conjunction with an online questionnaire for the process of assessing and weighting a long list of sustainability impacts. The approach also provides a means of quantifying wider impacts relevant for STA, thereby making them visible and comparable.
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69 The research also led to a number of more detailed findings with regard to the adaptation of MAMCA to this complex case, which can be summarised as follows. Validity for sustainable transport appraisal requires comprehensiveness in the long list of relevant impacts, and therefore criteria and their descriptions are cornerstones of the method (the considerations that led to the final list we used are explained in more detail in the paper’s second appendix). While most respondents felt comfortable with the approach, some
respondents expressed the need for exploring further how to decouple normative importance from contextual relevance in the assessment of the alternatives. Another important finding is the need for clear rules for grouping stakeholders into homogeneous groups, and therefore particular attention needs to be given to obtaining sufficient information on respondent traits. As MCA methods depend more directly on human judgment, validating who and how the questionnaire is answered is crucial to mitigate biases.
70 A final important finding is the potential for this approach to play a significant role in communicative forms of planning and decision-making. The process allowed the research team to experience reflexivity and learning on the part of respondents. Respondents realised the implications of their choices, which in some
70 A final important finding is the potential for this approach to play a significant role in communicative forms of planning and decision-making. The process allowed the research team to experience reflexivity and learning on the part of respondents. Respondents realised the implications of their choices, which in some