ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses both on transport systems themselves and their wider social impacts. Proponents of the ‘mobility turn’ in transport are extremely sceptical of meta-narratives based on grand theories such as unitary income elasticities or constant travel time budgets. Economic measures have long been a feature of transport systems, particularly in the shape of petrol and vehicle tax and subsidies to public transport. Since at least the 1960s transport economists have been arguing the case for a more sophisticated form of road pricing that better reflects the congestion and other external costs that motorists impose on society. There has been a global explosion in the amount people and goods travel in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the transportation cost component of bulk materials has continued to fall, there is evidence of an increase in this proportion for manufactured goods in effect because transport has substituted other inputs.
