ABSTRACT
Community ownership is far from the usual ways of providing services in modern societies, especially in the richer and more economically developed nations and cities and as such, there will be many objections to its application to providing urban transport systems. However, communityowned transport is not enforced communal ownership or a regime that prevents private ownership of the means of mobility. Rather, it represents a choice and offers an alternative way of thinking about transport systems that seeks to supplement existing urban transport systems. Two types of potential objections are the pragmatic and the ideological/political. In practice, as we know, many public policy debates use pragmatic arguments as proxies for political values and preferences, protecting vested interests and unexamined social prejudices. Here, we concentrate on pragmatic objections to community ownership of transport and in the next chapter, deal with the political economy of such ownership, where aspects of the political debate over commu nity ownership are examined.
