ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how historically marketing has been used to effect modal shift in urban-transport sectors where the overall size of the market is largely outside an individual provider’s control. These markets might include, for example, comparatively stable or mature ones such as commuting to work and education, where the geographical separation of home and place of work or education along with levels of (sub)urban congestion are of overwhelming importance; or expanding sectors driven partly by a some combination of wider policy initiatives and technological change – such as the extension of public transport into the suburbs as trams were replaced by buses before the Second World War – that threaten incumbent providers’ market share. In such cases imaginative marketing (along with other measures) could help to protect or even grow the incumbents’ share. This chapter therefore applies to the urban context the insight that the ‘demand’ for travel depends partly on commercial efforts to expand markets as providers and governments try to maximise returns on capital. It examines how historically various kinds of urban-transport providers have tried both to shape and to exploit public attitudes towards travel in and around towns and cities, helping to explain why ‘demand’ for personal mobility has reached today’s levels and forms. This has implications for the long-standing debate between those who argue that future demand for urban mobility can only be forecast and then catered for (‘predict and provide’) and advocates of demand management: the steps taken in the past to influence modal split despite the existence of exogenous factors driving the overall size of the market might be applicable to the challenge of developing sustainable ways of moving around our conurbations.
