CET Lunch: Adapting Legacy Institutions to New Challenges in Public Transport: A Comparison of Formal & Informal Institutions in Cross-Agency Transit Coordination in the US & Europe
Welcome to our hybrid CET Lunch seminar with David Weinreich, Postdoctoral fellow at CET.
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Our speaker will attend in person. Participants can sign up and tune in via stream, or turn up at CET where lunch will be served on a first-come, first-served basis.
Public transport is the most climate-friendly motorised travel mode, yet faces the difficult task of adapting to ever-increasing sprawl, and post-pandemic remote work. Integration of transit services and payment systems holds the potential to capture more riders, and facilitate more complex trips with smoother transfers and fewer first/last mile gaps. Yet institutions change slowly. In many cities, there are multiple operators, private and public, multiple cities, counties, tendering agreements and funding systems in place. Governance shapes the frequency of transfers and their difficulty, affecting ridership. This includes the existence and ease of cross-operator ticketing (Buehler et al., 2017), schedule coordination, terminal and app sharing, and data coordination (Rivasplata, 2012). This presentation discusses some preliminary findings from recent field research in Oslo, Frankfurt, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. Early findings identify severe integration challenges when transit is funded and managed at the most local levels of government; however also identify ways of overcoming such challenges in order to take a more regional approach to attracting riders.
About the speaker
David P. Weinreich is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Governance and Sustainable Transformation at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen. He received his doctorate from the University of Michigan and was previously a Fulbright Fellow doing research in Israel before coming to CET. His work focuses on governance of transportation systems, including fragmentation of public transport services, the politics of transport finance, the role of regulatory structures and governance structures for inclusion/exclusion from public transport.
