How can these platforms be used as policy instrument? Current practice reflects only a few of many possibilities. A conceivable explanation is that current platforms prefer to avoid complex governance challenges. What are these challenges? Can we make these challenges less off-putting?
The word ‘smart’ in smart mobility needs unpacking. Somewhat ironically, the word has two meanings, both ‘intelligent’ and ‘pain’. People tend to mean the first and ignore the latter. To some extent, smart mobility platforms may be a nice gadget for everyone, but to some other extent the platforms require value trade-offs, settling conflicts of interests against the will of some. In the current innovation rush, it is a bit sour to bring it up, but for the legitimacy of these platforms as policy instruments on the longer term, it is an underdeveloped aspect that needs our attention.
We read through the columns most related to the theme of policy instruments and reach a practical synthesis.
Theory promises a large variety in how to target and design a policy instrument. We call to mind three types (legal, financial, communicative), three dimensions (detection, effecting; imperative, voluntary; substantive, procedural) and three ways of nudging (incentives, information, choice architecture). Empirically, by contrast, we meet hardly any smart mobility platforms explicitly designed as advanced policy instrument. That is to say, few platforms are designed as a direct tool for specific policy makers to influence the mobility in a desired way. Instead, the general emphasis is to provide travellers with information on transport issues, but what’s the innovation? Where’s the policy interest?
Taking a closer look, however, we see a range of attempts to nudge the mass in new ways, particularly with communication, emphasizing some information and pushing other information to the back. This nudging is mainly treated as a collateral benefit and not as a trade-off. Financial incentives are somehow not used in all the platforms we studied. And what about detection? What about the procedural side of policy instruments? All these dimensions seem unexplored in current initiatives.
We encounter a paradox. The smart mobility platforms promise a new era of policy instruments in mobility. The stakes are high. Mobility is critical to billions, as well as to our economies in general. Many governments invest a great many millions in these platforms already. But hardly any smart mobility platform maximizes, and often even stresses, its potential as policy instrument at implementation. As if it is a side-issue.
This route through the empirical columns does not only show but also partly explains this paradox. This becomes more insightful when comparing and combining the rationales of two perspectives for one of the core dilemmas, ‘ambition versus attainability’. On one hand, the journey-planning platform can be taken as a technological design challenge. On the other hand, it can be treated as a policy-making endeavour, a governance challenge. From a design perspective, this dilemma can generally be tackled in a rather straightforward way. Ambition reduces attainability, but more efforts compensates for that. Technical feasibility is not a fundamental or very unpredictable problem in the case of journey-planning platforms. From a governance or policy-making perspective, however, the dilemma ‘ambition versus attainability’ is more difficult to deal with, less linear and less predictable. More ambition is not directly less attainable. It really depends. Leading in the policy-making process is the argument ‘who wants what and why’, i.e. which policy makers aim to change which kind of (system) behaviour in light of which public values. Hardly any platform has been found with an explicit argument for policy making who wants what and why, let alone whether this argument is also accepted or not.
So, what may explain the paradox mentioned above is that making such an argument from a policy-making perspective gets the genie out of the bottle. Conceiving journey-planning platforms as policy instruments, requires publicness, political consent, stakeholder interaction and concrete risk taking, and this creates much more complex governance challenges and transaction costs. Conceiving journey-planning platforms as design challenges within a technocratic sphere offers a much more predictable and safer context. The latter, design-oriented perspective seems a convenient starting point as it offers the best governability on the short term, but it may obscure the more problematic governability on the longer term when things change and eventually a switch is made to a policy-making perspective.
The rub is how these two perspectives come together in the process of developing journey-planning platforms. Common practice is a sequential approach. To start developing platforms from a design perspective in the political sidelines, in a safe technocratic context. If the platform eventually works, policy makers may step in as they get interested to use it. A major risk of this approach is that it may simply not happen that policy-makers seriously start using the new devices and the technological development stops when the project rans out of subsidy.
In most cases, it is not a reasonable option to treat both perspectives separated and sequential. From a policy perspective, the legitimacy of policy instruments is based on transparent and accepted trade-offs. A point of attention is the main authority, or authorities, using the policy instrument. Who these authorities are and how they publicly account for the trade-offs they may induce through this platform, may have many subtle implications for how to develop journey-planning platforms in a technical sense. A second point of attention, is the evaluation and adaptation of this policy instrument. Many technical design choices are not immune to this policy context.
It is unlikely that these platforms will spontaneously grow into ‘smart’ mobility platforms in the good sense of the word. When journey-planning platforms are first designed and then exposed to policy-making, the governance complexity may increase very abruptly and easily disrupt the continuity of developing. An alternative, more gradual approach would emerge when conceiving journey-planning platforms as policy instruments from the start of development.