ABSTRACT
Transport planning and policymaking increasingly face wicked problems. The era of planning under greenfield conditions is gone, and new policies must be implemented within a complex, dynamic society, navigating challenges that range from climate change to rapid technological shifts, often with contradictory stakeholder demands. Despite extensive research on individual policy topics, the field lacks an integrated framework for the policy design process itself, leading to interventions that are vulnerable to failure or overlooked risks.
This doctoral thesis addresses the challenge of designing more robust transport policies from multiple perspectives. The researched carried out aims at providing the foundation for a more systemic approach to policymaking. Such a framework approaches policymaking from a higher level, aiming to generate guidance to more robust policies by systematically addressing common failure mechanisms, and transferring policy knowledge between different interventions and settings, yet sensitive to specific contexts.
To do so, a bottom-up policy analysis is proposed, by building a taxonomy of transport policy clusters from the combination of transport policymaking domains (transport system characteristics) and policy instruments. Then, a Transport Policy Failure Mechanism Framework is derived from multiple sources of information and serves as a diagnostic tool to identify the root causes of policy vulnerability.After that, following an inductive approach, the framework application to four case studies synthesizes findings against failure mechanisms and leads to the primary contribution of this work: a two-tiered set of design principles. These are a set of foundational principles from the case studies, and stemming from that the thesis conducts a subsequent synthesis to derive higher order overarching principles. These reveal more general and hidden recurring patterns across multiple and varied settings, that may help test policy design to enhance its robustness.
The case studies carried out to do so revolve around an e-commerce tax to consumer, technological innovation for container terminal automation, superblocks, and road freight decarbonization. Ultimately, the thesis proposes a new approach to move the discussion from ad-hoc problem-solving to a systemic discipline of policy design science, where both a systematic approach to design and the generalization of principles to ensure robustness can be embedded in new way of policymaking.
PhD Advisor: Dr Sergi Saurí
PHD CANDIDATE
Mr Genís Majoral is a Civil Engineer specialising in transport and urban planning from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He is a Researcher at CIMNE’s Innovation Unit in Transport (CENIT) where his areas of specialisation are modelling, transport demand and transport economics. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Civil Engineering at the UPC and studying for a Master’s degree in Economic Research at the National University of Distance Education (UNED). He is also an Assistant Professor in Maritime Economics at the Tecnocampus of Mataró in Catalonia (UPF). In the field of transport modelling, he has contributed to updating the transport demand model for Catalonia (Department of Territory), developed mobility models for the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) of Ankara, Türkiye, including an activity-based model (ABM), and updated a freight model for Argentina (CAF). In terms of transport economics, he has worked on the analysis of the financial statements and financial model of highway concessions (MITMA) and service areas, as well as financial models for the implementation of electric buses in Costa Rica (World Bank) or the evaluation of the impact of a tax on e-commerce deliveries (ATM) and the definition of financial aid for the digitalisation of road transport companies (passengers and goods, for MITMA). Other notable projects include Study on the potential future impact of 5G on ports and the development of the national maritime policy of Trinidad and Tobago (Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago). Regarding electromobility, he has participated in the definition of business and financial models for mass implementation of e-buses in San José, Costa Rica, (The World Bank) and e-bus prioritisation for Fiji (GGGI). He is the author of the scientific articles (SCI) “Application of a Tax to e-commerce delivery in Barcelona.”; “Lessons from Reality on Automated Container Terminals: What Can Be Expected from Future Technological Developments?” and co-author of “Analysis of superblocks during the transition phase from traditional vehicles to a fully automated vehicle environment: A case-study of Barcelona City”.