How can city leaders learn what’s best for their city’s mobility future? Today, global communication and travel is quicker and easier than ever before. This means city leaders hear about, see, and sometimes experience policy solutions that might work in their city. Benchmarking lists entice policy makers to “jump on the bandwagon” and bicycling is an especially hot topic around the world – as a means to cure many problems cities are facing.
Droves of delegations and individual visitors come to places like the Netherlands and Denmark to “learn” about cycling policies and practices. They hear from local experts and ride bicycles themselves – and then they fly back home with high hopes of making change.
Once they are home – how do those working on transportation policies use and transfer their knowledge to wider circles?
The goal of the research is to more deeply understand the phenomenon of “policy transfer” or “policy learning” and its impact on both short-term project delivery and systemic change.
This research is a 3-year empirical study following select cities embarking on a process of accelerated implementation of cycling policies. It aims to unravel the role of learning in the international transferability of Dutch urban cycling policies and practices – an area of inquiry with loads of interest but little data. This research uses a variety of data collection methods in order triangulate findings in order to more deeply understand and better explain the application of learning in the field of transportation.
This project is running from January 2018 to December 2020 and partially funded by the Wend Collective.
Output: Glaser, M. et al. (2020). Learning from abroad: An interdisciplinary exploration of knowledge transfer in the transport domain. Research in Transportation Business & Management, article in press.
