TRANSPORT, TELEMATICS AND THE REDUCTION OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION: BEYOND THE THIRD WAY?
Presentation to the Advisory Board of the Transport Research Institute, Napier University, 2000

You can't say 'no' to markets. The only possibility is making them work for people economically, socially and culturally. --Anthony Giddens

Today, I want to take the opportunity of inviting the Transport Research Institute Advisory Group into the growing area of 'transport and society'. Tomorrow, I will be making the same offer at the Department of Psychology and Sociology, Napier University. Napier, with funding from SHEFC, has created the first 'Transport and society' chair in Britain: Jordanstown seems set to follow with its recent advertisement of a professorial position in this area. 'Transport and society' has already achieved status as an examinable area under the auspices of the Chartered Institute of Transport in the capable hands of Heather Ward, University College London, and Jeff Turner, Department of Planning, University of Manchester.

The presentation today is the beginning of a launch from TRI Napier of a Transport and Society network which will harness these new professional developments in transport and promote them in the era of emergent 'joined up government' - the 'third way'.

To commence this institution building activity, a web site has been developed - http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society - in order to provide a framework and guide to developments in the field of transport and society on the click of a button. (This presentation itself will shortly be available on that site.)

The web site is a pivotal resource in the world of 'joined up professional' resources, not least because, the meat of transport discussions has rarely been developed in a way that promotes public accessibility and institutional transparency. The Transport_and_Society Network web site already contains substantial materials on best practice in transport consultations as well as a host of other materials.Identifying materials for inclusion on data bases no longer requires direct contact or conversations with brokers, gatekeepers or authorities. The activity has been disintermediated: a characteristic which is at the heart of new information practices and, as we shall see, is a critical dimension in the ability of the new information technology to play a part in the reduction of social exclusion.

The change in technology is crucial to the discussion of joined up government. Historically, the development of bureaucracy was an appropriate way of organising the interaction between state and polity. New technology not only opens up the potential for government departments to be joined up to one another or for local governments to join together in efforts to make more efficient use of their resources under the ever growing discipline of the Third Way: it also enables the electorate to talk directly to government. A visit to the tele-governance page of the Transport_and_Society web site will give an indication of how far these developments have already progressed. Home based access to global communication technologies has major implications for an improvement in the quality of service delivery to low income groups as well as providing a channel for low income groups to be active in pressuring for an improvement in their living circumstances. In the United States older persons under the leadership of the American Association for Retired Persons have already been highly active in electronic advocacy ( AARP website).

Discussions of the Third Way by the leading politicians in the area - Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens ( Giddens home page) are far from precise on precisely what the Third Way is but there are some messages which are clearly present and important for transport professionals to pay attention to. The Third Way is the promotion of markets as the primary agencies with a substantial rolling back of the public sector. Public sector activities are undertaken in conjunction with private sector partners. These new forms of organisation and operation become possible because of the interconnectivity of new information communication technologies. The transformation of the public sector and the pressure for detailed individual accountability and performance tracking in the public sector are possible because of the new and immediate information management capabilities of the new technology. Transparency of each in front of all is a new potential of the globalised information world in which we now live.

Giddens has gone beyond the Third Way of Blair and sees globalised governance:

This is an era of intense globalization; it is not just economic, it is the emergence of a new world society. For most countries there are no clear enemies any more. Instead, countries face risks--such as ecological risks--that have to be faced together. I think the world urgently needs a better framework of institutions and an extension of democracy above the level of the nation-state. So far the EU has not been that good. But I do see it as a pioneering phenomenon; not a nation-state, not a federation, but something different, an attempt to provide a political form for a globalized world.

Blair sees the power of the new technology both to control and decentralise (an opposition set up by Castells in his work - The Information City) and has operated and guided the polity in both directions with the consequences of many missteps, confusion and conflicts ( Social capital, the economy and the Third Way:Dr Simon Szreter, St John's College, Cambridge 1998 ). What becomes of government itself in an age of globalised communication and electronic advocacy has not been clearly addressed by the political strategists nor has it been well addressed by social and political theorists ( third way links and resources).

Changes in government have in many ways been technology led: the technology developed for commercial reasons (though it should be noted that the development of the internet itself was an act of scholarship by Berners Lee and not the outcome of commercial profit seeking) has created accounting and strategic action capabilities which transform the social and political world. The leader of the third way, Blair, consistently talks in a language of emergence rather than a language of goals:

The Third Way, Mr Blair told the French National Assembly helpfully, is whatever works.

The ability of national governments to fine-tune the economy in order to secure growth and jobs has been exaggerated. The importance of individual and business enterprise to the creation of wealth has been undervalued. The weaknesses of markets have been overstated and their strengths underestimated.

The state should not row, but steer: not so much control, as challenge. Solutions to problems must be joined up.

Within the public sector bureaucracy at all levels must be reduced, performance targets and objectives formulated, the quality of public services rigorously monitored, and bad performance rooted out. Modern social democrats solve problems where they can best be solved. Some problems can now only be tackled at European level: others, such as the recent financial crises, require increased international co-operation. But, as a general principle, power should be devolved to the lowest possible level.

The rapid advance of the information age, especially the huge potential of electronic commerce, promises to change radically the way we shop, the way we learn, the way we communicate and the way we relax. Rigidity and over-regulation hamper our success in the knowledge-based service economy of the future. They will hold back the potential of innovation to generate new growth and more jobs. We need to become more flexible, not less