Practical lessons for winning support for radical transport proposals

This paper proposes that while many plans and solutions to the transport problems of the 21st Century have been mooted, very few have succeeded in significantly improving the situation within Europe. It is suggested that many schemes face problems at the project implementation stage due to adverse public and/or political reaction. This paper incorporates a series of vignettes, several of which are based on in-depth interviews with practitioners directly involved in the implementation of the schemes in question. It looks at several existing ‘radical’ transport schemes from around the world in an attempt to draw lessons as to how they overcame this, not least in terms of how the implementation of alternative strategies by European policymakers could be shaped and adopted world-wide.