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This chapter seeks to bring more clarity and urgency to the debate about the impacts of ‘smart’ mobility by highlighting the critical role of the state in managing the transition to a ‘smart’ transport future. This debate is currently dominated by producer-led imaginings of how technological innovation will solve apparent mobility problems, but has yet to address substantively more complex questions about how the impacts of these innovations will disrupt the mobility status quo, and how changing patterns of mobility in a ‘smart’ future will redefine the places in which we live. The chapter explores what impacts such innovations might have on the economic, environmental and social outcomes associated with the mobility system, and some key issues that systems of governance will have to address as ‘smart’ options become an increasingly important part of overall mobility provision.

The transition to a future of ‘Smart Mobility’ – a mobility system characterised by real time organisation via the internet incorporating technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles – has the potential to transform many aspects of everyday life. Many countries have evolved a system of ‘multi-level governance’ (MLG) to manage the formulation and implementation of public policies at different spatial scales. Whilst MLG has several potential advantages, such as providing multiple sites for policy innovation and de-risking the implementation of new policies by piloting them in particular places, the existence of many different governing tiers with different priorities and mandates requires skilful management and coordination. The management of any substantive, disruptive transition such as that to Smart Mobility is challenging for the policy system per se; for countries with MLG systems, the task is made more complex still by the need to achieve sufficient policy alignment between different tiers and entities of governance to implement new policy instruments in practice. The specific instruments of transport pricing and roadspace reallocation provide clear examples of these challenges and pointers to how implementation questions might be resolved in an MLG framework.

The point of departure of this book is that smart mobility will only be developed in a desired direction and fulfil societal objectives if it is steered in that direction. The market, left to itself, will most certainly not deliver on these objectives. This message has been conveyed extensively in recent literature, but this book aims to take this discussion one step further by focussing on what governance of smart mobility looks like today and in the future. In this introductory chapter, the authors provide a framework of different understandings of policy instruments, how they are selected, developed and used. After the array of policy instruments within the transport sector has been extensively discussed, the authors turn to discussing a broader understanding of policy instruments found within political science and political sociology. In doing so, this book contributes to the critical scholarship on policy instruments, while exploring the why, the how and the what of policy instruments in relation to smart mobility. The chapter closes with a brief introduction to the structure of the book as well as a description of the content of each chapter.

Despite the massive social benefits that the car has brought, it has become evident that the current mobility system is undermining the benefits it creates with substantial air quality problems, inactive lifestyles, deaths and injuries from accidents and major contributions to the global climate change challenge. The introduction of smart mobility innovations, in promising to challenge the existing regime of automobility may be a major policy opportunity, and also provide a source of new economic opportunity. However, it is far from clear that these opportunities will be recognized or, even where they are, realized due to the complexities of steering any transition in the mobility system.

This book sets out how we should understand the challenge of governing the smart mobility transition and, in this introductory chapter we set out the key arguments and contributions of each part of the book for addressing these challenges. The first section of the book focuses on how the role of the government is challenged by the growing network of actors and the new resource interdependencies that emerge from smart mobility. How these challenges come to be recognized and resolved is itself a critical part of the governance process as explored in the second section. The third section examines the changing context of governance and the capacity of the state to act to steer the transition. This allows us to identify, in our final concluding section, a set of critical topics for those researching and implementing the smart mobility revolution.