Many of you will have seen last week’s email flagging up the TPM abstract submission deadline extension to Monday 16th February. That’s next week! We’ve had an excellent response so far and without wishing to prejudge the deliberations of the TPM committee, I’m expecting that many of the abstracts we’ve received so far will be accepted and make excellent papers.
Several authors have been studying the links between parking provision and economic vitality, and coming to some very different conclusions. Similarly, people’s propensity to change travel behaviour comes under scrutiny by a number of authors – and the range of findings suggest that there will be a great deal of healthy debate in these sessions. The difficulties of providing a decent rural bus service is another common topic, and it’s particularly interesting to see that this problem isn’t limited to the UK. There’s also a rich vein of abstracts exploring what really counts when it comes to decision making about transport.
One of the issues suggested by the TPM committee as being particularly relevant was the question of the transport needs of an aging population – while this is touched on in a few abstracts, it would be great to hear more about this. Likewise, experiences of tapping into innovative funding sources or developing sustainable, legacy approaches to continue the delivery of local transport projects are topics that would have widespread relevance and benefits for the TPM audience.
If you’ve been involved in any of the above, or have been working on something that you think will be of interest to your peers, please do consider submitting an abstract this year. It’s looking like TPM 2015 is going to be awesome!
The date of the conference is now confirmed as the 1st and 2nd July, and the venue will again be the London Metropolitan University.