Transport governance system response during the COVID-19 pandemic: The allure of a ‘new normal’ and its implications for tackling the polycrisis

Abstract

This paper examines how the UK transport governance system responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and what this reveals about its capacity for transformative change amid broader societal challenges, or the “polycrisis.” Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset of interviews with senior transport decision-makers across four waves from 2020 to 2021, the study explores the tension between policy stability and change. While the pandemic disrupted travel behaviour—reducing commuting, increasing remote work, and shifting modal preferences—governance responses largely aimed to restore pre-pandemic norms and practices rather than seize the opportunity for systemic transformation.

Despite recognition of significant behavioural shifts and the potential for substantial long-term behavioural adaptations, a combination of institutional inertia, rigid funding mechanisms, and entrenched professional norms constrained adaptive policymaking. Instead, a desire to “return to normal” dominated, driven by political, fiscal, and operational pressures, which has left the sector in a worse position than before in terms of its capacity to tackle longstanding policy challenges and achieve the non-incremental shifts required to address the critical problems it faces.

The implications of the work are a need to move beyond the false “change versus stability” narrative and recognise that some societal trends are constantly in flux whilst others endure. Policy recognition of the change in the everyday is a pre-cursor to policy change in both more stable and turbulent times, rather than hoping that events will somehow conspire to unlock the more radical responses that are recognised to be necessary to respond to the polycrisis.