Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2012, the European Transport Conference or ETC is unique in Europe, attracting many transport practitioners and researchers to an event where they can find in-depth presentations on policy issues, best practice and research findings across a broad spectrum of transport modes and particularly related to Europe and European transport issues. This year’s conference is held 10-12 October in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
Transport planning in times of hardship
The Association for European Transport has been responsible for the organisation of the Conference, which has been held annually since 1973, and for those involved in transport planning, research and practice, 2012 will prove to be yet another challenge to their skills, namely budget constraints. “Transport issues in times of financial hardship” is perhaps a good description of this year’s overarching conference theme.
Conference topics
The Association is keen that the papers presented at the Conference address themes of current relevance to the transport policy agenda in Europe and worldwide, and this year’s list of topics is no exception to that rule:
- Low emission vehicles – providing infrastructure and achieving higher levels of usage
- Issues in the challenge of the movement of goods and people across long distances
- Changes in travel behaviour and demand patterns during changing economic times
- Climate change and extreme weather conditions – lessons to be learned and how to plan for an uncertain future
- How to minimize social exclusion in times of economic hardship
- The response of transport planning to the rise of social media
- Bus Rapid Transit and Personal Rapid Transit – the future of public transport?
- New approaches and applications in modelling
- City logistics – what difference does e-shopping make?
- How can reduced transport infrastructure funding provide an opportunity to shift attention to lower-cost but more environmentally friendly projects?
- Challenges faced in providing for leisure and tourism in an economic downturn
- Achieving the goals of the Decade of Action for Road Safety
Offers of papers on other topics will also be accommodated and authors should not feel constrained by this list.
Submission of abstracts
The deadline for submitting abstracts is 12 February 2012 and abstracts 250 to 750 words long are to be submitted via the AET website. The full written paper is due by 7 September 2012, which gives you plenty of time to write a paper if the research is still in progress or nearing completion. That is one reason why I like submitting papers to the ETC; it does not yet have to be a finished paper.
The ETC and I
I should add that yours truly has been a reviewer of abstracts submitted to the ETC since 2005, and while I haven’t had the chance to attend the ETC in recent years, being a ETC programme committee member has kept me abreast of much of the transport research that is going on in Europe at the moment. Considering the career change that I mentioned in an earlier post there will probably be a lot more mentioning of transport conferences than supply chain conferences on this blog in the future. This posts may in fact serve as a marker signifying the switch, as my new job is only two weeks away now.
More information
- etcproceedings.org: ETC 2012 conference website
