The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Jon's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Jon
I am Head of the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Most of my time is spent in this management role, but I continue to teach classes and conduct research in my specialist field of the geography of transport, travel and mobility. My latest book, Towards Transport Net Zero, is published by Emerald in 2025.
My research mainly focuses upon the geographical implications of mobility / accessibility, and issues to do with transport and governance. 'Getting my hands dirty' in research terms has always been one of my favourite aspects of my job, but in management roles over the years opportunities to actually go out and do my own research have become fewer and further between. In an attempt to put this right, together with Iain Docherty (Stirling) and Danny MacKinnon (Newcastle) I embarked upon a project about the impact of devolution on UK transport policy in which we deliberately involved no research assistants 'in the field'; interviewing the main stakeholders in this area was a fascinating process and we wrote up the results in the book Diverging Mobilities. A follow-up focusing mainly on 'Round 2' devolution in England, Governing Mobilities, will be published by Edward Elgar once we've finished the text later in 2025, this time with our colleague David Waite (Glasgow).
Another book with Iain Docherty (The Transport Debate) took a completely novel approach to synthesising and presenting the work of transport and mobilities scholars through the lens of a series of familiar journeys (the commute, the school run, the holiday, etc.) made by a fictitious Anglo-Scottish family, the Smiths. We followed this up with Transport Matters, bringing together 27 leading scholars in the transport and mobilities fields, to demonstrate the importance of transport as a means of achieving a whole range of different government policy goals from economic development to health and wellbeing.
As noted, my most recent book is Towards Transport Net Zero, the 20th volume of the Transport and Sustainability serties published by Emerald. Both the book and the series I co-edit with Stephen Ison (De Montfort) and Maria Attard (Malta). The book brings together editors and key contributors from across the T&S series to set out state of the art research and thinking on the subject of transport decarbonisation, and identify credible policy approaches towards net zero in a sector that generates around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition to these books and around 50 journal articles (that have been funded by grants from various sources including UKRI and the EU), I have provided three Impact Case Studies, one of which, with Andrew Seedhouse of Smart Applications Management, was judged by the REF 2014 panel to be 4*. We obtained more than £4m of government funding to help roll out the nationwide introduction of 'smart' ticketing as a means of making bus transport more appealing. This is particularly difficult in provincial Britain because of the deregulated structure of the bus sector outside of London.
Teaching
In my career I have taught numerous aspects of human geography. Because my PhD focused on transport and travel issues, I have always been involved in teaching Transport Geography modules, but my time at the University of Idaho in the 1990s gave me a lifelong love of the American West. Over the years I've written classroom-based modules on the USA and set up a field trip to the Pacific North West, a variant of which has run most years since 2002.
At the moment I teach on three undergraduate modules:
GEES1102 People and Place
A wide-ranging module that exposes students to a variety of topics studied by geographers and the different ways we go about studying them. I teach the political and economic geography sections of the module, dealing with ideas of states, nations, territory, governance and state restructuring, electoral geography, firms, labour and world trade.
GEES2102 Transport, Travel and Mobilities
I co-teach on this module which covers different ways of looking at transport, travel and mobility. We identify where people, goods and information go, and explain when, how and why they go there. We look at the significance of everyday experiences while ‘on the move’, as well as the mobility of specific groups of people and things.
GEES2109 Fieldwork in Geography: The Changing American West
This module involves between 20 and 40 students boarding a plane to Seattle to experience and learn about the Pacific Northwest for 10 days. We split the trip into two parts: in the first few days we investigate a a number of different geographic themes in Washington and Oregon, before the students divide into groups of 4-5 to undertake a project of their own design.
