2 1 Setting the context John Stanley and David A. Hensher 9.50 am Sunday morning 16 th September 2018. Tis introductory chapter is being written while the frst author is sitting in a Hong Kong hotel lobby, Super Typhoon Mangkhut raging outside. Tis has just been upgraded to Category 10 level, which shuts the city down; the most powerful storm in the world in 2018, thus far. All fights are cancelled but, hope- fully, the fight back home in 34 hours’ time will be OK. No-one is using the swimming pool! Tere was the odd taxi on the road but not any longer, as the storm peak approaches. In September 2018 the frst author appeared as an expert witness for the Independent Review Committee on Hong Kong Franchised Bus Services. Te Committee, set up by the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, is undertaking a safety inquiry, following a bus accident earlier in 2018, which resulted in multiple fatalities. Te major focus of evidence presented by the frst author was about establishing a robust governance framework focussed on safety risk management, working from legislation through to franchise arrangements and encompassing the environment within which this is located. Within 24 hours, the lived experience of the frst author had thus encountered major transport policy issues of (1) transport network resilience and disruption to human mobility/activities in the face of a major natural disaster (helped along by human activity with respect to climate change) and (2) public transport safety, both of which form part, but only a small part, of this volume. Tese are not the kinds of transport policy issues most of us would encounter very often. However, in Chapter 3, for example, Janet Stanley argues that we need to plan and shape our future transport policies taking greater account of more frequent and intense occurrences of transport network disruptions, the costs of which will be immense – perhaps easy to forget, unless you are close to the eye of the storm. Ten in Chapter 16 Zhang and Yamamoto remind us of some of the safety challenges confronting Asian transport, Jackie Walters discusses safety in relation to informal transport in Africa in Chapter 17 and Brian Collins outlines how technology can help to ease safety concerns, in Chapter 20. We note these two examples to illustrate the difculty that we confronted in putting this book together. How do you prioritize such a vast agenda as transport John Stanley and David A. Hensher - 9781788970204 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 07/06/2020 11:27:39AM via free access