This book examines different aspects of public transport design and its relationship to passenger experiences, reflecting the growing concern with approaching mobility through the lens of the arts and humanities and social sciences.
This book examines different aspects of public transport design and its relationship to passenger experiences, reflecting the growing concern with approaching mobility through the lens of the arts and humanities and social sciences.
The chapters in this book explore how transport environments, mobility infrastructures, and embodied movement practices have been shaped and 'designed' by a whole host of experts, professionals and political actors for different ends. Examples focus on a range of transport modes in different parts of the world, including buses in urban Chile, underground metro railways in China and the UK, and railways in Sweden and Japan. The book examines the role of architecture and design features in shaping, affording and hindering passenger flows, behaviour and experience, resulting in infrastructures which may include or exclude certain groups of passengers in different ways.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students in geography, urban planning, architecture, design studies, sociology, and mobility studies. It will also appeal to practitioners in transport planning, urban design, and public policy who are concerned with creating more inclusive and effective mobility infrastructures.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.
Introduction: Mobilities, design and passenger experiences
1. Watch the
closing doors- material interpellation, mobility affordance, and passenger
sensations
2. Are airports like cities? Affordances and peoples micro
embodied interactions during the arrival experience
3. A passenger service
revolution? Transport design and passenger experience on Tokyos urban
railway network, c. 19452010
4. Squeezing in: body, affect, infrastructure
and everyday passenger mobilities in contemporary China
5. Turnstile
politics: practices of care and mobility justice in Santiagos public
transport system
6. Breaking the continuum: network aesthetics,
infrastructural violence, and media responses to London Underground sexual
harassment posters
7. Border controls and (im)mobilities: experiences from a
public transport node Afterword: Designing mobilities
Samuel Mutter is Postdoctoral Researcher on the Data Stories project at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of several articles on the politics of mobilities, public transport, and urban infrastructure, including in the journals Mobilities, Progress in Human Geography, and City.
Peter Merriman is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (co-edited 2014), Mobility and the Humanities (co-edited 2018), Space (2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geographies (co-edited 2026).
