In the first half of the nineties car mobility, in Western Europe, has turned out to be not the unanimous, unambiguous blessing it promised to become in the forties and fifties. Perhaps no other technology has become so entrenched, and in that sense successful, as this one. No other technology has impacted so tremendously on public infrastructures and private life styles. No other technology has contributed so much to our sense of individual freedom. But, at the same time, no other technology is presenting such clearly tangible irritations (congestion problems), threats (safety problems) and risks (environmental problems) to a majority of citizens. It is certainly not accidental, then, that France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the European Community/Union saw parliamentarian TA (PTA) agencies conducting extensive TA-studies on transport and traffic problems. This chapter reports on the differences and similarities in dealing with the transport and traffic issue between TA approaches, outputs, and use of six of Europe's foremost institutions for parliamentarian TA (PTA). The major questions guiding this comparison were: (i) What are the approaches or methods, and products of the six PTA-agencies?; (ii) Do approaches to TA and the substance of TA-products differ in terms of cultural biases embedded in the approaches, and in policy belief systems displayed in the outputs, and their use?; and (iii) What accounts for the major differences of approach, output, and use; particularly, can we relate differences in cultural policy bias to differences in professional beliefs, national political-administrative institutions, and national political cultures? The research design is essentially a comparative case study of the process and output of the TA-studies on traffic problems conducted by the five national PTA-agencies and STOA. Data collection and analysis followed a triangulation strategy. We qualitatively analysed and coded the content of these TA-reports. Also we interviewed their principal authors/analysts, using unstructured but itemized, open-ended elite interviews. Concerning national institutional and cultural differences and any other external factors with potential impact on the process and output of the TA-studies, we relied on secondary analysis of works of comparative political science, public administration, and policy studies. These methods of qualitative content analysis, open-ended elite interviews and secondary analysis fit a comparative approach which is heuristic and hypothesis-generating. It has certainly not been our intention to formally test hypotheses. The structure of this paper is to outline our theoretical framework, first, and later to follow the logic of the research questions. The second section sets out the theoretical framework. The third section presents descriptions of the six PTA-processes and outputs. In the fourth section, a first-cut comparative analysis of the cases will focus on similarities and differences in cultural bias in TA-approaches in practice and traffic policy belief systems in TA-outputs. The fifth section addresses how these findings can be explained. This means a second-cut comparative analysis focussing on professional, national institutional and cultural variables. (A)
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