Every description of a transport context in the past or present is incomplete. There are always human experiences that remain unknown, just as with nonhuman impacts, such as to biota or structures. Conceiving futures about transport systems are even more fraught. Forecasting models rely on past data that was qualitatively chosen and manipulated, just as narratives we can tell about the future are fueled by personal experiences. Each perspective—each truth—is biased.

We must engage with the reality that any description of transport phenomena requires qualitative choices that guide which versions of data and stories the researcher or practitioner deems most important. To do so requires a critical review of how the way we think about these issues informs how we grasp reality, choosing between transport truths to guide decision-making. The thought process changes as an individual experiences, recalls, and selectively forgets knowledge about transport contexts. This experiential knowledge only scales up to organizational change to the extent that the experiences are communicated, recorded, and encoded as organizational changes.

This chapter shows four evolutions in how transport planners think: economic rationality, mobility vs. access, the role of public input, and dashboarding information for transport planning. Additionally, this chapter shows how each of these topics intersect with the LASTR framework—legitimacy, accessibility, social learning, transparency, and representativeness all play a role in transport planning's effectiveness, and can be analyzed in cases through a critical realist perspective.

On a warm June evening in San Antonio, Texas, Tina Galvan decided to take an e-scooter from one of the new shared schemes for a spin in the Government Hill residential district near downtown San Antonio. By the summer of 2019, e-scooter companies Bird, Lime, and Razor had rolled out systems rentable via smartphone apps, some of which required a brief safety guide before acceptance of their terms and conditions for use. Ms Galvan hit a small pothole and hit the asphalt hard.

‘When I came to my knee was swollen so bad I couldn't walk and (it was) bleeding, my forehead was bleeding, my teeth had gone through my bottom lip and my arm was broken,’ Ms Galvan told a radio reporter via telephone (Flahive, 2019). Galvan sued both Lime and the City of San Antonio for damages, claiming the scooter's design was not capable of safely navigating the pothole, which she could not see because of inadequate lighting and a lack of painted markings. Technologies—the new e-scooter, and the city's street conditions—were inadequate for the task, Galvan claimed.

E-scooter riders, the involved lawyers, and transport planners know that humans and technologies are intertwined factors in any transport problem. Industrial engineers designed the scooters with funding driven by venture capital, in a race to deliver the first, best product. City workers deliver services under political and economic conditions of their local council district, city, and sometimes regional, state, or federal funding. Everyday people traverse the city using complex ensembles of machines, navigation tools, and conversations with others about how to move around.

How do transportation planning organizations’ narratives guide discourse and results? This chapter shows how agencies merge quantitative forecasting and policy stories while building advocacy constituencies, revealing more of the underlying real transport social structure proposed from a UK context (Melia, 2020). Informed by critical realism, this study clarifies the mechanisms that lead to neo-advocacy planning, a concept developed by Gavin Parker and Emma Street as a response to the challenges of planning in neo-liberal contexts. In this chapter, I use the term neo-advocacy planning as an inverse of public opposition to agencies, where government agencies strategically leverage community groups through organizational communication that supports public opinion for their leaders’ dominant lobbying and voting constituencies.

‘No tolls on existing roads’ read one of many hand-written protest signs at the public meeting of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO)—the intergovernmental transportation group for the fast-growing Austin, Texas region. Crowds had gathered in a cool and dark auditorium in Anderson High School—moved from the normal small meeting room on the University of Texas campus—for the board's October 2007 vote on whether to include five toll roads in the region's transportation plan. Some shouted threats of ‘political suicide’ to the elected representatives on the board, led by then-state senator Kirk Watson (Wear, 2007). As a regional transportation planner for the organization at the time, I primarily analyzed land use and transportation data, and staffing events like this were also part of the job.