Thesis Defence: Just One More Lane

Jonathan Kettle, supervised by Dr. Babak Tosarkani, will defend their thesis titled “Just One More Lane: Barriers to Sustainable Transportation Transition – A case study of Intercity Light Rail in the British Columbia Interior” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering.

An abstract for Jonathan Kettle’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. This defence will be offered in hybrid format.  Registration is not required to attend in person; however, please email babak.tosarkani@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this defence.

Abstract

Auto-centric development within low-density non-metropolitan corridors presents a challenge within sustainable transition research. Limited land availability, financial constraints, and induced demand principles restrict the exponential addition of conventional infrastructure to meet growing intercity traffic demands, necessitating exploration of higher-capacity transit systems. However, entrenched automobility regimes complicate the adoption of more sustainable transportation systems. This thesis investigates the systematic barriers and enabling conditions of sustainable transportation transition within an entrenched auto-centric regime, using the Thompson-Okanagan region of British Columbia and a proposed hydrail intercity tram-train as a case study.

Through an exploratory mixed-methods framework, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with ten purposively selected experts to provide case-study-specific insights. Inductive thematic analysis of the data yielded eight central themes, with findings emphasizing the importance of social license, regional funding and governance capacity, and broader techno-regulatory constraints in shaping the feasibility of the LRT proposal. Participants also emphasized the need to examine public perceptions of rail within a broader transportation context shaped by automobile dependency.

This thesis further studies a corpus of regional transportation-related social media data as a proxy of public discourse. Topics are analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and a rules-based dictionary method with a Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER). At a regional level, rail-based discourse was found to exhibit higher average sentiment scores than automotive infrastructure while being disproportionately present in the corpus, suggesting a potential preference toward rail-based mobility. No significant affective differences at municipal levels were identified.

Interpreted through a Multilevel Perspective (MLP), results suggest that an LRT-based transition will likely require incremental public pressure to achieve political attention. An Awareness-Desire-Knowledge-Ability-Reinforcement (ADKAR) change management framework is proposed to provide forward-looking recommendations to intercity tram-train proponents in the case study region.