The ITEM (Inclusive Transitions to Electric Mobility) project technically ended on 31 August when its ESRC funding ended and I (have had to) move on to other funded projects.

Yet it is unusual for all a project’s outputs to be published within a project’s funded timescale, never mind to see engagement with the outputs or related impact in the short term. Journal articles in particular can be slow to appear, such that publication and publicising findings can often seem detached from the publicity built into the project.

For this reason, it was exciting to see the first comparative article based on primary data collected during ITEM accepted and published in the last couple weeks – and only a couple months after project end. As lead author, I had worked hard to identify patterns in policymaking across our four case study cities, explore the implications of these for more sustainable and just transitions to electric mobility, and highlight the potential learnings for policymakers and practitioners. I may be biased, but I think the article has a lot of exciting insights to offer.

It wasn’t quite published in time to be referenced in the expert comment piece on the University website, which also aimed to publicise the policy brief we produced for Bristol. However, it had just been accepted and the pre-proof published the week I went to Bristol to give a seminar on mobility justice and urban electric mobility at the University of the West of England (UWE).

I was honoured to be asked to present some of the key findings of the ITEM project to fellow transport researchers and students at UWE and beyond. I was able to focus on some of the highlights of the paper, such as the tensions between national pressures to deliver an EV future and local discomfort among transport planners with private automobility – even when it’s electric.

There was some lively discussion on the challenges facing the approaches to increase inclusion that I identified in urban electric mobility policymaking. Could policies to make EV charging infrastructure more affordable and accessible succeed in a competitive, industry-led market? Could shared electric mobility offer alternatives at a scale to make a difference when its uptake remained relatively niche? How could policymakers reach across modal silos and be confident in including diverse groups in decision-making – especially if even when they did so, it is rarely reflected in published policy documents? And how could funding streams be made both more flexible and more fair?

All were valid questions, and I can’t claim to have all the answers. Furthermore, as I said at the start, the ITEM project is technically over, so there is only so much time to go back over the research data we collected during the project and see if there are more answers or insights.

Nonetheless, we do still have other articles to finish and publish. We can still see what impact the project outputs and their findings have. And, having moved on to other projects, we can be creative in linking new data and findings to what we have learned. My research now involves diving deeper into the barriers and opportunities to scaling shared electric mobility and the potential of reaching across not just modal, but also sectoral siloes (e.g. between home energy and mobility demand). As I move forward, I will not forget the insights from ITEM or the further questions it raised that I might yet be able to answer.