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Interest in how individuals cope with uncertainty when scheduling their activities and trips has increased in recent years. While providing many useful concepts and insights, previous work tends to treat individuals as atomised decision-making units. This paper argues that it is imperative to think of persons coping with uncertainty about the duration of activities and trips as agents in wider sociomaterial networks or assemblages, at least in studies of how working parents collect their children from school or day care. A framework for understanding this way of coping with uncertainty is proposed, which foregrounds the practical, material, and situational aspects of space–time behaviour. Aspects of the framework are demonstrated through a small-scale study among dual-earner families in the Utrecht region of the Netherlands.

Since it erupted in 2015, the so‐called "dieselgate" scandal has revealed severe shortcomings in car manufacturers' efforts to reduce the impacts of driving on both global climate change and local air quality. In the European Union context, this controversy has raised questions about the trustworthiness of carmakers, and about the accuracy of the emissions measurements upon which key regulation is currently based. Just as importantly, however, it has also precipitated growing tensions between regulatory authorities situated in municipalities, national governments, and Brussels itself. Thus, even as European lawmakers have responded to the scandal by seeking to revamp and tighten up official "laboratory" vehicle emissions tests, growing citizen concern about the impact of vehicles on urban air quality is already having significant impacts across a multitude of European cities. Municipal authorities in Germany, for example – including in Stuttgart, the hometown of several major carmakers – have recently been compelled by court rulings to introduce outright bans on many older models of diesel vehicle, following legal challenges brought by environmental groups. That such bans have been upheld in Germany's highest court despite opposition from both state and federal governments underlines the need to view dieselgate as a knowledge controversy with distinctly geopolitical dimensions. In this commentary, we contend that questions about the accuracy of vehicle emissions measurements cannot be separated from geopolitical and scalar tensions over regulatory authority. Far from seeing such complexity as a barrier to the effective "closure" of the dieselgate scandal, however, we suggest that European regulators stand to gain much from adopting a more open and responsive position towards citizens' concerns about vehicle emissions, as well as the plurality of forms of knowledge and experience upon which they are based.

By way of an extended introduction to a theme issue on the space–times of decision making, this paper pursues two objectives. We first review some of the ways in which geographers—and especially economic geographers—have examined decision making over the past decades, showing that previous engagements with the decision are informed primarily by thinking from economics, psychology, and certain strands of sociology. Drawing on a wider range of intellectual resources, we then outline eight propositions that might guide future research by geographers and others into the space–times of decision making. These propositions help us to move beyond the idea that the decision is a singular moment abstracted from the context within which it takes place and undertaken by a discrete actor or set of actors. Instead the decision is understood as a differentiated, affectively registered, transformative, and ongoing actualisation of potential against a horizon of undecidability in which past, present, and future fold together in complex ways. A number of research questions follow from the outlined propositions: these pertain to the sites and techniques of decision making, its relationships to the governing of life, and our own decision-making practices as academics.

AbstractLow traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) are designed to remove motorised traffic from residential streets, while leaving them permeable to pedestrians and cyclists, and they have become a popular means to promote active travel. During the recent pandemic, the government introduced the Active Travel Fund in England to facilitate the rapid implementation of LTNs, but this also resulted in a powerful top‐down control element. This in turn has resulted in a paradox where funding is contingent on certain conditions being met, but insufficient and changing guidance has been given to the local authorities charged with implementation. This article outlines this highly unpredictable process, the controversies and the uncertain implementation through the development of the LTN process in England and the experience of Oxford, where many of the issues are currently being confronted.