Dr Simon Blainey BA (Hons), MSc, PhD, FRGS, MCIHT, FHEA, CMILT
Lecturer in Transportation
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Dr Simon Blainey is Lecturer in Transportation within Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton.
Background:
I am a Lecturer at the University's Transportation Research Group, with particular expertise in rail transport but with experience of work relating to all transport modes. From an early age I have had a keen interest in all facets of transportation systems and their relationships with wider society and the physical environment. Transport plays a crucial role in enabling and creating the complex linkages which allow our society to function, but also poses a threat to the continued existence of that society through the demands it makes on natural and human resources and the damage it causes to the environment. Through my work at TRG I aim to make a contribution to the development of a transport network which is more sustainable, more efficient, and less costly to users, government and the environment. This aim is central to both my research and my teaching, full details of which are provided on the relevant tabs.
Career History:
My career at TRG began in 2006, when I started work on a PhD on demand forecasting for new local railway stations and services. While undertaking my PhD research I reached the final of the 2007 BA Perspectives competition, and won the 2009 Smeed Prize for the best student paper at the Universities' Transport Study Group Annual Conference. In 2009 I was awarded an EPSRC PHD+ research fellowship to undertake a project titled ‘A Decision Support System For Optimising Local Rail Networks'. My contract was subsequently extended to allow me to work on a range of research projects relating both to rail and to transport more widely (see my ‘Research' tab for more details). I was appointed to a lecturing post at TRG effective from February 2014, having previously been promoted to the position of Senior Research Fellow in 2012.
Throughout my career I have worked hard to disseminate my research to interested parties in academia, government and industry and to the general public. I am a member of the Rail Research UK Association Executive Committee, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Membership Secretary of its Transport Geography Special Interest Group, a member of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. In 2012 I spent time as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney, and I was Honorary Secretary of the Universities' Transport Study Group from 2011-2012.
Before moving to TRG I obtained an MSc in Transport from Imperial College London and University College London, and a first class honours degree in Geography from the University of Oxford. During both degrees I undertook transport-related research projects, looking respectively at the occurrence of fatal railway accidents across Europe, and the potential for microfranchising of local UK rail operations. I also gained first-hand experience of working in the transport industry as a travel advisor for First North Western Trains and carrying out public transport surveys for Flintshire County Council.
Alongside my work at TRG between 2006 and 2013 I was project manager for a major new encyclopaedic reference work, the ‘Companion to Public Road Transport History'. This involved coordinating the work of a ten member editorial board and over 140 individual authors, to produce a 400,000 word book which was published in December 2013.