It is with great sadness that I am writing an obituary for my great friend and colleague Moshe Givoni, who died on 21 November 2019 from complications arising from major surgery. I first met Moshe in 1999, just after he had completed his MBA at Tel Aviv University. He had come to study for his PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning at UCL on the topic of rail-air integration, and the assessment of the potential impact of the high-speed rail (HSR) line between London and Paris/Brussels on travel markets. This topic aroused a lifelong interest on his part in air and rail as modes of transport, and the controversies more generally over HSR. He published many papers on these themes, including five in Transport Reviews.
He was then awarded a prestigious Marie-Curie Postdoctoral fellowship. He chose to work with Piet Rietveld and Martijn Brons at the Free University in Amsterdam on access to rails stations and issues related to passenger satisfaction. In 2008 Moshe returned to the UK as a Senior Researcher in the Transport Studies Unit in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University. There he worked on a series of EU projects related to policy packaging, visualisation of walking and cycling environments, and the development of European policy roadmaps.
In 2011 Moshe moved back to take up a post as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. His ambition had always been to return to Israel, and this seemed to be the ideal opportunity. Since then, he has established the Transport Research Unit at Tel Aviv University and he has been its main driving force for 6 years. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.
Everyone who has worked with Moshe has commented on his openness, intellect and willingness to put a contrary view, whether it was on high speed rail, new technologies, or on the need to minimise travel time. He had the ability to make that jump from more difficult conceptual and analytical issues to clear examples of how ideas might work in practice – he was an excellent communicator and he loved talking about travel and transport. As such he was always keen to network with other international researchers, whether it was in the UK (e.g. UTSG and RGS-IBG) or Europe (e.g. NECTAR and ERSA), or more widely (e.g. TRB, WCTR and IGU). Moshe always seemed to enjoy the act of travelling globally to meet people, to carry out research, or to participate in conferences or seminars.
Moshe was broad-based in his research output and this was reflected in the five books that he helped to edit, the most recent of which has just been published (2019) – the Companion on Transport, Space and Equity. I remember the discussions we had on another book that we were editing together – Moving Towards Low Carbon Mobility (2013) – as Moshe was insistent that cultural, institutional, financial and social factors were all important to the achievement of sustainable mobility. He argued (rightly) that it was only through such a holistic approach that real change in thinking would take place. We are still learning those lessons. His research output more generally was substantial, often involving international collaboration, but always on interesting topics and with new perspectives – his papers are still worth reading.
For all the international transport community, Moshe’s death is an enormous loss as he had so much more to contribute. He was Associate Editor of Transport Reviews from 2009 onwards, and it was during that period that the Journal’s Impact Factor increased from 0.747 to 6.648. His contribution to the extraordinary success of the Journal has been substantial and all the members of the Editorial Board (and reviewers) have commented that although they may never have met Moshe, they still know him as a friendly, helpful, supportive and dependable correspondent. Even if there had been no contact with him for some time the conversation just started again as if it had been yesterday. But he was also persistent and never gave up seeking improvements to the online platform used by Transport Reviews.
Moshe was gentle and kind, willing to share his ideas and knowledge with all researchers, and he had a wonderful sense of humour. He was also warm and enthusiastic, whether it was talking about his latest paper, or showing you around his Department, his University, or Tel Aviv, or when you were sharing a meal with his own family or his wider families in Israel and Finland. We published many papers and edited books together, and I have wonderful memories of discussions, debates and working together over many years. I have a profound respect for Moshe and for the true friendship that developed over the years we worked together.