Active travel and sustainable transport

Abstract

So far we have plenty of evidence that show how active travel, defined broadly here as walking and cycling, and encompassing multimodality with public transport and the use of a variety of micromobility options, affect positively the environment and public health, reduce car congestion in urban roads, and is the most effective solution towards decarbonisation. However, in many parts of the world and in many cities we still see a gap in the transport policies that prioritize active travel, with most policies still focusing on the car and its supporting infrastructures of more and wider roads, more parking and so on. Even the decarbonisation discourse is riddled with references to the electric, maybe shared, autonomous car as being the sustainable solution for the future. As researchers in the field of transport we owe it to this and future generations to continually persuade policy and decision makers that the future of sustainable transport lies primarily in active mobility. Active mobility has received much attention also during the COVID19 pandemic. During the first few months and possibly, due to the mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions imposed on communities and cities, several measures were implemented by local authorities to secure enough space in the road environment to practice safe physical social distancing, implement road closures and temporary pedestrianisation, and allow for the setting up of pop-up cycle lanes to support those walking and cycling, or simply enjoying their outdoor street environment when people were working from home. The images of streets full of people rather than cars was a sight to behold for many, in many different places around the world where the “car is king” and between parking and traffic movement, not much is left of the urban space to dedicate to people. Indeed the initial work with my colleagues Luis Guzman (Universidad de los Andes, Bogota) and Daniel Oviedo (UCL, London) on urban space distribution across different geographies has highlighted the need to re-think how our cities have to change, and how the safe infrastructure has to be built, to accommodate active mobility (Attard et al., 2021). Literature in this field is still trying to establish principles and the few works looking into this have raised a good number of questions for future researchers to investigate (Gossling et al., 2016; Nello-Deakin, 2019).