Woman on emissions

£582,000

INVESTED BY THE QUINTIN HOGG TRUST TO LAUNCH THE ATA

3

NEW PHD SCHOLARSHIPS FUNDED TO TACKLE EMISSIONS

14%

The Academy is funded over a three-year period by a substantial investment of £582,000 from the Quintin Hogg Trust (QHT), and since its launch last summer, Rachel and her team have been making strides in tackling the global problems caused by our car-dominated transport systems.

“Active travel is an area whose time has come,” says Rachel. “With the climate crisis, the growing awareness of health burdens and chronic diseases due to physical inactivity, the amount of air pollution – there’s a whole range of reasons why it’s gaining policy interest.

“I’m a sociologist, not a transport engineer – I know nothing about concrete – but it struck me looking at this area how important a social science perspective really is. We know what kind of environments people like and we know that they don’t like cycling on dangerous roads. This is not an engineering issue or a knowledge problem about what to build. It’s a problem about getting it built, which to me is a sociological problem. Why are these things not happening? Why isn’t policy changing? Why is public opinion as it is? This is what we need to address.”

Professor Rachel Aldred, Professor of Transport, is Director of the Active Travel Academy (ATA), a think-tank of interdisciplinary research dedicated to facilitating active forms of transport and reducing car use in the UK.

The research, which has a focus on walking and cycling as well as the use of ‘micro-mobilities’, such as electric bikes and e-scooters, aims to address a multitude of social and environmental issues, including climate change, air pollution, the inactivity pandemic, as well as road injuries and deaths.

A collaborative effort The Academy pools expertise from across the University and beyond, combining transport and urban studies with disciplines including architecture, sociology, politics, media and health and well-being.

“Really, I think transport has to be an interdisciplinary field because it touches all areas of our life,” explains Rachel. “For example, the health experts have really come in and shaken up the field, as they just don’t have the same preoccupations as transport specialists traditionally do. They don’t care about reducing journey time by 30 seconds, but question why people are sitting inside their cars, exposed to air pollution, as opposed to walking to work and keeping fit.”

DECREASE IN CAR USE IN LONDON IN TWO DECADES

Assessing health risks is one of the central goals of the Academy, from looking at injury risk to exposure to pollution and the less immediately obvious problems which result from a lack of exercise.

“The way in which our towns and cities have been planned means that exercise has been designed out of our everyday lives,” Rachel explains. “So, we can give lip service to ‘you should walk’ or ‘you should cycle,’ but if you look at the system, the message that is actually being given out is ‘you should be driving.’

“As a cyclist you have to mix with buses and HGVs, and have to fight for your space on the road; and as a pedestrian you have to press beg buttons and stand and wait for traffic to stop – this all creates this disincentive to

use active forms of transport and an incentive to drive.”

The ATA believes that this shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be the case. Through their research they endeavour to collect the evidence required to justify new policies, which when implemented, will see safer environments that people will want to walk or cycle in.

“If we look at the Netherlands,” Rachel says, “half of children cycle to school. The figure here is about two per cent. It’s not that children in the Netherlands all love cycling and children here don’t, it’s the fact that in the Netherlands, they’ve managed to create an environment where it’s completely safe and natural for children to cycle to school. In the UK, many parents simply won’t let their children because the streets are just too unpleasant and too dangerous for them.”

Speed funding The ATA’s extensive and varied research into areas of urban design, road safety, health and well-being, traffic control and much more, has all been made possible thanks to a generous investment from the Quintin Hogg Trust. The QHT was set up in memory of the University’s founder, and for over a century the charity has been supporting the advancement of education at Westminster by funding projects proposed by staff and students.

“I’ve been working around active travel myself since 2008, doing a number of small-to-medium funded projects,” says Rachel. “But the QHT funding has enabled me to really scale it up and expand the network; it’s gone from largely just being me, to a proper academy of practitioners, all working in different areas. We can host events – such as the Active Travel Media Awards – put together new research ideas and are able to give people a bit of seed funding to develop their ideas. Suddenly we’re on a whole new footing.”

Thanks to the funding from the QHT, the Academy has also been able to appoint three new PhD studentships, focusing on micro-mobilities, small active travel interventions and interactions between road users and how these are perceived. and from the health perspective of having more active travel, but there are just so many barriers in our built environment,” he says. “I spend a couple of hours a day on my bike, so personally,

THE WAY IN WHICH OUR TOWNS AND CITIES HAVE BEEN PLANNED MEANS THAT EXERCISE HAS BEEN DESIGNED OUT OF OUR EVERYDAY LIVES

One of the newly appointed PhD students, Asa Thomas (MPhil Transport, 2024), is researching the effects of traffic restrictions on school streets and seeing if they encourage more parents and children to travel to school using active forms of transport. “We know the benefits from the climate perspective I understand that we have so far to go. There are questions we need answered rapidly, and right now we don’t have the strong evidence base that’s required to make new policies, but it’s really exciting to be working towards that.”

Another of the PhD students, Lorna Stevenson (MPhil Transport, 2024),

is looking at how micro-mobilities are fitting into the transport ecosystem. “Micro-mobilities are generally docked and dockless bike shares and e-scooter hires,” she explains. “From an active travel point of view, it’s great to see people out of their cars and on an e-bike, but if actually what we’re seeing is people choosing not to walk and instead take a passive mode of travel like an e-scooter, which has a more negative environmental impact than walking and with less health benefits, then it might not be so good. We also need to consider how we can regulate and make policy around these new travel options, to maximise the benefits and minimise the negative effects.

“Rachel’s reputation was a big draw to this PhD: the work she does, looking at transport from a sociological perspective and thinking about how people use transport, instead of treating it as an engineering problem and asking what our maximum traffic input is,” says Lorna. “With her research and reputation, and the really interesting group of people she’s managed to pull together through the ATA, both in terms of the permanent staff and the visiting fellows we’ve got coming in, it just feels like the place to be if you want to take a person-centred approach to active transport.”

Bike to the future With so much ground to cover, the staff and students of the ATA are conducting multiple research investigations simultaneously. One study which Rachel and her team have completed since the launch of the Academy is an impact study on near misses.

“I wanted to record the rate of near misses to see how many cyclists experience them on a weekly or yearly basis,” she says. “Thanks to the money from the QHT to fund the hardware, our colleagues in computing fitted a Brompton bike with sensors for us, which can measure the distance that drivers give when they’re overtaking.

“The data shows that a regular commuter might be killed just once every 8,000 years, which is reassuring. But I found that on a weekly basis, people are having very scary incidents. This suggests there is an impasse in the field – where on the one hand, people are looking at the injury stats and saying ‘death rates are low so it’s pretty safe,’ and on the other hand the general public are saying ‘I nearly got hit, it’s terrifying, I’m not cycling again.’ So, by measuring these near misses and understanding how often people might be overtaken with just a 50cm gap, we can explain why people find cycling frightening and would opt for other forms of transport.”

Everything the ATA are working towards is contributing to a healthier, safer future, with fewer cars on the roads and less pollution on our planet. It’s not an easy road ahead, but Rachel remains positive that the public will embrace the changes for the greater good.

“To reduce the priority, space and time given to car use is really difficult, because we’re undoing decades of transport planning. But, as people say, ‘Amsterdam wasn’t always Amsterdam’ – in the 1950s and ‘60s they built over the canals to make big roads, and later had to undo it all. The same is true for us, because we know that building for more cars is just going to get us more congestion, pollution and climate change.

“London has already seen a shift; in two decades we’ve gone from about 52 per cent of trips made by car to around 38 per cent. Public transport has overtaken the private car as the majority mode of transport, which is a really positive sign.

“Policymakers are worried that change will be unpopular, but you often find that when changes have been made and neighbourhoods have been calmed, motor traffic has been reduced and cycle tracks have been improved, you don’t see the public clamouring for it to be changed back. People will come to accept and like the way it is.”