00:01:40 – News from around and about
00:10:37 – What interventions are effective in increasing active travel? – Eleanor Roaf and Emma Lawlor
00:55:46 – Bob Davis shares the manifesto of the Road Danger Reduction Forum
excellent stuff so we are now recording welcome to active travel Cafe um and as usual this evening we’ll be doing a Roundup of news from everybody’s part of the world so um it’s always always very good very diverse we’re going to have a quick interjection from the road danger reduction Forum on the new Manifesto um and then the main speakers tonight are Ellena roof and Emma La Laura Laura sorry Emma angled your name there um talking through their systematic review of evidence on active travel um so that would be really exciting get into proper proper academic work going on in our field we’re going to hear about that shortly um we’re gonna um do our crowdsource news a to finish that about quarter past 20 past and then get on to our speakers so thank you to everybody contributing in advance um uh and during the session we’ll be uh watching for any questions my facilitators are helping and um we’ll try and keep ourselves to time um if you do by the way in the chat have any lengthy conversations that start to become a sub meeting all of their own feel free to take that onto an alternative platform like Twitter um so that’s the plan for this evening um and I’m going to start by um asking if anybody has any bits of news from their parts of the world anybody want to contribute so I think we have Matt from Nottinghamshire Matt did you want to go first oh there you go is that is that working it certainly is go for it okay excellent just a very quick one we are all familiar with the cards which say you parked like a can’t um there is an alternative version that is more polite that says thank you for parking for parking thoughtfully next time and is more around Mobility AIDS uh which has come out of the community around wheels for wellbeing but it’s not branded uh but I have posted uh the artwork to be used into the forum over at road.cc and I will drop a link into the chat excellent thank you Matt that sounds like a very good thing okay that’s me and if you really Posh you might crack open your home laminator machine and turn them into weatherproof cards as well um thanks Matt that’s excellent Ruth over to you in Sunny Creek we’re not jealous at all uh hi can you hear me yeah okay um well it’s a moan and it’s a bit relevant really so last week on Wednesday I cycled route ncn 461 which is also ncn 61 uh woking is area um I can’t add photos I’ve never learned how to do this in spite of Steve trying to teach me but it is woefully inadequate it’s barely a meter wide because it’s so overgrown it’s got kissing Gates it’s got all sorts of things that make it totally unusable for anybody who isn’t really really fit on a you know that kind of a bike and you know with the new elections sorry I’m in a bar but with the new elections hopefully we’ll get a government that recognize that cycling active travel Wheeling whatever has to be funded properly so we don’t rely on Charities like C strands NCA LCC it’s my usual moan it has to be funded properly and when we do get the new government I would urge all of you to please write in and then ask your MPS to do this because you know if any of you know ncn 461 it was almost unusable and it’s it’s shameful really shameful but thank you for listening to me oh no pleasure Ruth and you get the award for being the first person this evening to mention that we might have a tiny election going on here in the lovely UK um John over to you hi good evening all hopefully you can hear me good yeah um yeah at the weekend we held the uh Mike goof uh visual um and unveiling of his Ghost Bike in memory obviously of Mike and all victims of road traffic uh crashes in campure uh we had a turn out of about 70 people and we’ve had a lot of coverage to it as well both in local news newspapers uh and it was also on BBC luck East and I believe it was on Anglia news as well last night um and we are encouraging everybody now to write to our new members of parliament to act um uh will they commit to pushing forward for there to be a road safety strategy to be reintroduced picking up from the excellent speaker that we had last week brilliant thanks Sean thanks for that um yes so please do pick up John on that um um did you say you’re going to put some link a link in the chat John for people to follow yeah I’ll I’ll put a link in now just to uh to the event it was a very uh moving event as you can well imagine yeah absolutely John thanks for that really good um H to you okay thanks prepare yeah I’ve I’ve got myself clear now I went to a hustings the other night and also we discussed a few things nice one in Scotland and make you guys in Le and Manchester a bit jealous um we have 247 express coach services that carry bikes to virtually every Scottish City and um there’s an hourly service through the night between for the 47 miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow um compared to uh an hourly service all day that runs from 5: in the morning till midnight between Le and Manchester so I think U we seem to be doing the public transport with bikes quite nicely in Scotland and um I think we should Bang the Drum about that particularly particularly the express coaches they go down the motorway they stop at the Junctions they don’t go off into the towns so it works ideally for cycling to catch the coach at the motorway Junction and Brilliant it it really makes transport work H that’s excellent you just out of Interest H um was that National Express that you’re talking about um sadly not um it’s taken me 20 years but we’ve now got Scottish City Link which also operates Mega buus from Glasgow uh the new managing director is Simone Smith um and um they um they committed to putting bike reservations so you guarantee a bike space on the coach uh it took us 20 years to get bike reservations on their system and about 30 years ago we had bike B and everything set up so that when you landed in alool having done your tour of The Western Isles you didn’t face the climb up to braymore Junction and the fish lorries on the a835 you could just pile on to the coach hate those fish lorries well as yet again H you’ve shown Scotland to be the land of Enlightenment so that’s it is we’re slow we’re slowly getting back when it was at smt and nationalized all rural buses carried bikes and slowly we’re getting that back brilliant stuff H I’m going to move us on thank you so much for that Mark Strong thanks um just a quick recap and I’m not sure what I should be saying and what I shouldn’t be saying but I wasn’t told not to say it so because of the work we did for Wier I was at the Active travel England Showcase Event hosted by Wicker in lovely Todd last week last Thursday and Danny Williams gave a presentation um and suffice it to say there’s lots going on behind the scenes and lots would have happened if it wasn’t for the election they’ve got they’ve got lots of things that they would have been able to say they’re obviously Bing their time to the election his main focus is on cwis 3 and I think at some point that people will need to stop thinking to Pivot towards that which will operate from 2025 to 2030 looking at where they’ve got to predicting where they’ve got to by 2025 where they want to get to by 2030 um and obviously that will very much depend on who not just it’s an obviously very likely it’ll be labor government but who particular is the minister and what the views are labor Manifesto is rather short on detail um so I think all the lobbying that Ruth talked about um is going to be relevant um so I won’t say anything more than that there was just lots and lots of talks and some interesting they would have been putting out some ltns or leaflets design guides they would being very Cy about what they what they could say um but there was lots of things happening and lots of things happening in Wicker apparently so um I don’t want to steal the Yorkshire Thunder of people who are actually from that area they seem to be doing lots of good stuff brilliant thanks Mark good stuff um so I’m going to move as if there’s no other news round outs from people’s parts of the world Bob are you here chair the road danger reduction Forum I can’t see him uh CLA wolf can you see him on the list of he’s did say he might be late Steve so you might want to just pop him on he’s not here yet Stephen he’s not in the waiting room so that’s fine what we might do is um use Bob as the lovely end point to our session this evening where we can share the road danger reduction Forum right at the end to give us all a bounce in our step as we get on with the rest of our evening um so what we might do Emma and and Ellena is come to you next I did promise you at Quast 5 so we’re kind of on time um we’re going to come over to you to present your wonderful research it’s very exciting over to you you’re still on mute Elena M and have I successfully shared my screen nether maybe there we go yep we can see that Elena and if I you sound a little bit quiet so if you want to pull your yeah there we go good Lord good Lord all the mistakes in one one Rift swiftly hopefully I’ll do a bit better now so um I’m Elena Ro and this is some research that um I did so I’m a retired director of Public Health I’m not an academic and this is but this is a piece of academic research that I have done together with Harry larington Spencer and Emma Lawler and what we were interested in was whether we could find out what interventions actually work at increasing active travel particular on a population level so um you know what active travel is and but what the reason we did this study was because most systematic reviews in the past have looked at specific types of intervention so they’ve looked at things that affect children or infrastructure or social and behavioral they haven’t looked at all of any intervention that any researcher thought might increase active travel so this is what we decided to have a look at um we then discovered there was an awful lot more written on this in the last 10 years than we’d thought so um we chose I mean that this is more for people the Geeks you’re welcome to have the slides but I’m I imagine you’re more interested in the um the results than the methods but I just thought I’d share the methods with you um we included so what we included as a study that could be included was peer-reviewed articles um of primary research so we didn’t look at system other systematic reviews we didn’t look at model data we looked at um any the participants in the study could be absolutely anyone but they had to be people living in in the wild if you were not people in hospitals not people in prisons so Community dwelling um people any age we didn’t have any restrictions on age gender or language although we didn’t actually find anything in any language other than English we had to they had to include measure actual measurements of active travel not model data not um not a mod not and they had to have something that had measured before as well as after although for the before we did allow people to do a study and they ask people sometimes what you know to compare what they did now to what they’ done before so the on there weren’t very many of those but that obviously brings in quite a bit of um recall bias where where that was in we we um didn’t include E Scooters we didn’t include motorized wheelchairs and we didn’t include public transport studies unless people were talking about um data on active travel so there was some on public transport where people specifically were looking at what impact it had on active travel I think if we were to do this again we would probably include E Scooters although I don’t think there’s very much written on those yet um the reason for them including them is that you are actually standing up which is uses a bit more energy than sitting in a car and also they make the same demands on the road system as um other forms of active travel we didn’t include things that only looked at PE how many steps people took they had to actually reference active travel and we had to they had to assess the impact so there were they could be counts they could be frequency they could be duration or they could be distance and one of the issues we found was everybody measures active travel in different ways um which really did mean that we couldn’t combine what we what we found so to our horror we found 207 2,738 articles we then um that bit wasn’t so bad because you can just quickly skip through we had to read in detail 269 and we found 89 papers of about um 78 studies that we included in our review um and most of the studies were at medium or high risk of bias um and I think that’s really because mainly because um the nature of the funding and the nature of the interventions mean that quite often there was a lot of loss to followup or there was quite short time periods so people would do something and then review it very quickly afterwards so um again there’s some methodological issues we then having got the 78 studies we we categorized them by five different types of intervention this was our categorization other authors might have categorized things differently we looked at things that were related to children and schools as one group we looked at studies that provided social or behavioral interventions or a policy change we looked at studies that included a bike or an aimike um but without any infrastructure changes and then we looked at infrastructure changes and studies that included infrastructure interventions alongside other changes and now I’m going to hand over to Emma who’s going to give us a quick run through what we’ve found for our different categories yeah no problem thank you um so studies involving children or else AR in close to schools um so there was 10 studies included um so our findings um find that interventions aimed at only increasing knowledge your skills or changing attitudes had little impact um walking or cycling buses it showed positive impacts however it required it longer term funding um more consistent communication and engagement to keep this going um gamification interventions aimed at primary school children without any associate infrastructure changes and there was increases in Walking cycling rates however this tended to generally not be maintained in the longer term um and repeating intervention possibly may be required and the influence of families and friends behaviors and attitudes um was noted by some authors to influence children’s behavior however um it was highlighted that this wasn’t often assessed in the research and also as well um some studies of infrastructure changes only considered the area immediately by the school um so this may not have affected the journey enough to create a modal shift um so for example the rest of the journey may not have felt safe enough um for the children or for the carers to let them travel actively next slide please um so for the social behavioral and policy interventions there was 18 studies that were included um so interventions that were aimed at only increasing knowledge or changing attitude um were found in general to have little impact in active travel rates uh three studies use campaigns to increase cycling um and they generally included a gamification element and it seemed to have some impact however um this U campaign uh needed to be repeated to be maintained in the longer term um gamification also as well seemed to be more popular among people already using active and sustainable travel um five studies as well looked at Social advertising approach on the benefits of active travel such as use of social media or rewards and it may have some impact however it was also highlighted it needs to be extensively publicized um so four uh studies as well looked at workplace interventions for example um travel planning and public transport salary sacrifice um work based workto work um promotions and also as well nudges um so with infrastructure these changes um without infrastructure changes these generally made little difference to active travel levels the social and behavioral interventions did appear to be more effective when the environment is more conducive to walking cycling so the environment it really was key as well and also as well that cycle training on its own does not appear to increase cycling um however it was noted that mentorship may help next slide please thank you um so the studies that offered practical support recycling there was 16 of them um so this was the likes of access to bikes or ebikes and it was some alongside other support such as training or mentorship um so the studies um we found that providing an ebike or an ebike rental scheme seem to be more effective than offering pedal uh pedal bikes so loans are subsidies of ebikes they showed a positive effect in cycling rates and reduced car usage and they were more popular than pedal cycle loans um loans of pedal bites also as well seem to work for people who self-referred into programs or else had very limited access and options to forms of transport and there was also as well the finding that bicycle sharing schemes that are linked to good infrastructure may be more effective um but it really was key that people needed to live to both live and work in areas of good infrastructure thank you um so findings from studies including infrastructure changes so there is 20 U with two of them focusing on walking 10 on cycling and nine focusing on both walking and cycling um so the liks of complete streets and Greenways new public transport and improv cycling infrastructure um so the findings show that environmental CH changes tend to be more effective than social and behavioral ones multicomponent interventions um and those covering a larger area appear to have the biggest impact um rather than smaller changes such as to specific roads um the interventions as well it didn’t always seem to have the same impact on cycling levels on women as on men and most of the studies’s environmental changes focused on the needs of cyclists rather than pedestrians um so the evidence and improvements of the cycle infrastructure um was a little more mixed um so some of the infrastructure led to a move of existing cyclist to new routes so there was strong root substitution as well uh there was the finding that improving in area’s walkability score led to increases in Walking rates and there was two studies included that that investigated the impact of public transport such as new Railway Metro lines and stops um so the finding was that better public transport and also as well proximity to stops May decrease time spent in active travel but may increase the frequency uh so the number of times used and also as well uh ruce the use of private vehicles uh there was also the finding of improving public transport can reduce cycling by pedal bike however um the use of ebikes is maintained Ellena are you doing this bit you’re yes she’s you’re on mute Ellena geez you wouldn’t think I could do it twice in one but there we go so pedestrian cyclist what we um the the role of how many different people with different needs um are occupying the same space and the need to respect the hierarchal hierarchy of vulnerability and that came out very strongly we felt um overall that behavioral interventions on their own aren’t effective but interventions that combine infrastructure change with social and behavioral programs and those offering ebikes have the most impact um one thing that we found as well as Emma said the small scale cycling interventions probably just lead to root um substitution rather than an increase of people cycling with quite a few of the cycling interventions what we saw was you could get some quite good results for specific subpopulations in in particular people who were willing to change or who were at a teachable moment but that wasn’t really going to give us a population level change in cycling and just so that people are aware although we looked you know the studies could be done in any any country in the world most of them were in high inome countries um uh in particular Europe and North America Australia um we found that ebikes and EC cargo bikes make similar demands on the road system um and they allow more and longer Journeys to be made and they actually are much more acceptable to novice cyclists and to people maybe coming into cycling there wasn’t as much research on done on disabled people’s travel as we would have liked to see but actually the role of an ebike and adaptive bikes for incre um for encouraging disabled people into cycling we felt was a really important way of maintaining Independence and travel and that was something we would like to have seen more um research on we thought uh the issues that we’ve seen in particularly in this country and I think um it’s important to note that we’ve been writing this over the last um we started about a year ago this study and they’ve both it’s just been published now um but we finished the data collection in December last year so it’s very much being at at a point where in the UK we’ve been seeing massive hostility to active travel and the sort of whole war on war you know stopping Wars or and so on so I do feel probably um our our opinions have been colored by this I don’t know if somebody writing from a different country might not have felt quite so strongly about how you get this this road space reallocation which is absolutely vital and how to develop that public and political support for it just how important that that feels to to well to us at the moment and we felt that a lot of the research there were several things one was people doing this research tend to either come at it from a health point of view because they’re interest Ed in increasing active travel travel in order to increase physical activity or they’re coming at it from a um transport point of view and they’re wanting to reduce um congestion um and both sets want to have cleaner air what we found was with some of our studies they were almost saying oh well this active travel doesn’t work because it’s reduced physical activity because if people were for particularly the ones with good public transport because having more stops close by means people are that that shorter distance but actually that seems to be absolutely critical for getting people out of cars um so I think the the role of public transport as as a facilitator of active travel is something that’s really important to remember and we felt that our the research generally doesn’t include enough financial assessment of costs and benefits um which we think does limit the um political uh salience of some of the research we think that this could be a lot of the research could be more strongly focused towards a political policy agenda rather than you know a sort of does this work does this not work and we felt it would have larger impact if it did that so we made our recommendations we felt that active travel should be encouraged for all Journeys and that there should be public promotion of walking and cycling and enhancing the access of e to ebikes and EC cargo bikes and I would include adapted bikes there as well we felt very strongly there must be good links to safe affordable and reliable public transport if you’re going to get people out of their cars and stop Force car ownership we um there was strong evidence that this will only be achieved if we can actually particularly in urban areas make a change to how and where motorized vehicles are driven and parked um E Scooters I’ve talked about and we felt that there has been plenty of research that is looking at the moment on or a lot of interventions at the moment are social and behavioral ones or things where they’re not going to scare people so they’re all aimed at children or you know um but they’re not really thinking about how how you uh change actual Behavior so a lot of funding seems to be going into research or a lot of not so much the research actually but the interventions that are being promulgated are ones that are unlikely to make any population level change um and so we need to think about how we actually do Implement interventions that will work and how we get that public um public and political support for those and I think that’s it Emma Ela that was excellent I think it’s safe to say um you you’re you’re in a good place this is definitely home turf we we’re all very excited about that I I I can read the room um and I I think this is extraordinary stuff I think it’s very very exciting indeed um I’m going to take questions I am going to suggest because there’s quite a few questions coming in the chat um what we might do is ask people to very briefly um give their questions verbally because I think it’s more fun that way I’ve just got a quick one um Ellena first of all if that’s right I’ll just take my chair’s prerogative um did you come across oh two two questions occurred to me when you’re going through all that and it it was really refreshing yet again to hear you make it really clear that there isn’t a magic poster Behavior change campaign that suddenly makes everybody want to leap on their bicycles and that you know it’s slightly more complex than that um did you come across I’m really interested in whether my world of coms and campaigning is part of a deliberative dialogue around things like the infrastructure is required so rather than having a campaign going get on your bike it’s wonderful did you come across any examples where Communications was used as as a dialogue with people as to the type of interventions and infrastructure that should be developed rather than some kind of horrifically sort of dactic these are the great things about cycling campaign um so that’s with quite a few of the we we divided our infrastructure changes into two categories one were ones that did infrastructure as well as other things and that was typically might have been a campaign it might have been some sub provision of bikes it could have been anything and the other set were just infrastructure changes but we suspected in a lot of the just infrastructure changes that they actually had an element of communication engagement activation with the public in the areas that they were being delivered um but because they weren’t reporting on that in the papers that we were reading um we couldn’t include them in that category but we were pretty sure that for most of the infrastructure changes that that actually had been part of a wider conversation yeah but the focus was on that infrastructure change I think um I mean I’ve heard some Paris have been really interesting recently they have been talking about you just do it and you put up with the flag for two years and after two years people love it in this country we’ve gone a bit down more down the route of we’ll do it we’ll call it a pilot so that gives lots of people opportunity to object to it in the first place then they can object to it all over again all the way through the pilot then at the end of the pilot they can object yet again and then they can derail the whole thing because you know it was only ever a pilot and we don’t do pilots with building motorways and we don’t do pilots with other things so we really should be moving away from if we think I think we I mean my view on this is we need to be starting to say if people have a better way of cleaning up the air and I’m talking about Urban situations of cleaning up the air increasing physical activity and reducing carbon emissions of which the transport sector contributes about a quarter um if they have a better way of doing it than making some restrictions on how and where people drive their cars and park their cars then let’s hear it and if not we actually need to just get on with putting some restrictions on car use um but we’re not actually having that conversation Emma you um this the children’s stuff I think probably had quite a bit that that tended to have quite a bit of conversation about what the children thought and I think some of Emma’s other research which actually isn’t included in this um has been fascinating on the role of children as experts in their Journeys so I don’t know if Emma wants to mention that because I think that’s um yeah well I’m happy to provide a link for it um as well it was more qualitative so didn’t was more about healthy news in England the work that elers is referring to so very much so um childhood perspective and them taking photographs and what guided tours as well and so I can add that into the chat but um yeah definitely uh very important and very interesting excellent right I’m I’m not going to hog it I’m going to ask for questions does anybody want to put their hand up or I’ll take some from the chat James a we might start with yours I I’ll ask it directly and then people stick your hands up if you’d like to come in and ask a question are did you come across any good papers Emma and Ellena on workplace parking Levy or do we not have enough schemes for there to be a reliable research base that uh there was nothing published in the peer-reviewed literature the doorbell’s just gone so I’m going to ask Emma but there was nothing we found in the peer reviewed literature on the workplace parking Levy and we wish there was no [Music] wasn’t I’m hoping Ellen has just nipped off to get a piece of research off the bookshelf in a kind of live research amazing awesome moment or there’s somebody at the door with an Amazon parcel we don’t know he just said Steve there’s someone at the door oh sorry I wasn’t I was listening to Emma very attentively yeah the answer is no it wasn’t included so unfortunately okay Ellen is back um right other questions or I will take them from the chat anybody want to STI the hand up or I’ll I’ll carry on asking your questions so if I start from the first um one question we had straight away when you were presenting um was any data from when safe roots to school was in place pre 2010 so no we chose in order to preserve our own sanity um which was the main reason the uh the academic reason was to create recency and make sure that the stuff was um relevant we had a cut off you had to have data in or after 2013 right excellent good good good and before I go to H um so we had a question in the chat about what sort of workplace interventions did you notice um that made little difference they I think it was a reference to workplace interventions making not huge difference I think it’d be good to hear a little bit more about that if you can so we had all sorts but in a couple of places they hadn’t they’ mainly done carrots and they hadn’t got on to sticks and they were talking about doing things but what you had was promotion of sh um reduction in parking spaces you had um showers workplace promotions gamification in the workplace um what else was there Emma there was um yeah so there planning transport salary sacrifice um as well um yeah then NES that you you mentioned as well too yeah so mainly mainly it was trying to people were trying to do positive things to encourage people rather than absolutely whacking up parking charges although a few people did start talking about doing that okay brilliant well sorry I shouldn’t hog this but my thought on installing loads of showers um totally manages to reframe this as being some crazy sport that everybody does rather than just a sensible way to get to work I I agree I think um I think the the difficulty you’ve got with some of this as well is that for a lot of the countries that we were in including High inome countries basically everybody walks somewhere some of the time and almost nobody Cycles so it’s difficult to show an increase in Walking very effectively because everybody is already walking but they did you know some of the studies particularly what was interesting was um to get people more people to cycle you have to do more than just improve the infrastructure but to get people to walk more actually just improving the quality of the environment in which people walk does appear to increase number of people walking especially if you link it to better public transport or something like that so the difficulty we had with with the cycling studies was that you start from such a low base that you’re often really starting with the willing and you’re starting and a lot of the workplace interventions some of them were quite um did did show that if particularly if you offered an ebike the ebikes link to a workplace were pretty effective um that was one of the most effective interventions uh but in the main with the cycling things you are you are actually looking for volunteers and if you start doing it you you can’t really just offer it randomly to people because people aren’t in the right place to think about cycling at all in this in most of the countries we were looking at I think bits of London may be changing I mean you’ve now got about 19% of people in Hackney for example cycling that really is a decent number um but most of the rest of it and and again I mean slightly older work from Cambridge showing that while you’ve got very high high rates of cycling in Cambridge as soon as you come out of the city center it it drops and there’s quite a bit of stuff I would say for the UK around qualities in this that actually some of the infrastructure is going into better infrastructure is going into higher income areas increasing inequalities potentially um particularly as people more people are likely to be driving through low-income areas um so yeah and that’s where you get a lot of push back about oh we can’t stop people you know uh parking on the pavement in a Terrace Street etc etc so there’s a real there is a real danger of um around inequalities and a failure to look at what’s happening to in inequalities more generally around transport interesting Elena um I want to come back to you in a minute because one of the questions is about what comes next I think CLA stocks had a question around bidding for the next round of research you’re going to do so I think we’ll do that in a minute but before that H did you want to come in and I’m hoping it’s a slightly snappier version of the question you popped into the chat so over to you questions in the chat are separate um in Glasgow um we have a very success accessible public bike hire scheme um increasingly you see people going around on it it’s increasing use um some of the interventions have been quite interesting people with transport poverty um get a 95% discount on the subscription um there was a case that all members of Glasgow University were free members of the scheme and so people start using the bikes in whatever clothes they’re wearing to go short Journeys about the town and I keep seeing loads of the High bikes flying around being use um and so it is a case of lowering the inertia making it so easy to pick those bikes up and I used to be able to hire a bike with my bus pass because I’d enabl my bus pass to hire bikes so making making it low inertia that first and final mile thanks H thoughts on that to em and I’m me there were a couple of studies from glasow included in our research um and again it was that pointing out that um it’s that importance of having people living and working in that in the area which actually was from a Canadian study as well but what they’ found in Glasco some of the roots have been more successful than others but they were feeling that it it just takes time in some areas to bed in and make sure that you you get those roots that are further out as popular as the um as the city more City Center ones Emma is there anything else you want to say about the Glasgow work uh not in particular I suppose I’m actually in Glasgow at the minute so I know L what cycle scheme you’re referring to and read some of the reports so yeah it does seem to be all very positive with the scheme up here actually um from what I can see in most of the locations anyway and we did some analysis with that and it was very much so a lot of trips to the likes of um public transport uh hubs and things like that as well so it was actually seemed to be lots of multimodal Transport actually the that e uh the scheme bites we’re using so yeah I agree I think as well just on the particularly with pedal bikes there is definitely a cohort of people who have literally you know typically people who have no recourse to public funds or who have are really on low incomes for whom a pedal bike is an absolute godsend but you might actually refer to them as almost Force cyclists because they really have very they can’t afford public transport they can’t afford anything else and they love a bike um whether if they had an option of other things whether they would still choose a bike I don’t know the other group that we haven’t really that researchers haven’t particularly looked at but I think is an increasingly interesting one is the whole um uh ebike in particular as a delivery Tool for delivery because again you’re bringing in a very different group in this country of cyclists um on those on those ebikes for delivery um interesting so um I’ve got um couple I’ll come to you in a second Adam I was just going to ask um Shane’s question Shane from gway City had a great question which is did you come with any papers um on the lessons we can learn from slightly unintended interventions such as fuel price shocks the covid pandemic what did anything come up there we had a few studies were during covid one of them showed one of them was um I would say not the strongest study um but they found that if you aren’t allowed to drive you cycle more and walk more um um the fuel price stuff I think has been quite interesting people didn’t talk about that contextually in any of the studies I think but what we’ve seen in the UK is a consistent dropping of the you know that the fuel price taxes have not risen with inflation and therefore that um that Financial marker hasn’t hasn’t worked in this country we did because of when we are we didn’t have anyone who was looking none of the studies looked at the impact on cycling of the current cost of living Rises but what we have seen is um if you look at the cycle travel data there was a massive increase in cycling during the pandemic and we are now back down to pre-pandemic levels below pre pandemic levels of cycling in this country so whatever’s happened and however much fuel prices may be going up or people are suffering from um from the cost of living they clearly aren’t using cycling as a transport method they may be walking and they may be um public transport isn’t even I don’t think back up to um pre-pandemic levels in part that’s because not as many people are going into work every day but there are still there are now an awful lot of people who are going into work every day and indeed an awful lot of people who never stopped going into work um so we’re we’re not empirically we’re not seeing we didn’t see anybody looking at this in our studies but actually if you look at the other data we’re not seeing people people turning to bikes as a consequence of cost of living Rising thanks Helena fascinating so um in a moment I’ll come to questions that we’ve got from Diana and Lauren in the chat they are really good ones but Adam you’ve patiently had your hand up over to you Adam yeah just a quick one have you looked at the over consultation that seems to be emic and whether or not there are any papers looked at how we all any strategy for going forward on this because yeah all of our studies were basically people were either there was an intervention going on that people decided to hang some active travel measures around or um or they were part or it was a piece a funded intervention that had an evaluation with it because we needed data that was both pre and post um we I think that sort of the probably the consultation discussions might have been at an earlier stage so we wouldn’t have captured it unless they wrote about it in it I don’t I don’t most of the studies didn’t really talk that much about how they did their public engagement although a lot of people a lot of them did talk about I there’s quite a bit about using social media for example or gamification or apps that you could log in or some people sent things to people at point of house move so there was quite a lot of stuff but there wasn’t really very much about um The Madness of different consultations and how those are done yeah I was going to say if maybe some of our search criteria and things like that maybe some of those papers wouldn’t have come through they would have been filtered out if they were a bit more kind of qualitative or something like that um so it wouldn’t maybe have been included in the studies that we um that we got from our searches I I have noticed that some of the aaf the active travel fund tranch fois where they look at what’s been spent you see something like 500,000 spent on the scheme and then 250,000 spent on on the actual services or consultation side of it so I’m wondering if that’s an indicator that could be used as a way anyway but yes that’s that’s for a different study down the line yeah I I I must say Ellen I know you’re relatively new to this academic lot but you should be lining up those future study requests there should be a whole sequence of them I imagine but I’ve been talking to I’ve been talking people at nihr about what they should fund and what they shouldn’t um obviously they’re fascinated by My Views that’s brilliant um couple of other questions that we’ve had in the chat if you don’t mind um Lauren had a question about whether there and this might be one of your future research subjects actually but whether there are any particular theories of behavior change that seem to be more effective than others when she looked at those studies that were focus yeah so there were a few that looked at those and again these tended to be social behavioral interventions only and I think if you I think with all of these I might there was some social and behavioral things that showed some promise and If Only They coupled them with some infrastructure changes as well they might actually have really been we probably would learn more from them but there were some for example who looked at different types of nudge and um so using a moral or a norm or a moral reason or a financial one or a normative reason so you know other people are doing this or you should do this or you’ll save money if you do this they find the financial one to be the most effective and the moral one to be no impact whatsoever um other people there was a nice study in Holland where they looked at Social um creating social groups of people to do um to do Journeys together versus infrastructure changes and actually they found in that one they found either of those was more effective than doing nothing but they did say these were groups of older people who already very active um so there were some interesting there were some interesting things that were about theories of behavior which I think could be applied but I would say just doing that without changing the environment as well is certainly not going to make a difference to um cycling although it might make a difference to use of public transport and walking excellent and we another really good question in the chat from Diana was about whether you’d um come across um and such as the level depth of this Al trust me I’m sure everybody’s really fascinated so we could go on for some time so we will have to cut this short at some point but did you come across any ceiling on cycling uptake if there wasn’t a corresponding investment in infrastructure so did you get any sense of any measure you could put on from a low base how limited are you in terms of cycling update if there if there literally isn’t any investment in for example segregated infrastructure I mean it’s pretty low you there was one study workplace study in um uh Australia and they were looking at 3 to 4 percentage points something like that Emma that’s right isn’t it I don’t think we were seeing anything much more than that um without infrastructure and with the root with the ones about the root substitution a few of quite a few places found that that you got what looked like quite a nice increase in in cycling but it was actually people not cycling on Parallel roads and Chang to those ones and even in I think it was a Norwegian or Danish study where you’ve got a higher rate of cycling than we do I think they did find a sort of three to four that most of the impact of it was um was on root substitution but I think they did find a three to four percentage Point increase in iny in cycling so there was a little bit of getting some new cyclist in but you’re talking you’re talking pretty low numbers and as I say most of the cycling studies um certainly the workplace ones the schools ones with the school bus with the bus the walking and cycling buses um they were pretty much starting with people who were Keen to do it they weren’t they weren’t um which is great because actually you know if you’ve got a low base you start with the Willing um but I think the evidence for all of the particularly around those walking buses and so on and it’s very relevant to the school streets conversation is that trying to do things relying entirely volunteers or with short-term funding that people know is going to end it just doesn’t work because people they’re not going to change their behaviors and change their Lifestyles for something that’s only going to be working for a term fabulous okay so a final question in just a moment I’m going to read out um Claire stocks from the chat actually uh about next phase of research but before I do that Ruth should we come to you thank you um I was very interested Ellena when you said about how cycling wasn’t seen as an option and cycling is perceived as very much a white male medium income well-off income kind of people and I’ve always thought that that’s partly because where they live so they have a place to put the bike um I live in a flat but I have a garden and I’m able to store my bikes and I always have been able to people who live in flatbox mostly lower income people literally have nowhere to put a bike and surely that must impact Countrywide on whether people are even going to even begin to think about cycling not least when they get to work and there’s nowhere safe to put them how is that in your research thank you so we found so people did have talked about that a lot but I would say that the level of Cy what we’re seeing at the moment in countries like the UK countries with low rates of cycling tend to see it as very much a male activity and a middle class male activity at that um if or actually I think you’ve got a big divide in this country now where you’ve got um because the delivery drivers that you cyclists that you see are not I would say typically middle class A lot of the the trouble with a lot of the studies as well is that um quite a lot of them have just counted people going past and haven’t even counted whether they’re male or female let alone whether they’re um able you know what what social demographic they may be from Valencia has been doing a lot of work over a long time and they’re really seeing a big increase in women including women using their bik share schemes um so that has been a so I think that the more people cycle the less it becomes a gendered activity and what we’re seeing in the UK is it’s a gendered activity because we perceive it as being a very very unsafe activity and women aren’t as prepared to take the risks perhaps as men the storage issues are are there definitely but actually far more of us and far more even people living in Flats on it you could always change some parking spaces if people were minded to do so into bike store which they’ve done a lot in London um so I think the the problem is not simply of bike storage it’s much more fundamental than that if you want to cycle you can often find a way around the fact that you don’t have decent places to store it if you don’t want to cycle it’s yet another reason not to um so I I feel that they it’s um it’s it’s important that we don’t get too hung up about uh not being able to store bikes because actually how much we need to create the demand for people to want to have bikes to store and that would change how but I do think you know is definitely something that certainly as a director of Public Health I would be teach talking to my housing planning colleagues about about you know we must have spaces where people can store bikes either in a flat or or and lots of blocks of flats now do have safe cycle storage and so on but it’s it’s a necessary it’s a sufficient it’s not an it’s not better bike storage is not going to be the full full answer although bike theft and fear of bike theft is significant well thanks Ruth um so I’m just gonna ask this last question and then I know Matt’s posted a late one in the chat Matt just as we’re almost running up so what we might do Emma and Elena is just do this last question then I’m going to Bob Davis from Road danger reduction forum for his Manifesto um while we’re doing that if you wouldn’t mind would you answer just the last couple of questions in the chat would that be all right and just if we got any late ones but this last question is from CLA which is um in your recommendations you said that research should focus on how to develop public and political support for Effective interventions um and Claire’s plea in capsule letters is that’s vital can you please bid for that as your next piece of research so is that next and then Associated to that as a question um is uh can we get a link to This research and and uh where does it go next and how can we support so where this research goes next well Emma and Harry are proper proper researchers and Harry is currently working on um bar removing barriers study on removing barriers um to cycling as in phisical barriers on Roots I’m particularly interested she’s particularly interested in the experience of disabled cyclists and disabled people traveling more generally I’ll let Emma tell you about what she’s doing and what I’m doing is I am doing a piece of work looking at how local authorities um fund active travel interventions which interventions they’re choosing and why is it that they’re choosing them what metrics what metrics of success are they using if any and why how do we support them to um actually choose things that work rather than things that are easy so that’s my research and Emma yeah my research um so I’m based at the University of Glasgow so it’s a project um actually in Partnership with Glasgow city council um all focusing on climate change Solutions so I’m leading the active travel work package on it but um I’m doing a combination things so a behavioral um cycling intervention um with the charity based up here called back for good so it’s also as well as doing education sessions um and cycling skills also giving people a free bike um or access to a free bike so really trying to um reduce any Financial barriers to it and also as well um an evaluation of a new Walking cycling Bridge um that’s opening as well so a little bit behavioral and infrastructure brilliant um well listen guys my plea for the next ph’s research is a little bit on where the helmets put people off but there you go um maybe that would be a nice one um excellent stuff that was amazing and and it’s so exciting to see all that fascinating research I think um please feel free to accept an open invitation back to active travel Cafe whenever you’ve got an update EML that was absolutely brilliant and and if we can act as any kind of reference group or informal sounding board we’ be more than happy to I’m sure I speak for all of us but that was absolutely excellent thank you both so much thank you very much you’re welcome to have the slides and the latest version of the paper should be open access it’s just been published so um I can send links to that as well that would be amazing yeah we’ll we’ll jump on that very readily thank you so much so final thing for this evening before we uh clock off and go canvas or leing or whatever we’re going to do in a hectic week um Bob Davis you’ve got a Manifesto to share with us Bob you’re on mute Bob right I’m here can I uh just share a SC screen quickly you sent can here we go so this is the manifesto of the road danger reduction Forum um and uh it’s been sported by moms lungs uh at some extent action Vision zero and uh 20 20 yes so do go to this link and it’s not just for you to question candidates about it’s for the future so uh the first thing is um move the UK away from dependence on private M transport which is unsustainable wasteful uh unsafe Etc well sorry just a quick thing Bob could you make it full screen there’s a couple of people I think are on smaller screen uh right see you’re in power there so you be able to go into presentation mode oh dear sorry um um uh wait a minute uh if you go bottom right Bob the very smallest icon on not the slider but the one just the left of the slider that’ll take you into full mode uh oh gosh hang on there you go that’s it show yes here we go so that’s transitions your trans slide transitions I missed these yes go for it Bob so moving the UK away from dependence on private mod of Transport we’re putting Road Safety uh in the context of Transport policy and it’s about incentivizing at and everything else uh so that’s a big thing other people like parliamentary advisory Council and transport safety don’t do that uh we are and it fits in with G policies cut the 30 billion Pound Road building budget and reallocate for sustainable transport including 2 billion per anom for active travel routes actually the green party’s gone for 2.5 billion a year so um we’re just doing a uh similar thing there um third point in en Force Road Traffic Law nobody’s really talking about that that’s important uh we wanted a substantial increase in roads policing including national sport for third party reporting um emphasis on minor penalties for common offenses rather than uh the headline big super Dreadful cases where people are talking about length of time in prison that’s a bit of a red herring and we want 500 million pound per Anum to be spent on Road traffic policing because there’s very little of it and actually a lot of motorists might like there to be more road traffic policing um having a road safety strategy we’ve actually talked about a road safety investigation branch that may not be so effective but we’re trying to reach out to other bodies like pacts who go on about such things um uh legislate for and incentivize use of small slower safer sustainable Motor Vehicles for passengers and Freight taxation should be based on vehicle size weight and fuel with an objective being the reduction of the use of SUVs in urban areas you may have seen this uh SUV Alliance combination of bodies uh who may actually come on active travel Cafe sometime talking about uh opposing Urban SUVs uh we’ve just started a campaign uh uh trying to get the old England Lawn Tennis Club to not have had uh sponsorship by Janu Jaguar Land Rover to Ferry uh VIPs around in their SUVs and that’s very relevant following the crash in wbl which you should be aware of and finally a commissioner review of all road traffic laws to secure Road Justice um she think it’s very important very necessary if we’re going to have enforcement to have some basic deterrent sentencing doesn’t need uh heavy penalties but is something which is important um so there you are uh basic points supporting active travel not pushing ahead with a road building budget and more cars more Vans more lorries um so uh that’s the link to go to uh if you want to support uh this either personally um or uh uh getting your organization to support it just bang me an email and um that’s uh what it is so um any questions I think we just got one I’m gonna make this brief because we’re almost time up we’ve got one from James Avery which is uh to what extent do you also think there an elephant in the room for medical conditions most of which are fully known before the before crashes happen uh that was raised about the um Wimbledon crash and the person concerned claimed that that was the first time she’d had a seizure uh you can talk to doctors about that and people um you know I can’t comment on that specific case because you’d have to go through all the legal stuff but if you were looking at that um there would be an interesting area to to look at about the medical conditions excellent thanks Bob well I think wolf has just popped the link in the chat um for everybody so please do head on over to the manifesto support it if you can repost on your social channels uh I’m sure we all agree with those six points Bob was excellent stuff any more for any more I think we might be all done apparently there’s some football CLA said to go and watch so enjoy that if you’re into that sort of malar um so that’s all done I’d just like to say another thank you to and Ellena for really excellent presentation that’s really exciting stuff thank you all for your questions and for coming along next week will be another good one so please do tune in because we’ve got Laura Laura ler on uh potholes and Pavements who doesn’t want to be part of that one so uh next week potentially with a a new political context for all of this discussion that we’re having um potholes and Pavements here on active travel Cafe but um have a check on our socials send us an email if you’ve got suggestions for speakers and in the meantime everyone have a lovely evening lovely to see you take care everybody