Active Travel Podcast

Cycling has always been about more than its health, economic and environmental benefits. The rise of women cyclists coincided with the age of the new, educated and independent woman. The early moral outcry over women’s cycling outfits and alleged damage to their feminine physical features may seem ridiculous today yet cycling continues to be linked to discourses about who can be visible, who can take space, and how.

Over the pas...

So, in a culture, where the car is really dominant, being a cyclist can make it feel like you’re a second class citizen. And if you already feel invisible in society, because of your identity, because of who you are or the way you look, it may seem odd that you would opt for more of these othering experiences by choosing to cycle, especially if you then also don’t see yourself represented in the cycling culture or don’t feel like y...

Professor Aldred talks to Harriet Larrington-Spencer, a researcher at Healthy Active Cities at the University of Salford. Harriet, or Harrie, developed an interest in active travel after experiencing cycling in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, and after losing the use of her left arm following a collision with a driver. Harrie discovered that while a tricycle was far easier for her to use, the physical barriers and chicanes in place...

Laura Laker interviews Fare City's Charles Critchell, the Active Travel Academy Media Awards' only double winner. In 2019 Charles won our investigations/long-term follow-up category for his piece, Burning Bridges, on the closure of Hammersmith Bridge to motor traffic, and in 2020 won the campaign or research category for a two-parter on non-commercial use of cargo bikes. Judges enjoyed the detail and research that went into Charles...

Low traffic neighbourhoods have been around for decades – but recently many more have been deployed as part of COVID-19 interventions to help people walk and cycle more, and avoid public transport. New analysis of three years of the People and Places study in “Mini Hollands” in London, by Dr Rachel Aldred and Dr Anna Goodman, has found that, in ‘high dose’ low traffic neighbourhoods, not only do people walk and cycle more, but over...

Sustrans’ and Arup’s new report, Cycling for Everyone, was published at a time when both the Black Lives Matter movement and the active travel movement are at the forefront of public discussion. Susan Claris is one of the report’s authors, and Global Active Travel Leader at Arup, and Daisy Narayanan is Sustrans’ Director of Urbanism.

Coincidentally launched the day Boris Johnson’s government announced its Gear Change document, s...

The current global pandemic has pushed most cities in the Global North to rethink how we envision our streets to create car-free, safe, healthy and clean environments for its citizens. However, in the context of African cities, this transition is marked by extreme poverty, unequal access to good quality infrastructure and lack of resources.

Dr Daniel Oviedo works at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL ...

Our second PhD pod showcases Dr. Rorie Parsons’ PhD research. Rorie used a range of different qualitative methods, including archival analysis, interviews, and ride-alongs, to explore cycling cultures and cycling advocacy in Newcastle. This takes in both contemporary practices and those that came before them, exploring links between what cycling means, how infrastructure is designed and used, and what kinds of skills people cycling...

Some of the most exciting active travel research is done as part of a PhD, and this is our first Active Travel Podcast to showcase a couple of recent PhD studies.

These two projects, from Dr. Katja Leyendecker and Dr. Emma Mbabazi, use qualitative methods to dig into the how and the why of travel. Katja’s project tackled questions around policy, advocacy, and governance, with a mix of methods from retrospective video diaries to ...

Data in active travel is big news right now, and this is our second in a two-part series discussing some of the latest research in the field.

When a global pandemic required us to avoid public transport and, ideally, cars, making cycling's usefulness for everyday trips even more apparent, transport authorities needed to know quickly where a network of cycle routes might be built. In a country with no historical cycle network, le...

Big data is a big issue right now - and we are perhaps about to realise just how much information Google and Apple have on us. Data is hugely important in understanding how we travel, but while we've been very good at measuring car traffic, how we measure cycling and walking is far more primitive.

David McArthur, at Glasgow University's Urban Big Data Centre, is trying to change that. Using Strava Metro data, and 'spare' CCTV ca...

The Active Travel Academy's (ATA) Dr Rachel Aldred and journalist Laura Laker talk media reporting of active travel, in this two-part pilot episode of the Active Travel Podcast.

First up, your hosts speak to researchers Tara Goddard (Texas A&M University) and Kelcie Ralph (Rutgers University, Alaska), on their paper Does news coverage of traffic crashes affect perceived blame and preferred solutions? Evidence from an exp...