The active travel backlash paradox: opposition and acceptability determinants of built environment-based sustainable travel interventions

Transport policy is a contentious issue.

In recent years, ambitious proposals aiming at reducing car use and creating a more sustainable, equitable, and healthy transportation system have been met with strong opposition movements. However, little is known about the factors and nature of these opposition movements.

At the same time, mayors, and elected leaders worldwide, who have pushed for ambitious built environment-based travel demand policies, have later been vindicated by major re-election wins.

This would suggest the existence of an “active travel backlash paradox”, one where loud opposition movements might be concealing substantial silent support towards measures that aim to transform the built environment, in order to make it more walkable and cyclable.

Validating the existence of this paradox, and expanding our understanding of opposition and acceptability factors towards built environment-based sustainable travel interventions, has major implications both locally and globally.

To this end, the ATRAPA project sets out to (1) test the existence of the paradox and (2) to further our understanding of opposition and acceptability towards built environment travel demand interventions. To do so I will use a multi-scale, multi-method design to be applied in eight leading European cities.

Thanks to highly disaggregated spatial election data and geolocated information on land-use transformations, I will be able to assess the associations between voting behaviour and built environment-based sustainable travel interventions.

In parallel, I will use an international public opinion survey and interviews with experts to understand, the socioeconomic, individual, and contextual factors behind acceptability/opposition levels.

This will assist in understanding their causes, and their spatial and social distribution, and permit exploration of much-needed future least-opposition pathways towards efficient and widely-accepted sustainable transport policies.