Research paper

Children’s well-being and health, the quality of the environments they are brought up in and the impact of a range of social and technological developments in the lives of children has been the subject of much research, public concern and debate. This report presents new research on one factor that is affected by (and affects) these issues – children’s independent mobility. This can bedefined as ‘the freedom of children to travel around their own neighbourhood or city without adult supervision’ (Tranter and Whitelegg, 1994).

This manual takes stock of common car parking treatments and reviews how successful they are in providing adequate levels of safe parking within a high quality environment. Here the introduction briefly reviews recent studies into demand, allocation and parking efficiency as a starting point for designers. It also touches on innovation, including mechanical systems, homezones and the use of travel plans such as car clubs.

Junctions are places of interaction and hence conflict for all road users. Two thirds of all collisions in built up areas occur at junctions, with pedestrians and cyclists being most at risk. The aim of the research is to investigate the attitudes to change, and likely behaviour at junctions, of all types of road users, were a general and unambiguous duty to ‘give way on turning’ to be introduced in the UK context. Q-methodology was used because it is good at capturing and describing divergent views and also consensus.

City administrations across Europe and beyond have made real progress in planning and providing for cycling in their cities. Support both for cycling measures and this book has come from the European Commission. Their support has been most valuable, but this was not the start of their involvement. In 1999, the then European Environment Commissioner, Ritt Bjerregard wrote the following foreword to their publication ‘Cycling: The way ahead for towns and cities’:

Background: Despite the well-recognised benefit for individuals and communities of increased active travel, cycling remains a minority travel mode in many high income countries. Fear of injury is often cited as a reason. Campaigns to promote cycle helmet wear are alleged to contribute to this. However, there is little information on whether head injuries to cyclists are an important cause of death in road travel fatalities, compared with other road users.

The potential of bicycle and pedestrian travel in the city has been underestimated in past decades and, as a result, there has been some deterioration of facilities and public space availability for these road users. However, in recent years the value of these transport modes has gained recognition and is being prioritised much more highly in cities’ mobility policies.

This paper analyses Active People Survey data (collected 2011/12 to 2015/16) on 789,196 English adults, providing new information on how a range of socio-demographic factors are associated with utility and leisure cycling. Substantial inequalities are found in relation to gender, age, disability, and ethnicity for both types of cycling. For gender and age, and perhaps for disability in relation to recreational cycling, inequalities are moderated by local cycling prevalence such that English authorities with more cycling see less inequality.

Urban utility cycling is being promoted widely due to various health, social, economic and environmental benefits. This study seeks to identify and rank which munic- ipal-level policies and other factors are most influential in increasing cycling as a means of everyday transport and improving the real and perceived cycling safety in car-oriented urban centres. This is achieved by identifying the key factors thought to influence cycle use and by establishing a hierarchy of effectiveness of municipal cycling policies.

This thesis focuses on the question of how the road environment (road design and network characteristics) affects road safety for cyclists through effects on risk and exposure to risk. In this thesis, the term ‘road design’ is used to denote the location level (e.g. intersection design) while the term ‘network characteristics’ is used in relation to the network level (e.g. the presence of a road hierarchy and road classification). Road design plays a role in cyclists’ crash and injury risk. Network characteristics affect mode and route choice (Heinen et al.

The objective of this research report is to support the development of the forthcoming Cycle Safety Action Plan being prepared by Transport for London to be published in 2014. TfL wished to improve the understanding of the factors which lead to collisions involving fatally injured cyclists and those with life-changing injuries. The research focussed on an in-depth analysis of collisions that occurred between 2007 – 2011 when there were 79 fatal and life threatening collisions involving cyclists of which 53 were available for analysis.