Blog

Our blog offers commentary, analysis and insights on the latest urban transport debates from our team of experts, as well as our Director’s regular column for Passenger Transport magazine.

Cyclist

A new era for active travel?

Active travel is entering an exciting phase which is seeing investment on a new scale. However, with the upcoming Spending Review, there is also some nervousness around revenue funding streams and ensuring that we can continue the good progress that’s been made.

Total Transport: totally worth it?

As the nation awaited the announcement of the next Prime Minister this week, the Department for Transport (DfT) – quietly and without fanfare – released its review of the 37 Total Transport pilot projects which begun in 2015. The information on which the review is based was collected back in April 2017 and - reportedly by popular demand - the findings have now been made public.

We know the pledges – but what’s the plan?

Climate change is the challenge of the century, both in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the worst effects of the continuum we are already on. We all kind of knew that. But the implications were just too hard to face.

How can we support towns like Batley?

There are so many policy reports on transport and cities you could stack them up as high as the Beetham Tower. However, the pile of reports on transport and towns would struggle to get higher than the front step.
Housing roundtable

When transport met housing...

Yesterday we held a roundtable in parliament chaired (at different stages) by both the Chair of the House of Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee , Clive Betts MP, and his counterpart at the Transport Select Committee, Lilian Greenwood MP.
Glider BRT

Northern Ireland is getting ahead

Of the four main constituent parts of the UK, only one of them saw bus use grow last year. It is the same one on track to having a smart and fully unified ticketing system across all forms of public transport, and which has also seen the use of its rail network double in 10 years. That’s Northern Ireland, where after decades of being sidelined as car dependency took hold, public transport is back.

Five takeaways from Health in All Policies 2019

Prevention is better than cure’ is a truth universally acknowledged and one that has recently taken centre stage in UK health policymaking. The extent to which we can prevent poor health depends on influencing the wider determinants of health and wellbeing, neatly summarised here…
Health in all policies

Health in All Policies - the transport connection

A few quick reflections on the thought provoking Health in All Policies conference we were a sponsor of on Wednesday and which our AD Rebecca Fuller spoke at (as part of our long term aim of getting better coordination across the health and transport sectors)  - shamefully, health inequalities in this country are getting worse... 
Bus passenger

What do we really feel about the bus?

Most of the discourse on buses treats people as if they know what they are doing. It assumes that travellers are constantly making fully conscious rational economic trade-offs between cost and journey times and then making the logical choice as a result.