‘Social movement could drive policy change’

POLICY

A new social movement may be needed to put transport policy and travel behaviour on a more environmentally-friendly trajectory, according to academics. 

The suggestion features in a new paper by two academics at the University of the West of England’s Bristol Business School: Adrian Davis, a specialist in transport and health, and Alan Tapp, a professor of marketing.

Davis and Tapp say that attempts by public authorities to persuade people to reduce car use are constantly being undermined by policies to improve roads and support car-based activity patterns. 

“Individual travel behaviour change is significantly less open to behavioural free will than many other behaviour changes such as, for example, breast feeding, condom use, or recycling,” they say. “For each of these, the individual can progress without any or with little state involvement or support. 

“But for travel behaviour change, the highway and its surrounding environment and related spatial planning (i.e. distances to facilities and services) have the most profound influence on whether people choose to use other modes of transport rather than the car.

“If a local town grants planning permission to a superstore on a ring road, the consequences of that grant extend to a running down of local amenities, a demand for car parking near the store, a hostile environment for cycling and walking, and an inevitable increase in car use.” 

They suggest that a new social movement may be needed to bring about major behavioural change. “A social movement around transport policy might require an initiation or trigger ‘event’ of some sort. 

“An extended period of recent cold, still weather in London that led to an outbreak of extremely high levels of air pollution is an example of such an event. Another might be local protests to the building of roads through an area of outstanding natural beauty... Such an event might trigger the next phase of a movement – a sense of injustice.”

Transport campaigners could benefit from forming partnerships with other campaigns that have a common interest in changing the same set of societal values. “Transport policy campaigners could partner with, say, the ‘Slow Food’ movement. Strategies such as this would also have the advantage of being positively framed (dreams, visions) rather than negatively framed (policies to prevent car use).” 

The paper, ‘The UK transport policy menu: roads, roads, and a dash of multimodalism’, appears in the journal Social Business.