Project description
Shifting gears in urban transport policy
In the realm of transport policy, ambitious proposals to reduce car usage and foster sustainable transportation encounter fierce opposition. Despite the potential benefits for health and the environment, efforts to transform urban landscapes face significant resistance. This discrepancy, known as the ‘active travel backlash paradox’, highlights a gap in understanding between vocal dissent and underlying public sentiment. In this context, the ERC-funded ATRAPA project aims to unravel this paradox. Working across eight European cities, the project uses diverse methods, from spatial election analysis to international surveys and expert interviews. By probing factors behind opposition and acceptance of built environment-based travel interventions, ATRAPA paves the way for sustainable transport policies.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Spain