Urban transport decarbonisation and public-health goals increasingly depend on interventions that reshape everyday space, such as reallocating road space from cars to walking, cycling, and public transport, reducing parking supply, creating low-traffic neighbourhoods, or pedestrianising streets. Across Europe, many such Built Environment-based Sustainable Travel Interventions(BESTIs) have delivered measurable benefits. Yet, they also provoke a recurring political and social dilemma: while citizens often express broad support for climate action in the abstract, specific spatial changes can trigger intense, emotionally charged opposition that is sometimes amplified through media and organised networks. This tension, the gap between diffuse support and concentrated backlash creates uncertainty for public authorities, slows implementation, and can threaten the durability of policies central to meeting climate and health targets.
ATRAPA is motivated by the need to explain this phenomenon to benefit both scientific progress and policy practice. The project’s overall objective is to develop a robust, comparative account of why BESTIs are accepted in some contexts and contested in others, and what forms that contestation takes: attitudinal, narrative, and electoral. ATRAPA aims to move beyond anecdotal accounts of “mobility wars” by building a systematic evidence base that captures the nature and intensity of urban transformations through GIS-based change detection, resident perceptions and trade-offs through behavioural surveys, media framing and the amplification of controversy through media analysis, and the relationship between these dynamics and political outcomes via quasi-experimental analysis.
The expected impact of this research is twofold. Scientifically, seeks to advance knowledge on policy acceptability, behavioural change, and political feedback in the domain of urban mobility transitions, where material changes to streets make acceptance particularly salient and contestation particularly visible. Societally and institutionally, it aims to support more effective, equitable, and durable urban transitions by clarifying which concerns reflect genuine hardship or distributional inequities, which reflect conflicts over values and identity, and which are products of narrative amplification. This is intended to help cities design interventions and engagement strategies that are both ambitious and politically sustainable, reducing implementation risk while improving public legitimacy.
ATRAPA integrates perspectives and methods from political science, sociology, human geography, planning, and behavioural research to interpret conflicts over space as social and political processes rather than merely technical disputes. By combining these lenses, and by understanding that backlash is a question of political trust, fairness perceptions, identity, and the cultural meanings attached to mobility the project generates insights that are transferable across cities, contributing to European debates on the governance of just, democratic, and resilient urban transitions.
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