ABSTRACT

BackgroundAchieving health benefits while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport offers a potential policy win-win; the magnitude of potential benefits, however, is likely to vary. This study uses an Integrated Transport and Health Impact Modelling tool (ITHIM) to evaluate the health and environmental impacts of high walking and cycling transport scenarios for English and Welsh urban areas outside London.MethodsThree scenarios with increased walking and cycling and lower car use were generated based upon the Visions 2030 Walking and Cycling project. Changes to carbon dioxide emissions were estimated by environmental modelling. Health impact assessment modelling was used to estimate changes in Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) resulting from changes in exposure to air pollution, road traffic injury risk, and physical activity. We compare the findings of the model with results generated using the World Health Organization's Health Economic Assessment of Transport (HEAT) tools.ResultsThis study found considerable reductions in disease burden under all three scenarios, with the largest health benefits attributed to reductions in ischemic heart disease. The pathways that produced the largest benefits were, in order, physical activity, road traffic injuries, and air pollution. The choice of dose response relationship for physical activity had a large impact on the size of the benefits. Modelling the impact on all-cause mortality rather than through individual diseases suggested larger benefits. Using the best available evidence we found fewer road traffic injuries for all scenarios compared with baseline but alternative assumptions suggested potential increases.ConclusionsMethods to estimate the health impacts from transport related physical activity and injury risk are in their infancy; this study has demonstrated an integration of transport and health impact modelling approaches. The findings add to the case for a move from car transport to walking and cycling, and have implications for empirical and modelling research.

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Certain developed countries have experienced the 'peak car' phenomenon. While this remains to be confirmed longitudinally, it looks certain that future mobility in Europe and elsewhere will be shaped by a particular technological development: driverless or autonomous transport. The 'autonomous car' ignites the imagination, yet the research and debate on this topic largely focus on the 'autonomous' and not adequately on the 'car' element. Like any new technological development, autonomous transport presents ample opportunities to better our mobility system, but similarly it carries risks and can lead into a future mobility that exacerbates, rather than relieves, current deficiencies of our mobility systems, including its high carbon and high cost characteristics. Now it is high time to explore these, before we lock ourselves into the autonomous car future. Using Low Carbon Mobility (LCM) as a guiding framework to assess mobility patterns and based on an extensive literature review, this paper aims to explore where there is a gap between the likely and desirable outcomes when developing the autonomous car and suggest how we might reduce it. Moreover, enhancing on global empirical evidence and forecasts about the opportunities and threats emerging from ICT deployment in transport and initial evidence on the development of the autonomous car, the paper concludes that a desirable outcome will only come if technological development will be accompanied by a social change. A change where public and sharing will be seen as superior to private and individual transport, could make the autonomous car a blessing.

a b s t r a c tThis paper analyses whether the current provision of air services in Europe is impacted by high-speed rail (HSR). An ex-post analysis is carried out considering 161 routes EU-wide using transnational data. We use censored regressions with special attention paid to the presence of outliers in the sample and to the potential problem of non-normality of error terms. It is found that shorter HSR travel times involve less air services, with similar impact on both airline seats and flights. This impact quickly drops between 2.0-and 2.5-h HSR travel time. The impact of HSR frequencies is much more limited. Hubbing strategies led by the airlines have the opposite effect from HSR, as hubs involve more air services. Airline/ HSR integration at the airport and cities being served by both central and peripheral stations have no significant impact. Metropolitan and national spatial patterns may help to better understand intermodal effects.