Planning

When Is Too Much Accessibility A Bad Thing?

Increasing 'accessibility' (the ease and potential with which people can reach opportunities) instead of mobility has become a core objective in many transport strategies. This research asked whether providing too much accessibility has a downside.

Key Takeaways

• Almost always, higher levels of accessibility are implicitly assumed to be better.
• Higher levels of accessibility can result in increases in motorised travel.
• In thinking about the potential negative sides of higher accessibility, we need to first distinguish between the different approaches to providing it: through speed versus through proximity.
  • accessibility by speed approach, in which the improvements to available opportunities are primarily provided through the transport system by speeding up traffic and facilitating ease of moving.
  • accessibility by proximity has provided an alternative provisioning approach with a greater focus on the land use system, with concepts such as transit-oriented development, the compact city, and the 15-minute city.
• Potential disadvantages from increased accessibility:

Comment

This paper provides some welcome thinking around accessibility beyond simply more accessibility good, less accessibility bad.

However, as the paper admits, there is a lot more work to be done across multiple disciplines to really understand this issue.

The paper misses a significant potential disadvantage of increasing accessibility: the opportunity cost of investing in accessibility when the money could be spent on something else. Accessibility is likely to suffer from what economists call diminishing returns.

I also think that we need to be careful in identifying what is really a potential disadvantage from accessibility.

If one group benefits from significantly improved accessibility, I question whether the disparity is caused by the improvement of accessibility or just the delay in improving accessibility for other groups. After all, we don't restrict one group from benefitting from a medicine on the basis that it might create disparities. Instead, we look for ways to make the medicine available to everyone.

What Next?

Are you targeting improved accessibility? If so, how are you prioritising how to improve accessibility and where to improve it?

Cycling

Why Most Cycling Campaigns Don't Work (And What Does)

How effective are different interventions to increase cycling? This research reviewed the evidence.

Key Takeaways

• A rule-based classification framework is used to compare outcomes across different study designs and measures, assessing interventions by type, cost, and behavioural mechanisms, and the direction, strength, and confidence of observed cycling outcomes.
• Evidence regarding the effectiveness of interventions is mixed. While some studies report positive effects, many appear to show limited or no measurable change in cycling behaviour, even where intermediate outcomes improve.
• Structural interventions such as bike paths and street redesign often increase cycling on specific routes but do not consistently lead to population-level change, suggesting that some observed increases reflect redistribution of existing cyclists rather than new cycling uptake.
• Behavioural interventions such as campaigns and training programs frequently improve knowledge, confidence, or skills, but do not reliably translate into sustained cycling behaviour on their own.
• Resource and incentive interventions such as e-bike access, subsidies, and bike share schemes are most consistently associated with increases in cycling, particularly where they improve practical access to cycling.
• A small number of studies report changes in perceived safety, convenience, or cycling conditions without corresponding changes in cycling behaviour.
• Other behavioural mechanisms, including motivation, habit formation, and social influence, appear to reinforce change rather than drive it independently.
• Modest effects are commonly associated with multi-component interventions combining structural and behavioural elements, including area-wide programmes, infrastructure expansion, and national or local campaigns.
• Increasing cycling depends less on influencing decision-making alone and more on changing the conditions that make cycling possible.
• The study highlights the importance of aligning intervention design with the behavioural mechanisms most likely to support cycling uptake.

Comment

The study shows how hard it is to increase cycling.

Although the resource and incentives interventions look promising, they have often been at a small scale and so more work is needed on whether they successfully scale up.

What Next?

How does this study impact what you are doing to increase cycling rates?

Road Safety

Safe System's Implementation Problem

Vision Zero, Safe System and Sustainable Safety are common and widely recommended approaches to road safety, but how effectively are they implemented? This study reviewed the research.

Key Takeaways

• Governments that have formally implemented the Safe System have relatively low levels of implementation, due to implementation barriers and operationalisation challenges.
• It is not necessarily clearly defined what Vision Zero/Safe System is in practice, and the concept must be interpreted and translated by those who will implement it.
• There are as many versions of Vision Zero or Safe Systems as there are countries or places that implement these, because such visions and systems always have to be adapted to the reality in which they are implemented.
• Those working with road safety need to clarify the purpose of the Safe System concept to ensure that it is successfully integrated into public policy.
• Current road safety policies do not fully realise the potential improvements that Safe System can provide, because the principles are not followed to a sufficient extent.
• There are different views on how individual responsibility versus system responsibility (a core part of the Safe System approach) is actually weighted in practice.
• A major challenge is to facilitate actual Safe System implementation by mapping barriers/facilitators, and defining actions to realise the full potential.
• Studies point to various factors that inhibit implementation, for example at the political level, administrative level, cultural level, technological level, infrastructure, etc.
• We need more knowledge of measures that can enhance the implementation of the Safe System, i.e. measures that can be used to weaken factors that prevent implementation.

Comment

As with much of transport policy, it is in the implementation where we really struggle.

In particular, in many places, we still have a long way to go in gaining the support of both transport professionals and the community for the Safe System approach and principles.

What Next?

Have you mapped barriers to Safe System implementation and identified actions to overcome them?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Road User Charging: An Old Cost Made More Fair and Visible - A podcast interview with a former minister who was trying to get road user charging taken forward.
• ​Driving Automation in Australia - An interview on the Changing Lanes blog discussing what Australia is getting right and wrong about driving automation.
• ​In European Shared Mobility, E-Bikes Have Emerged as the Winner, While E-Scooters May Never Make a Comeback - a LinkedIn article arguing that shared scooters could be on their way out, whilst e-bikes go from strength to strength.

Tool

The Global Designing Cities Initiative has published a new guide on "How to Implement Cycling Infrastructure."