World Car Free Day - Ways to get more of us out of our cars

22 September 2009

Oxford University's Transport Studies Unit is staging an event to reclaim a street for people to mark World Car Free Day on 22 September. Traffic will be diverted for most of the day from Little Clarendon Street in Oxford to make way for an installation of a 'living room and reading space'. In the long term Oxford University researchers are also engaged in a three year project to find ways of encouraging more of us to cycle and walk by 2030.

Lara Scott, Outreach Officer from the Transport Studies Unit at Oxford University, said: 'The important message is not that the street is closed to cars tomorrow, but that the area is open to people. We hope children will come to the installation to read and play and city life will take on a slightly different quality for a few hours.'

Dr Moshe Givoni, a senior researcher at the Transport Studies Unit, is currently engaged in a funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) to envisage ways of encouraging more people to walk and cycle in UK cities by 2030. In the project, led by Leeds University in collaboration with researchers from Oxford's TSU, they are examining the obstacles that are preventing people from walking and cycling in Britain so they can develop visions to promote long term change.

Using 3D computer visualisations of certain parts of a generic city, they look at how different strategies might change in each of the future visions, and what effects they will have on the appearance of urban areas, the nature of society in 2030 and how the transport system will operate.

 Practices they envisage include:
- stricter land use policy to prevent sprawl and keep community facilities closer to home.
 - improved road safety with streets being classified into 'fast' or 'slow' routes.
- improved public transport i.e. more reliable, more comfortable
- legislation which favours non-motorised road users.
- local authorities required to implement a 'core network' of cycling paths
- more quality public spaces for gathering and socialising
- electronic navigation for people who need additional support e.g. electric bikes
- better car design to reduce speed and carbon emissions.

Dr Moshe Givoni said: ' We have developed visions which show that by incorporating steps that reduce car travel and increase the use of public transport and walking and cycling, the city is a much more civilised place to live and work. For instance, some of these suggested modes are more sociable and reduce the sense of isolation. Road safety would also be signicantly improved. This is not pie in the sky - we know that cycling and walking has been in decline compared to a few decades ago. We want to encourage those modes again to create cities where we have cleaner air through reduced carbon emissions and we also have a healthier, fitter population.'

To date the research has focussed on developing a set of three alternative and distinct visions for 2030. These are not intended at this stage to be definitive, rather the aim is to use these in the next stages of the project where they will discuss with different groups of the public aspirations for walking and cycling to 2030 and use the initial visions as a prompt for those discussions.

Dr Moshe Givoni will be available for media interviews on the research 'Visions of the Role of Walking and Cycling in 2030'.
Lara Scott - Outreach Officer for Transport Studies Unit - will be available to talk about the Living Room installation in Oxford on 079268 06698.

For more information or the paper, please contact the University of Oxford Press Office on 01865 280534 or email press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk