Area-wide traffic restriction in Lisbon city center: opportunity lost or mistake avoided?

Traffic restriction policies address economic, social, and environmental issues at the local level but may have effects beyond their area of application. Due to social and political opposition, a proposal to restrict all car traffic crossing the Lisbon old city centre ("Baixa") was recently abandoned. This paper assesses the potential effects of this policy in terms of the distribution of noise exposures among populations belonging to different age and qualification groups. The changes in exposures were obtained through the modelling of motorised traffic and noise levels in the pre- and post-policy scenarios. It was assumed that car users react to the policy by seeking alternative routes or shifting to public transport. Under this assumption, the policy would have a modest effect on the reduction of noise exposures in their area of application. In addition, due to the redistribution of traffic, the policy would lead to a wide redistribution of exposuresamong neighbourhoods in other areas of the city, especially in areas with low-qualified populations. If provision is not made for alternatives for the suppressed traffic, this type of policies may have extensive impacts throughout the city and complex trade-offs between the levels of environmental quality of different social groups

Book Review: Visual Pollution: Advertising, Signage and Environmental Quality by Adriana Portella

Visual pollution is the poor cousin of urban environmental research. Often dismissed as a policy issue because it is difficult to measure and depends on people’s tastes, it is also subject to far fewer regulations than more tangible environmental problems such as litter, air pollution, and noise. Nevertheless, books such as Marc Augé’s Non-places (1995) and Naomi’s Klein’s No Logo (2000) have raised awareness to the visual quality of the built environment and inspired the work of researchers and activists. For example, during the 1990s, social movements such as Reclaim the Streets held demonstrations to highlight the factors affecting people’s experience of public spaces. More recently, projects such as the Billboard Liberation Front and Brandalism have used “guerrilla art” to challenge the encroachment of consumer culture on public space

Book Review: What is Environmental History? by J. Donald Hughes

The question that What is Environmental History? asks is answered in its first sentence: environmental history is the study of the mutual relationships of humans and nature through time. More specifically, it delves into three main themes: how the environment shapes human history; how attitudes towards the environment influence human actions; and how these actions bring about environmental changes

Bus travel (Africa)

Bus transport in Africa is usually provided by the informal sector, both in the case of urban and regional or interregional travel. Stated-own formal bus systems operate in some countries but tend to be economically inefficient and have small coverage. However, some cities have started to implement bus rapid transit systems (BRT). In rural areas, the network is sparse and the services are irregular. Some countries have an extensive network of intercity buses. The offer of international bus services is limited. Many roads are in poor condition and the bus fleet tends to be old. Bus travel is usually subject to delays, overcrowding, and safety and security risks

Urban street: challenges and opportunities., in MORE Handbook Chapter 1

Urban streets have multiple uses (for movement and 'place' activities), leading to tensions and conflicts. The allocation of street space also has broader consequences for the lives not only of street users, but also of people who live, work, shop, or visit the surrounding area. In fact, busy urban streets are where many strategic policy issues play out, at the economic, social, and environmental level. Roadspace allocation is not only a technical issue but also a political issue: it requires dialoguing with a wide range of stakeholders. It also depends on the priorities of policy-makers. These have been changing over the years. In many European cities there is now an increased priority to non-motorised modes and on the use of streets as social spaces. The COVID-19 crisis has amplified these challenges and but also the opportunities for more radical allocation of street space in cities

Book Review: Governing Compact Cities: How to Connect Planning, Design and Transport by Philipp Rode

Philipp Rode’s new book, Governing Compact Cities: How to Connect Planning, Design and Transport, looks at the institutional arrangements that enable sustainable cities. It starts with the recognition that in many cases, sustainable cities are also compact cities, characterised by mixed-use neighbourhoods and by transport systems oriented towards public and non-motorised modes of transport. But cities in countries with similar income levels can be at different stages of densification and motorisation. There are sprawling cities in North America and the Gulf region where up to 90 per cent of trips are still made by car, and other cities (mostly in Western Europe) that are re-densifying and where car ownership and use have started to decline. Demographic and social factors alone cannot explain these differences – urban policy and governance must also play a role

Effects of the roadside visual environment on driver wellbeing and behaviour – a systematic review

The view that drivers have from the road can be enjoyable or disturbing, stressful or relaxing, distracting or fatiguing. Road planning guidelines balance aesthetical and safety considerations but are rarely grounded on empirical evidence. This paper reviews evidence on the effects of the roadside visual environment on the wellbeing and behaviour of drivers, focusing on natural and built elements external to the road, i.e. excluding road geometry, design, conditions, and users. Standardized information was extracted from 50 studies. These studies have used experiments involving participants watching videos or driving a simulator or instrumented vehicle, usually with unrepresentative samples (mostly males, young age groups, and students). Most evidence is related to the driving task (e.g. distraction, fatigue), not to wider aspects of driver wellbeing (e.g. stress recovery), and to safety issues, not aesthetical ones. There is increased evidence for monotonous views (linked to fatigue), roadside vegetation (linked mainly to a reduction of stress and risky driving behaviours, but depending on the characteristics of the vegetation) and advertisements (linked to distraction, but depending on advertisement type and other variables). A few studies have looked at other elements of the built environment (memorials, drones, utility poles, wind turbines), with mixed evidence on distraction and safety behaviour. The links between continued exposure to certain types of views and car commuter stress have not been studied. There is little evidence for developing countries or differences by gender, visual impairment, trip purpose, and type of vehicle

A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making [Book Review]

Wellbeing is how happy people feel or how satisfied they are with their life. Achieving wellbeing is the aim of most individuals, so it is fair to argue that the main goal of governments should also be to improve people’s wellbeing. This idea has been around for 300 years but has gained momentum during this century. A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making is the latest in a succession of recent handbooks on wellbeing-driven public policy. Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel’s new work has a similar scope as these other books, but it gives more attention to practical issues in the implementation of wellbeing approaches

Social justice and the gap between potential and realized accessibility

Accessibility is increasingly regarded as an object of social distribution, but the applicability of this premise to public policy depends on the extent to which the indicators of accessibility used actually measure people’s wellbeing. This paper addresses this question by studying social inequalities in the realization of the accessibility potential offered by the places where people live. The hypothesis is that social differences in observed commuting outcomes depend not only on the locations of residences, employment centres, and transport facilities, but also on the daily destinations and travel modes of the population in each neighbourhood. The analysis relates demographic and socio-economic variables with indicators of job accessibility and commuting outcomes, and incorporates aspects that are often neglected in the estimation of commuting time, such as road congestion, walking trips, and public transport schedules, waiting and interchange time. This approach is used to assess the effect of a series of projects that radically expanded the road network in the Lisbon metropolitan area. The results suggest that inequalities are explained by a mix of geographic factors related with transport policy and of household decisions that are the product of wider economic and social forces. These findings have implications in the debate regarding the role of urban policy in addressing social justice