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

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

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

Rethinking the death of the railway in the Portuguese countryside

Two waves of line closures (1988-92 and 2008-12) have left the Portuguese countryside largely deprived of railway services. This paper assesses rail accessibility and potential demand in the areas served by the lines closed. The study contributes to existing literature by taking into account the availability of rail services and public transport access to stations, considering separate types of destinations, trip frequencies and departure times for different population segments. The population potentially served by rail is first mapped at the level of the civil parish and aggregated to rail stations. In a second stage, the effects of providing extra rail connections and bus feeder routes are estimated, identifying the parts of the country and railway network with the highest potential improvements. The findings show that despite low levels of demand in absolute terms, rail services still had the potential for serving a significant part of the population in the areas around some of the lines closed

The transport infrastructure as a barrier to walking

The promotion of the use of non-motorised modes (such as walking and cycling) is a crucial component of strategies to reduce climate change, as these modes have a minimal environmental impact. However, in most cities, large transport infrastructure such as railways and multi-lane roads act as a physical and psychological barrier to the movement of pedestrians and cyclists, a phenomenon known as “barrier effect” or “community severance”. In face of the barriers, people living close to the infrastructure may choose to use private transport rather than walking or cycling, with impacts on local environmental quality and on greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the barrier effect may have negative impacts on the local economy and society. The Street Mobility project at University College London set out to understand the impact of busy roads on pedestrians, using an interdisciplinary approach involving researchers from a variety of backgrounds working together with local communities and other stakeholders. The project started with a 3-month phase consisting of activities for researchers to understand each other’s disciplines and their perspectives on the problem. The main stage of the research was an in-depth study of four case studies in cities in the United Kingdom. The findings from the different teams were triangulated to assess similarities and difference. Overall, the study found that busy roads reduce the levels of walking mobility and accessibility of residents in the surrounding areas and to some extent, also affect their health and wellbeing. A suite of tools is now being developed and will be made available to local authorities and local communities

What do we mean by "community severance"?

This working paper collects definitions of community severance found in academic studies, government guidance documents, and reports produced in several countries. A new definition is proposed, based on the analysis of these definitions and on discussions held as a part of the Street Mobility and Network Accessibility research project

Book Review: Rights of Way to Brasília Teimosa: The Politics of Squatter Settlement by Charles J. Fortin

Now that the FIFA World Cup has started, it will be easy to forget the news of the few past months about police incursions into informal settlements (favelas) in some of the Brazilian cities that organize the event. And in Recife, the capital of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, all eyes will be on the football stadium hosting the matches and not on the favelas that house 23% of the city’s population, the 4th largest percentage in the country. Charles J. Fortin’s book, Rights of Way to Brasília Teimosa is the story of one of these favelas. The first part of the name is an allusion to Brazil’s capital city, but why stubborn? Because the residents have occupied the area and managed to remain there for over 50 years during a period of fast urban growth, escaping the fate of other similar areas where the population was evicted and the houses demolished to make way to upscale housin