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

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: Slow Cities – Conquering our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability

This book explains a contradiction: the increases in travel speed occurring since the beginning of the 20th Century have failed to save time for urban citizens. This contradiction has been previously identified, in essays by Ivan Illich (1974) and André Gorz (1973). Slow Cities is the first book-length development of the topic. It updates the discussion and frames it alongside a discussion of the negative impacts of fast speed on aspects other than time (e.g., economy, society, environment)

Book review: A handbook for wellbeing policy-making by Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel

In A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making, Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel offer a new guide to wellbeing-driven public policy, focusing on the proposal to replace GDP with wellbeing as the key metric to assess societal progress. With the book comprehensively exploring the theoretical and methodological assumptions and implications of the wellbeing approach, Paulo Anciaes recommends this timely work to practitioners at all levels of government. A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making. Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel. Oxford University Press. 2021

Book review: what is environmental history? by J. Donald Hughes

In the second edition of What is Environmental History?, J. Donald Hughes outlines the development of the study of the relationship between humans and nature across time. In tracing the emergence of the field, Hughes’s work underscores the extent to which environmental history is a necessarily interdisciplinary endeavour covering a wide geographic scope. Paulo Rui Anciaes positions this as a text to be approached as a concise reference work to supplement environmental history research