CATCH (Carbon-Aware Travel Choice in the City, Region and World of Tomorrow): D1.3 Monitoring and evaluation report

The CATCH project was a three year project to address a gap in awareness of urban transport Greenhouse Gases (GHG). The project‟s mission is “to become the natural place to look for mobility related GHG reduction advice and information”. This has been pursued by building an internet-based resource “Knowledge Engine” which engages, informs and stimulates stakeholders at different levels to tackle transport related emissions in their urban centres. The CATCH platform provides objective, comprehensive and timely information to facilitate stakeholders to identify policies to reduce GHG from urban mobility, and empower them in making informed, innovative, and effective change.This report details work done in task 1.4 (T1.4), Monitoring and Evaluation. There were three main objectives for this task: To evaluate the success of the platform design in terms of objectives (and specifically in increasing awareness on transport CO2); To establish a connection between the grounding work of D1.11 and D1.22 and the platform design of the final product; To examine the effect of the platform design on awareness of transport CO2 and motivation or intention to lower transport CO2 emissions

Walking to school in Scotland: Do perceptions of neighbourhood quality matter?

ABSTRACT: A decrease in active travel has been observed over the past years in many Western countries including Scotland. A large part of this is likely due to the greater travel distances. However, previous research has suggested that perceptions of one's neighbourhood may also affect walking levels. If parents fear crime or traffic levels, or feel that their neighbourhood is of low quality they may not let their child walk. These perceptions are subjective and may be interlinked to each other. It is important to understand which perceptions matter more than others, in order to design the most suitable policy to promote more active travel behaviour among children. Using the Scottish Household Survey, this study investigates how or whether 48 different perceptions of neighbourhood quality or 11 reasons for having chosen their house affect children walking to school. A variable attrition method was used to reduce the number of variables for modelling. When walking distance, household characteristics, and built environment are included in a binary regression model only two perceptions were found to be significant: good local shops and slow/safe traffic. Implications of the findings are discussed

Collection time inequalities: fetching water in Ethiopia

In 2015, WHO and UNICEF reported that only 12% of Ethiopia’s population have access to water on premises. High proportion of the population thus needs to fetch water for their survival. Considering the importance of time to fetch water on an individual’s health and well-being, we aim to demonstrate where water fetching issues are the most prevalent. This study highlights the widespread burden of fetching water and the significant disparities in terms of accessibility with regards to the location of the source within population groups. Characterization of collection time by regions, type of source, education level and water fetcher illustrated where work mostly remains to reach universal access to drinking water

Walking to school in Scotland: Do perceptions of neighbourhood quality matter?

ABSTRACT: A decrease in active travel has been observed over the past years in many Western countries including Scotland. A large part of this is likely due to the greater travel distances. However, previous research has suggested that perceptions of one's neighbourhood may also affect walking levels. If parents fear crime or traffic levels, or feel that their neighbourhood is of low quality they may not let their child walk. These perceptions are subjective and may be interlinked to each other. It is important to understand which perceptions matter more than others, in order to design the most suitable policy to promote more active travel behaviour among children. Using the Scottish Household Survey, this study investigates how or whether 48 different perceptions of neighbourhood quality or 11 reasons for having chosen their house affect children walking to school. A variable attrition method was used to reduce the number of variables for modelling. When walking distance, household characteristics, and built environment are included in a binary regression model only two perceptions were found to be significant: good local shops and slow/safe traffic. Implications of the findings are discussed

Revisiting MDGs in view of accessibility with particular attention to distance: examples in Eastern Africa

Data from WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation show that 91% of the worldwide population have access to an improved source of water in 2015. However, this indicator does not reflect the definition of water access considering distance to the source. This is an important factor to take into account considering that 42.5% of the world population don’t have access to water on their premises in 2015. This study examined accessibility data from the JMP by taking distance into account for 5 Eastern African countries. As reported by JMP, 72,6% of these countries population have access to an improved water source while our analysis revealed that this figure falls to 58,5 % when considering distance in the access criterion. To achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all, as desired in the new Sustainable Development Goals, this impact must be considered to ensure reasonable access to water

Active travel by built environment and lifecycle stage: Case study of Osaka metropolitan area

Active travel can contribute to physical activity achieved over a day. Previous studies have examined active travel associated with trips in various western countries, but few studies have examined this question for the Asian context. Japan has high levels of cycling, walking and public transport, similar to The Netherlands. Most studies have focused either on children or on adults separately, however, having children in a household will change the travel needs and wants of that household. Thus, here a household lifecycle stage approach is applied. Further, unlike many previous studies, the active travel related to public transport is included. Lastly, further to examining whether the built environment has an influence on the accumulation of active travel minutes, a binary logistic regression examines the built environment's influence on the World Health Organization's recommendations of physical activity. The findings suggest that there is a clear distinction between the urbanized centers and the surrounding towns and unurbanized areas. Further, active travel related to public transport trips is larger than pure walking trips. Females and children are more likely to achieve the WHO recommendations. Finally, car ownership is a strong negative influence

A review of cost–benefit analysis and multicriteria decision analysis from the perspective of sustainable transport in project evaluation

Transport decision processes have traditionally applied cost-benefit analysis (CBA) with benefits mainly relating to time savings, and costs relating to infrastructure and maintenance costs. However, a shift toward more sustainable practices was initiated over the last decades to remedy the many negative impacts of automobility. As a result, decision processes related to transport projects have become more complex due to the multidimensional aspects and to the variety of stakeholders involved, often with conflicting points of view. To support rigorous decision making, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is, in addition to CBA, often used by governments and cities. However, there is still no consensus in the transport field regarding a preferred method that can integrate sustainability principles. This paper presents a descriptive literature review related to MCDA and CBA in the field of transport. Among the 66 considered papers, we identified the perceived strengths and weaknesses of CBA and MCDA, the different ways to combine them and the ability of each method to support sustainable transport decision processes. We further analysed the results based on four types of rationality (objectivist, conformist, adjustive and reflexive). Our results show that both methods can help improve the decision processes and that, depending on the rationality adopted, the perceived strengths and weaknesses of MCDA and CBA can vary. Nonetheless, we observe that by adopting a more global and holistic perspective and by facilitating the inclusion of a participative process, MCDA, or a combination of both methods, emerge as the more promising appraisal methods for sustainable transport

A framework for post-project evaluation of multicriteria decision aiding processes from the stakeholders’ perspective : design and application

Numerous multicriteria decision aiding (MCDA) methods have been developed over the last decades and are now applied in various domains, sometimes using facilitated group workshops to create models. These models are all designed to improve decision processes. However, the lack of follow-up and post-project evaluations limit the understanding of how the participants experienced the group workshops and how the results were subsequently used within the organization. This is in contrast with the public participation research field, where a rich literature was developed for a posteriori evaluation of projects. Based on this literature, our research proposes a framework to evaluate, ex-post, MCDA projects. In order to illustrate this framework, we apply it to an MCDA project in Quebec City where a spatial decision support system to prioritize the redesign of streets as Complete Streets was built. Individual interviews were conducted with the Quebec City professionals that currently use, were leaders of the project, or have participated in the development of the decision support system. This research has identified that the need for change of practices within the workplace, communication problems, and the requirement for multidisciplinary work were at the root of the various challenges encountered during the workshops. Based on our experience, we propose some lessons learned and potential solutions that can enhance the body of literature in MCDA

International origins of walking school buses and child fatalities in Japan and Canada

The concept of a Walking School Bus (WSB) has existed in Japan for over half a century, but is a relatively new concept in Anglo-Saxon countries, tracing its origins to the early 1990s. In Anglo-Saxon countries the WSB is seen as a safe means of addressing the negative impacts of increased school trips by car. Recently in Japan, a discussion as to the value and appropriateness of the shuudantogeko (the Japanese WSB) has emerged as some suggest that it could reduce safety. This paper introduces and compares the two WSB systems, and then uses traffic fatality data from Canada and Japan to compare travel-to-school in an open choice system with a country where WSB is common practice