ABSTRACT
Before we can establish the details of an action plan for city governors and spatial planners to galvanise change towards low energy travel choices, the effects of our current travel behaviour and the concepts that shape this behaviour must first be understood. The following two chapters deal with these two issues in turn. This chapter summarises the patterns of travel across Europe and offers an account of the trends in travel over the last thirty years. A precursor for producing a more energy efficient transport system is first, to understand the travel choices households and businesses make in response to the perceived options available and, second, to understand the cumulative impacts of these movement patterns on society and its ecosystems. The way the available transport infrastructure is used provides a commentary on not only the convenience and ease of use of that infrastructure in moving around cities but also the way in which infrastructure shapes our selection of where to live and where to shop and how to move between the two. Before reviewing the evidence on travel behaviour from academic and government commentaries and statistics, the chapter first introduces the two concepts of accessibility and mobility, which are central to the analytical frame used to unpack the data. Introducing these two contrasting heuristic analytical tools at this early stage in the discussion will help the later critique of the supply and use of transport infrastructure, and also lay the groundwork for developing a conceptualisation around what ‘sustainable transport’ could mean. These concepts will be developed further in Chapter 3, which compares their use across the policy sectors of transport, land use planning and public health, and discusses the long-term implications of the different conceptions for sustainable travel. The chapter then moves onto explain how transport provision (and demand) has been shaped by wider societal economic, social and environmental objectives. This is followed by a summary of how the EU, as a higher tier of government and potential influence on travel behaviour, has responded to the perceived challenges for transport across Europe. We then move on to gain an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the built environment form and the transport services provided. This is the precursor for an in-depth evaluation of the substantial academic research on this topic in Chapter 3., which should be seen as the springboard for reorienting the reader towards a conceptualisation of sustainable transport that derives its focus from the
principles of exergy, or resource minimisation, and which promotes the delivery of social, economic and environmental objectives through the transport system.
