Aspects of active travel

Increasingly, daily activities are carried out further from people’s homes. They drive to out of town shopping centres or to distant destinations for leisure, whilst local activities and facilities are neglected or just not known about. This leads to ever more car dependent lifestyles, while people without cars lose access to services, making them isolated or dependent on people with cars. The negative impacts of this on local economies, quality of life, health, energy consumption and the environment are huge. This edition of > Studies on Mobility and Transport Research< addresses the question of how to encourage people to walk and cycle in urban areas. It highlights the implementation of successful measures and campaigns in different countries and cities and also the importance of and degree to which awareness of active travel has been raised among stakeholders and decision makers. The aim is that walking and cycling should be seen as equal to other modes of transport, requiring an adequate and defined budget. Another purpose of this collection of articles is to point out that the planning and implementation of strategies and measures for active travel modes in cities is a smart step towards energy-efficient, healthy, social and environmentally-friendly development which improves quality of life. It is also important to point out that this approach makes sense for cities all over the world, whether they are old EU member states or new member states or even outside Europe.