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Over the last decade or so, transport has become a concern for
health policy makers as well as city planners (Cavill, Rutter, & Hill,
2007; Pucher, Dill, & Handy, 2010). Increasing alarm about the
threat of an ‘obesity epidemic’, resulting in part from increasingly
sedentary lifestyles in urban settings in high-income countries, has
focused attention on the potential of ‘active transport’ as one
method for improving the physical and mental health of the population
(Frank, Andresen, & Schmid, 2004; Hamer & Chida, 2008).
‘Active transport’ includes modes such as cycling and walking,
which involve the traveller using their own energy to move from
one place to another. Internationally, there are large variations in
the use of ‘active travel’ modes with, for instance, cycling now being
an unremarkable transport choice in European cities in Denmark,
Germany and the Netherlands, but a relatively rare one in many
Australian and North American cities (Pucher & Buehler, 2008).
In the UK, recent decades have seen a decline in the proportion of
people cycling regularly (Department for Transport, 2006b; Pooley
& Turnbull, 2000), to levels similar to those of North America and
Australia (Pucher & Buehler, 2008). Although data on cycling rates
are contentious, with difficulties in agreeing on how to count both
numbers of regular cyclists and individual journeys (Parkin, Ryley,
& Jones, 2007), what is clear is that, despite national policy
support for active transport (Department for Transport, 2007;
House of Commons Health Committee, 2004) there has been
little recent change in cycling rates, with around 2% of trips made
by bicycle (Department for Transport, 2010). London, the setting of
this case study, has a rather different transport system from other
parts of the UK, with a well developed public transport infrastructure
and local policies that set ambitious targets for increasing
cycling levels (Transport for London, 2004). Rates of cycling
increased following the introduction of a congestion charge for cars
in 2003 and the bombings on the public transport network in July
2005, but remain low (Transport for London, 2009b), with around
2% of London’s residents cycling on any given day (Table 1).