News
13/12/2017

Integrating health in transport: Handbook of good practice for walking and cycling promotion & policy recommendations

These days we Europeans are moving less, and not surprisingly it comesat a great cost to our health and the public purse. But building in those 20 minutes of recommended physical activity every day isn’t always easy. One way to change this would be to make physical activity part of our daily routine. This is where the PASTA project comes in.

The EU-funded project PASTA - Physical Activity Through SustainableTransport Approaches - aimed to connect transport and health by promoting active mobility in cities (i.e. walking and cycling) including in combination with public transport use) as an innovative way of integrating physical activity into our everyday lives.

PASTA Handbook of good practice case studies for promotion of walking and cycling

There exist numerous handbooks and good practice collections which illustrate success stories from cities all over the world which have become leaders in active mobility promotion and public space design for people. They provide excellent recommendations to planners and urban designers about how to create healthy places through active mobility, and build more inclusive communities for walking and cycling.

The PASTA Handbook of good practice case studies for promotion of walking and cycling is a handy 28 pages PDF document released in November 2017 by PASTA project. The innovation of the PASTA Handbook lies in its original approach for identifying successful measures across the transport planning and public health domains that had a health dimension embedded.

The compendium comprises a selection of 8 best practice examples, two for each of these four domains:

  • Strategic policy,
  • Social environment,
  • Physical environment and infrastructure,
  • Regulation and legislation.

Overall 8 good practices are described in case studies. These good practices have specific characteristics of active mobility measures that can effectively support decision makers in a greater uptake of innovative approaches to promote walking and cycling in daily life. By this approach PASTA looks at a larger spectrum on different intervention levels beyond traditional sectors of urban and transport planning and health promotion.

Best practice measures were selected for their characteristics:

  • Innovation aspects,
  • Potential for enhancing physical activity and promote active mobility,
  • Cross-sectoral and institutional cooperation,
  • They bring added value and meet new challenges.

Each selected measure has been identified and described with respect not only to the implementation aspects but through an analytical description of the institutional infrastructure and policy environment in which action and the development of the good practice could take place, providing most useful practical information which constitutes the added value of such a search in PASTA.

Good practices are described for an expert audience of practitioners and decision makers working in transport and health. The compendium also comprises a list of existing resources, tools and compilations of good practices for practitioners which are available online.

Download

The PASTA Handbook of good practice case studies for promotion of walking and cycling can be found here.

For more information about PASTA project - Physical activity through sustainable transport modes, please visit the project website.