Professor Rachel Aldred is Director of the Active Travel Academy at Westminster University, which was set up five years ago with support from the Quintin Hogg Trust and now is largely funded by research projects for NIHR, Motability Trust, DfT, TfL and other organisations.

Rachel has spent over fifteen years researching active travel. She has seen and studied important yet still limited changes in London and elsewhere. Walking and cycling remain often marginalised and under-funded, with a history of being overlooked and/or stigmatised continuing to affect planning, policy, and data. Huge austerity-related cuts have negatively affected local authorities’ abilities to make the transformational changes that we need. Even where changes have happened, improvements remain socially and spatially unequal, although we know that active travel can be much more inclusive – in the Netherlands and in Japan, for instance, women are more likely to cycle than men, a very different picture to the UK.

Rachel’s talk will cover how she got interested in the field and what motivated her to pursue it further. Taking as an example the innovative Near Miss Project, she will explore the development of an idea into a research study, and the impacts that such research can have. Rachel will reflect on the changes that she has studied in London’s cycling and walking environments, and what we might expect and hope for in future.