Street mobility and accessibility: developing tools for overcoming older people's barriers to walking

Walking (or cycling) around an area helps people to keep physically active in their daily life, reducing the risks of obesity and depression. Streets that are pleasant to walk along also provide opportunities for people to meet and chat with friends and acquaintances. This both enhances the quality of life and is good for health.

Busy roads can deter people from going outside their home to socialise, walk or cycle because of noise or fear of injury. This can also lead to people deciding to avoid making trips, particularly if the alternative to crossing a busy road (e.g. an underpass) increases distances or is considered inaccessible, unsafe or unpleasant. People living on streets with heavy traffic know fewer neighbours and have fewer local friends than people living on streets with less traffic; people with fewer social contacts have worse physical and mental health and die younger. When people do not even try to cross roads because of traffic, they often cannot reach shops, health facilities, services, friends or family easily. This is called community severance (CS).

All these effects are worse in older and other vulnerable groups, for whom mobility and social ties are fundamental to good health. This severance increases social inequalities and exclusion, leading to various economic and social costs. CS probably affects people's physical and mental health and wellbeing too, but this has not been studied very much. Studying health effects of community severance is challenging, as there are no agreed measurement methods that can be used easily and because this is a complex subject, crossing several areas of expertise.

We will first study two residential areas to develop an in-depth understanding and measure of CS. We will ask local residents what is important to them. We will observe what happens in practice when older people try to walk around their neighbourhood. We will consider all this information in the context of the whole area, the levels and composition of road traffic and the way streets connect to each other. We will use the information we collect to develop ways to measure CS in three ways: (i) questions to individuals to assess the effects on them, (ii) how they value these impacts, and (iii) a measuring tool to estimate the extent of community severance due to particular types of roads or road layouts. We will then test these tools in two different residential areas.

The main methods we will use are: community engagement, to explore perceptions and measures of CS and potential solutions; household-based surveys of travel behaviour, social networks, health and wellbeing; computerised surveys to elicit residents' values for severance and mitigation; on-street surveys of travel behaviour; measurement of traffic and road characteristics; space syntax methods, to study how the network of streets affect accessibility and mobility; and analyses integrating these discipline-specific methods. The final stage will be to test the impacts on CS - and thus on mobility and wellbeing - of proposed interventions to reduce CS.

By the end of this project, we will have developed and tested three tools. The first two will be for local government to use, to model and to value levels of CS in their area. The third will be a set of questions that can be asked in surveys to find out whether and how severance affects local people. The survey can then be used by local communities, providing information they can use in discussions with local councillors and staff. The tools can be used by local government to test proposed transport policies, development plans and interventions to assess whether they will affect severance. They can also be used by researchers to find out whether and how CS affects people's mobility, social isolation, and short- and long-term health and wellbeing. The survey can also be used in national surveys so that a more complete picture of this problem is obtained across the UK.

Beneficiaries will include the public sector, the third sector and, particularly, older members of society. The project will increase understanding of the complex nature of community severance (CS) and its effect on mobility at different ages and degrees of disability, and its impact on independence, wellbeing, social networks, and civic engagement. New tools measuring CS that equate with people's perceptions of ease of movement around their area and how this impacts on their lives will increase understanding of individual mobility behaviour and the relationship between ageing individuals and their social and physical environments. It will enable future work to assess effective interventions to overcome constraints on older people's quality of life, providing a sound evidence base for policy and practice.

It will enable cross-sector policy development and appraisal, allowing the creation of a common language and set of issues that can then be shared between policy makers and community leaders, enabling routine modelling by planners of CS using an evidence-based design and engineering tool validated against user-centred data with particular implications for street design and spatial planning locally, nationally and internationally. Altering the built environment to reduce CS will facilitate mobility and activity and decrease isolation in ageing populations. It will enable an evaluation of how extensive CS is and how it influences perceptions of societal norms, especially where CS is severe, informing design decisions regarding urban restructuring on residents, mobility and wellbeing in complex built environments. This has implications for 'Big Society' policy nationally and social cohesion and mobility at neighbourhood level.

The study will identify 'willingness to pay' to reduce severance and knock-on cross-sector benefits of improved wellbeing and physical and mental health. It will help make the case to the Department of Transport, the Treasury and other bodies for public funding to address CS problems.

Project outputs will include survey tools that can be used nationally (e.g. Health Survey for England), locally (e.g. PLACE surveys), and in studies of older people e.g. English Longitudinal Study of Ageing to assess impacts of severance on long-term health and wellbeing.

Measuring local community severance and its impacts on individuals' wellbeing in a repeatable, validated way will enable local government to assess and mitigate existing severance and model impacts for new proposals, improving quality of life for people living and working in the UK. We intend to ensure the impact is long-lasting by creating tools for end-users, disseminated to organisations in relevant and comprehensible forms. We will also organise a final workshop for senior national policy-makers.

Interventions reducing CS and increasing mobility will help maintain older people's independence, reducing health and social care costs, and facilitate access to local goods, thus enhancing the local economy and improving local social engagement. Broader economic impact will result from increased mobility, since physically active people have better health and cost society less, adding life to years.

Existing research, such as Inclusive Design for Getting Outdoors (I'DGO), focuses on the street and home level, not the broader public realm. I'DGO's design guidance will be complemented by the proposed, validated CS measurement, valuation and survey tools, enabling planning interventions which promote mobility and social cohesion. We will enhance the capabilities of local communities to identify issues and engage effectively with professionals to address problems affecting local wellbeing. We will also strengthen and extend the capabilities of traffic engineers, transport planners, urban designers and others to recognise CS and deal with it effectively, working with local communities.