How to make people travel less by car and plane?

This is the million-dollar question for many advocates of sustainable mobility. T&E – European Federation for Transport & Environment – invited me to present my insights and discuss these during a seminar with their national member organizations. You can download the slides of my presentation Less car and plane.

I have been puzzling on how to achieve a substantial modal shift for more than thirty years. The strong interlinkages between mobility and spatial developments – urbanisation or suburbanisation – certainly limit easy changes in mobility behaviour. I analysed this complex interaction in my recent paper Transport urbanisation dialectic. Say’s law seems to be at work: each transport mode creates its own demand.