Helping Victorians make healthy transport choices
Governments across Australia continue to support walking and bike riding as part of the solution to urgent health, environmental and equity challenges. Yet despite growing investment, participation rates remain low and largely stagnant — a problem compounded by the lack of evidence to guide where and how to invest for greatest impact.
A new project funded by VicHealth will address this challenge by developing a first-of-its-kind policy decision-support tool designed to help key Victorian decision-makers identify the most effective and equitable strategies to increase active travel uptake across the State.
The project, run by a multidisciplinary team led by Associate Professor Ben Beck, will deliver a tool that simulates complex combinations of interventions, and enables prioritisation based on based on health, economic and equity outcomes.
While high-quality infrastructure such as bike lanes and footpaths are an essential part of the solution, research by Monash University’s Sustainable Mobility and Safety Research Group shows that travel decisions are influenced by a nuanced mix of factors, including confidence, habits, knowledge and social norms. Despite the wide range of potential interventions available to policy-makers — from bike subsidies and workplace travel plans to education campaigns and local walking groups — little is known about how to best combine them for greatest impact or return on investment.
“Without tools to evaluate the real-world impact of these interventions, governments are effectively flying blind,” said Associate Professor Beck, Head of Monash’s Sustainable Mobility and Safety Research Group. “I welcome this funding from VicHealth, and am excited to provide the evidence and capability that is needed to prioritise active travel investments that work, and work fairly for all.”
Conducted in partnership with the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning, the Municipal Association of Victoria, Victoria Walks and Bicycle Network, the tool will be co-designed to ensure it meets partner needs and supports real-world planning and investment decisions. It will also allow policymakers to test the likely impact of different approaches based on specific goals — such as achieving a target of 25% of trips taken by active modes by 2030.
The project will build on an existing foundation of behavioural and transport modelling work completed by Associate Professor Beck’s team, extending this to deliver a new, person-centred travel behaviour model that fuses behavioural science with advanced transport modelling. Using scenario modelling and deep reinforcement learning, the tool will model both standalone and combined interventions and will account for diverse geographic contexts, including urban and regional settings. It will deliver a suite of outcome metrics tailored to policymaker priorities, including mobility patterns, health gains, and cost-effectiveness.
By directly addressing current knowledge and capability gaps in active travel planning, the project will support the design of healthier, more sustainable and equitable cities for the future, and shift the dial on Australia’s great dependence on private vehicles.
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