Impact

This project created new tools, enabling routine modelling by planners of community severance in suburban areas, using an evidence-based design and engineering tool validated against user-centred data.

The project findings have implications for street design and spatial planning locally, nationally and internationally. This project has filled a gap in academic knowledge, offering a multi-disciplinary evidence-based approach to studying community severance.

The project outputs (both the tools themselves and the various publications) will be valuable to policy makers, practitioners and local communities themselves. It focuses on making people's lives better and giving local communities tools to engage with professionals about the forms and consequences of community severance that impact adversely on their lives. 

Examples of use by policy-makers and practitioners

The walkability tool has been used by Transport for London to identify locations where walking has the greatest potential to be increased by interventions to alter the infrastructure or change behaviour. The ability of the model to be used analytically to support policy formation and evaluation in relation to active transport is important to balance the established advantage for motorised transport that has long had the benefit of analytically based evaluation tools.