Urban traffic and health risk: what is the role for citizen participation in transport planning?

Abstract

One of the challenges of human scale urban planning, including transport, is that citizens feel more engaged and responsible for processes and outcomes of planning decisions, mainly in view of liveability of cities. This new engagement seems increasingly to be happening where traffic is at high volume and density, causing serious noise annoyance which may come with several health risks. These risks may include cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, arteriosclerosis and ischaemic heart disease (Babisch, 2014; Basner et al., 2017). Addressing the issue of noise in urban traffic is not new. Some cities have already installed measurement systems to assess noise exposure for citizens. However, there is a more general trade-off in policy-making; for example, facilitating transport demand growth to promote economic development at the expense of noise exposure or low air quality for citizens. As a result, not much of the knowledge gained on citizens’ exposure has been actually applied in urban policies for noise management. In some cases, however, citizens have taken the initiative to measure and address high noise levels or other health risk by themselves, aimed at increasing quality of life in places that suffer from such risk (Goodchild, 2007). Such citizen initiatives can be called ‘citizen sensing’. Citizen sensing initiatives have recently become increasingly popular, not only through improved sensor technology and mobile devices owned by citizens or collectively owned, but also, in particular situations, by a common feeling among citizens of distrust towards the actor(s) responsible for noise or low air quality (Gabrys et al., 2016; Berti Suman, 2018). Distrust may follow from the feeling of not being taken seriously; in particular, in calls for transparency in measurement undertaken by the responsible actor(s). Given these aspects, citizen sensing can