Building better transport in a polarised world
In this guest blog, Dr Milad Mehdizadeh, from the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, discusses why transport debates increasingly reflect deeper cultural values and political identities.
Transport debates are no longer only about congestion, emissions, or infrastructure planning. Increasingly, they reflect deeper cultural values and political identities. Discussions around low traffic neighbourhoods, road pricing, cycling infrastructure, or even electric vehicles often become emotionally charged because they are tied to broader beliefs about freedom, fairness, government legitimacy, and acceptable lifestyles. What used to be a largely technical policy domain is now often experienced as symbolic politics. A cycle lane is not just a cycle lane; it can represent climate responsibility and healthier cities for some, while representing inconvenience or state overreach for others. Similarly, the private car, especially SUVs, can function as both a practical mobility tool and a cultural symbol linked to autonomy, status and resistance to behavioural change.
These disagreements are not random. They often cluster around broader political identities and attitudes toward behavioural change. A way to interpret this is through a hypothetical typology with two dimensions: political orientation and willingness to reduce car dependence. As shown in the diagram below, this typology does not suggest that political ideology determines behaviour in a fixed way. Rather, it highlights how mobility preferences are often filtered through broader values about freedom, responsibility, and the role of government. Importantly, the divisions are not absolute. Some segments of the population hold mixed positions depending on context, geography, and life stage. The diagram illustrates how support for transport policies may cluster around different political and behavioural orientations, contributing to increasing polarisation in mobility debates.
A hypothetical typology of mobility and political preferences
Behavioural reality: why change is harder than it looks
Our research in transport behaviour shows that mobility choices are more habitual and structurally constrained. Even when attractive alternatives exist, people often do not significantly reduce car use/ownership (Börjesson and Eliasson, 2026). This is not simply a matter of attitude or awareness. It reflects infrastructure lock-in, time pressures, household logistics, and the high cognitive and practical cost of changing routines/habits.
Pull measures such as improved public transport or cycling infrastructure are necessary, but they often produce slower or more limited behavioural shifts than policy expectations assume. At the same time, this does not mean people are unwilling to change. It means that change is uneven, context-dependent, and often incremental rather than immediate. This creates a policy tension. Relying only on voluntary behavioural change risks insufficient progress toward climate and congestion goals. Yet relying only on top-down intervention risks political backlash and reduced legitimacy, particularly in increasingly polarised environments.
From polarisation to co-design: the INFUZE approach
Within this context, the INFUZE project explores whether co-design can help bridge the gap between behavioural reality and political acceptability. Rather than assuming that citizens will naturally adopt low-car lifestyles, or that they will resist all change unless forced, co-design treats mobility transition as a shared design problem.
We provide a ‘salad bar’ of transport policy measures. This includes both ‘pull’ interventions, such as improved public transport, cycling infrastructure, and shared mobility options, and ‘push’ interventions, such as parking management, pricing mechanisms, and regulatory tools designed to reduce car dependency. These measures are grounded in evidence from transport and climate policy experiments across different countries and contexts.
Citizens then work with this set of options to redesign and combine solutions based on their own priorities, constraints and lived experiences. Importantly, participants are drawn from diverse backgrounds, including different mobility needs and political identities. This diversity is not incidental; it is central to understanding how argued policies can be shaped in socially meaningful ways. The goal is not to assume consensus, but to make trade-offs explicit and negotiable. Co-design does not eliminate push measures, nor does it rely solely on voluntary behavioural change. Instead, it helps explore which combinations of interventions are both effective and socially acceptable in practice. The resulting mobility solutions are then tested in real-world trials, allowing researchers to evaluate behavioural impacts, acceptability and unintended consequences.
Why this matters
In a time when transport policy is increasingly interpreted through cultural and political identities, technical evidence alone is often not enough to ensure implementation or acceptance. The challenge is no longer only about identifying effective policies, but about designing processes through which better policies can be developed, understood, and adapted. Co-design approaches such as those used in INFUZE do not remove politics from transport. Instead, they acknowledge that mobility is already political and attempt to make that reality productive rather than polarising. Ultimately, successful transport transitions may depend not only on better infrastructure or stronger policy instruments, but on building decision-making processes that can work within behavioural constraints while still achieving meaningful system change.
Dr Milad Mehdizadeh is a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. The Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility (INFUZE) project aims to conduct evidence-based research that will directly inform the development of future policies designed to enhance transport solutions in the UK and beyond.
