Lucy Marstrand-Taussig is a transport consultant with around 18 years’ experience in design of either buildings or highways (both public and private sector).

Her key area of interest is planning and designing roads suitable for walking and cycling - specifically enabling more active travel among children, the disabled, women and older people.

She has spoken at conferences including Cycle City, Ecobuild, the Royal Town Planning Institute, Cycling@teatime at UCL, PTRC cycling infrastructure course, and the Cycling and Society Symposium.

Presentation: Transport Curriculum: walking, cycling and road safety
This presentation will explore the training and background of transport professionals charged with designing roads - including analysis of the LinkedIn profiles of senior transport practitioners in order to shed light on the culture and values of this professional community.

It finds that the overwhelming majority are from an engineering background, and that skills pertaining to designing for the car and ‘road safety’ are held in higher regard than skills relating to walking, cycling or urban design among the current generation of transport practitioners in local authorities.

A review of the current system of transport education finds ‘road safety’ was invariably covered in engineering modules, but often it appeared to be studied in isolation from the critical issue of designing for more pedestrian and cycle traffic.

Transport policy syllabi are more likely to encompass walking and cycling and the diversity of topics which impact on active travel, than transport engineering syllabi.

Within engineering modules, some universities clearly cover walking and cycling engineering in detail, others only touch on active travel as one of a number of elements.

The paper discusses the possible impacts of this on transport and the implementation of walking and cycling road environments.