Why Travel? Understanding Our Need to Move and How It Shapes our Lives

Deborah Saunt and Tom Greenall answer the Independent Transport Commission's titular question, "Why Travel?", by exploring the ways transport infrastructure can complement and enrich the public realm. Understanding this most fundamental of territories as a place where culture is nurtured and the city is allowed to flourish through the cultivation of exchange. This chapter examines how travel, place and human connectivity are intimately related from physical, cultural and psychological perspectives.

First, we provide a brief survey of historical relations between human settlements and travel, before turning to psychological and behavioural insights that reveal how different modes of travel can impact upon our experiences of the places we live and move through. We close the chapter with a delineation of our preferred approach to designing transport infrastructure, one that responds to the diverse and unique characteristics of each place with a sensitivity to the lived realties of its users.