Sustainable Travel Reading List

Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (2019)
by Steven Higashide
ISBN-9781642830149
Better Buses, Better Cities inspires us to fix the bus. Transport expert Steven Higashide shows us what a successful bus system looks like with real-world stories of reform, such as Houston redrawing its bus network overnight, and San Francisco revamping its boarding procedures. Higashide shows how to marshal the public in support of better buses and how new technologies can keep buses on time and make complex transit systems understandable.

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality (2018)
by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett
ISBN-9781610918794
In car-clogged urban areas across the world, the humble bicycle is enjoying a second life as a legitimate form of transportation. City officials are rediscovering it as a multi-pronged (or -spoked) solution to acute, 21st-century problems, including affordability, obesity, congestion, climate change, inequity, and social isolation. As the world's foremost cycling nation, the Netherlands is the only country where the number of bikes exceeds the number of people...

Carmageddon: How cars make life worse and what to do about it (2023)
by Daniel Knowles
ISBN-9798396745957
In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, Knowles traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. Knowles then shows that there are better ways to live, looking at Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and New York City...

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives (2021)
by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett
ISBN-9781642831658
In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people...

Movement: how to take back our streets and transform our lives (2022)
by Thalia Verkade
ISBN-9781911344971
We take it for granted that the streets outside out homes are designed for movement from A to B, nothing more. But what happens if we radically rethink how we use these public spaces? Could we change our lives for the better? Join journalist Thalia Verkade and urban mobility expert Marco te Brömmelstroet as they confront their own underlying beliefs and challenge us to rethink our way of life...

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (2020)
by Angie Schmitt
ISBN-9781642830835
The face of the pedestrian safety crisis looks a lot like Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez. The 77-year old grandfather was struck in a hit-and-run crash while trying to cross a high-speed, six-lane road without crosswalks near his son's home in Phoenix, Arizona. He was one of the more than 6,000 people killed while walking in America in 2018. The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture...

Streetfight Handbook for an Urban Revolution (2017)
by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
ISBN-9780143128977
As NYC's Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: she rewrote the rule book and involved local artists in a radical approach to city planning...

Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change (2015)
by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia
ISBN-9781610915267
The book provides a detailed toolkit for conceiving, planning, and carrying out projects, including how to adapt them based on local needs and challenges. Tactical Urbanism will inspire and empower a new generation of engaged citizens, urban designers, land use planners, architects, and policymakers to become key actors in the transformation of their communities...

Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It (2023)
by Paul Donald
ISBN-9781784274849
The first step to solving any problem is to recognise that it exists in the first place. But with road traffic, we are not even at that crucial initial stage in our recovery. Quite simply, Traffication does for road traffic what Silent Spring did for agrochemicals: awakening us from our collective road-blindness and opening up a whole new chapter in conservation...

Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (2019)
by Jeff Speck
ISBN-9781610918985
Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable-for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment-yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck's follow up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer's guide to making change in cities, and making it now...

Autogeddon (1991)
by Heathcote Williams
ISBN-9780224026444
A campaigning narrative poem with an anthology of prose writings on the devastating effect of the motor car on our lives. More than 17 million people have been killed on the roads in the century since the first motor car appeared and an incalculable number seriously hurt, or have died later from the effects of road accidents. This is but one fact among many that build up to the evidence of man's heedless inhumanity to his fellow traveller. But this book is much more than a catalogue of death and destruction - of maimed children, of noxious pollution in the air, and through the petro-chemical industry, in rivers and the soil. It is a revelation of the extent to which the human psyche has become possessed by a machine until it can no longer control the effects of it.

Autogeddon by Heathcote Williams
Read by Jeremy Irons

Why the UK needs a nationally integrated and publicly owned railway
What RMT workers say

Campaign for Better Transport is an advocacy group in the United Kingdom that promotes sustainable transport, particularly bus and rail services.

Carfree Cities (2002)
by J.H. Crawford
ISBN-9789057270420
In this volume filled with historical and contemporary references to guiding historic precedents and ideological errors of 20th-century planning, the author sets up the carfree city as the cornerstone of sustainable development. This book outlines a structure carefully designed to maximize the quality of life for people and communities worldwide.

Remaking Society: A New Ecological Politics
by Murray Bookchin
ISBN-9781849354424
Drawing on rich traditions of ecological science, anthropology, history, utopian philosophy, and ethics, Remaking Society offers a coherent framework for social and ecological reconstruction. This innovative work on nature and society provides readers with clear strategies for averting climate disaster.

Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis
by Mathew Lawrence & Adrienne Buller
ISBN-9781839765803
The authors argue the systemic change we need hinges on a new era of democratic ownership: a reinvention of the firm as a vehicle for collective endeavour and meeting social needs. Against the new oligarchy of the platform giants, a digital commons that uses our data for collective good, not private profit. In place of environmental devastation, a new agenda of decommodification - of both nature and needs - with a Green New Deal and collective stewardship of the planet’s natural wealth. Together, these proposals offer a road map to owning the future, and building a better world.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
by Andreas Malm
ISBN-9781839760259
Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.