Dr. Pete Lunn:

We have systematically looked at submissions about active travel. My team has a research programme with the National Transport Authority. It has only just started. One of the first things we did was to get a feed of many submissions from many different projects and look at them. The Chair is right about people not joining up the dots to climate and realising it is part of climate policy. We are not doing that research programme because we think every active travel scheme is good and should not be opposed. It is perfectly legitimate for people to oppose changes to their local communities that they view as negative if they wish. What we can see, and the reason we are involved, is that there are systematic misperceptions about these schemes. It is clear that if we communicate in different ways, we might be able to do something about that and get people to have a better understanding.

One misperception we know exists is that because people can see the negative impacts, with something disappearing, such as parking space, they focus on that, but they find it hard to imagine what will happen to their community and what the positive impacts will be. When these active travel changes are systematically studied, it is found that many people who initially opposed them end up liking them. That is a real problem if we are trying to get change. How do we get people to the position of liking the change to begin with, if they know it will be beneficial, rather than after the fact as they look back at it? There are classic examples of this, with none better than the London congestion charge, which was opposed by 85% of Londoners until it was put in place. They then voted to increase it because it had such a beneficial effect on London city centre.

Getting people to imagine what positive things can happen to their localities and communities is part of the story. We are starting to research this to see how we can do it and trying to devise interventions. There is time pressure here. We have only started to dip our toe in the water. It is an important research issue. We are picking and choosing a few projects. It would be great if more people were doing this kind of work.

I will leave the advertising question to others. The Chair's second question was about trends. This is the first time we have ever managed to get a representative sample of 16 to 24-year-olds. It is very hard to do. We have not done it before. I do not know whether there are trends. I do know from the report we published this morning that the 16 to 24-year-old group is more radical in what it wants to see than older adults are. One has to be careful with that, because people in that group are mostly not the people who are paying. As they get older, they may become more conservative and lose that radicalism. I would be very surprised if the current older cohort, of which I am clearly one, was as radical as this group is when they were that age. I know I was not. I do not think my friends were. We do not have data on that but I think it is pretty clear that 16 and 24-year-olds now-----