Introduction
Urban mobility can detrimentally impact city dwellers' health and quality of life, e.g. through air pollution, noise and traffic injuries, but offers opportunities for health promotion, e.g., through active travel. While the health impacts of transport are well known, the extent to which health is considered in mobility plans is less obvious. The European Commission encourages cities to develop Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) to improve residents’ quality of life. We assess how health is addressed in SUMPs by examining: i) key health and health equity terminology, ii) explicit transport pathways to health, iii) health targets and key performance indicators, and iv) the health-rationale of actions and measures.

Methods
Using a customised health dictionary, we perform a quantitative text analysis of SUMPs issued from 2006 to 2023 (n = 230) from 31 European countries listed on the European Local Transport Information Service (Eltis) City Database. We further validate this by an in-depth qualitative analysis of a purposive sub-sample (n = 13).

Results
The findings show that while the prominence of health in SUMPs seems to be increasing, the link between transport and equity, and social and mental wellbeing is not frequently discussed. Detailed targets and KPIs for several health pathways are scarce or missing, as are the health rationale and health outcomes for proposed measures. Overwhelmingly SUMPs’ health aspirations focus on minimising detrimental health impacts of transport, primarily from traffic injuries and to a lesser extent from air pollution. Health related concepts such as accessibility and active travel feature prominently but are not explicitly identified as an opportunity to enhance health.

Conclusion
Urban mobility planning across Europe seems to miss an opportunity to embrace mobility as a driver of health promotion.@en

As people require time to adjust their travel behaviour to changes in residential location and transport infrastructure, there is a need for long-term empirical studies quantifying the relationships between locations, individuals and travel behaviour. Such empirical evidence is critical for assessing previous and candidate future land use-transport policies. Existing research however, has mostly investigated travel behaviour during relatively short time periods and for a single transport mode. This paper examines the development of travel behaviour and its socio-demographic and location determinants, using Dutch National Travel Survey data from 1980 to 2010 among other sources, for the Randstad, the Netherlands. A pseudo panel analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of various indicators on average daily distance travelled by train, car and bicycle over three decades. Econometric models including pooled ordinary least squares, fixed and random effects and a hybrid model were tested to identify the best fit. The results indicate that average daily distance travelled rose until the mid-1990s before witnessing a decrease till 2010. Interestingly, half of the Randstad inhabitants have been travelling ≤26 km per day over the past thirty years. Furthermore, as people grow older, they increasingly travel more by train and bicycle. Finally, a rise in suburban inhabitants decreases the average distance travelled by train and increases that of bicycle, while a rise in rural inhabitants encourages higher distances travelled by car.

@en