Jenny was asked to give some talks in Wellington, capital of NZ, and attend a ‘National Science Challenges Healthier Lives ‘ day. This coincided nicely with Purim as there is an orthodox shul there (but not in Dunedin). We flew up and stayed in a motel near the City centre. Much more noisy and lively than Dunedin, especially at night. I did lots of walking around. There is a nice harbour front, lots of cafes, great museums and cool shops. We went to the theatre and I did two bike rides outside the city. One on wooded hilly trails with great birdlife and scary cycling and one long distance ride along the river to outlying towns. I tried to find a disused railway, now a cycle track, but ran out of time. 

But I did see a pukeko.

At shul a good attendance in the evening for Purim (60-70, lots in proper fancy dress). Nice megillah followed by a big seudah and a really good magician. We both went for shacharit as well.

The shooting in Christchurch has really shocked people here. On the Shabbat the community were told the shul had to close so they davened in the rabbi’s house but couldn’t get a minyan and couldn’t leyen parshat Zachor, so the rabbi read it at Purim shacharit. All his sermons over Purim and the Shabbat following made reference to the event. He had gone to Christchurch to represent the Jewish community and then to Friday prayers at the Wellington mosque. We went to the Rabbi and Rebbetzen for dinner Friday night. Shabbat morning was very quiet: everyone had already been to shul once that week!  I did the haphtarah, chatted to people over Kiddush. Nice community, declining as you would expect, but younger than Northwood and with a kindergarten and shop.

We did a lot of walking around, good harbour front, lots of nice shops, good museum (Te Papa), and we went to see ‘Side by side by Sondheim’ at the theatre.

Flew back to Dunedin from Wellington: another week of lectures and writing a book chapter (for her), Pilates and housework for me. During one hot Pilates session we were listening to the ‘music’, waiting for the session to start, when people started signalling to us. Couldn’t work out what was going on until it became clear that the change in the music was in fact the fire alarm. We all had to go out to the street. Now 15 scantily-clad people (dressed for Pilates at 28^o) laughing themselves silly in central downtown Dunedin caused quite a stir. Fortunately, it was a lovely sunny day but we were soon surrounded by a crowd.

Thought it would make the local paper but it was eclipsed by the news that the Accident Compensation Board has reported a 5% increase in the number of hot water bottle related injuries to over 900, mostly in young women!

On Thursday we went in the evening to an isolated beach to see rare yellow-eyed penguins. There were three there and we got some good pics. Also saw some sea-lions with other naughty tourists getting too close. We hoped to get some pics of them being eaten but had to leave because it was sunset.

Moved house on Friday to Chalet Leithenthal. This is a little studio next to a bigger house. There are four sheep and chickens too. Beautifully appointed and a lovely host family who have already supplied us with apples, plums and beans from their 5 acre woods and garden. There is much less space but we are only 20 mins walk and 10 mins cycle from the University and it’s all flat!

Today, Shabbat, we were able to walk to the farmer’s market (only looking) and watch the National Pipe Band championships just to reinforce the fact that this is really Scotland, not NZ. Weather fabulous again. Have a schedule of bike rides to explore this side of Dunedin. 

Eglington valley is U-shaped because it is glacial, so also contains moraine.

Although it is very close to the west coast, Eglington River flows from these mountains down to the east coast.

There are 14 fjords in Fjordland. Each is called a sound, but that is wrong. A sound is caused by water due to earthquake but these were caused by glaciation, so are fjords.

The NZ conservation authority is trying to remove the Douglas firs planted by miners for timber. When the trees shed their pine needles, it alters the acidity of the soil.

Day two of The Active Living and the Environment Symposium, continued

After a morning break for networking (and refreshments), Rebecca Brookland, of the Dept of Preventive and Social Medicine at the University of Otago in Dunedin, reported the results of her survey of older drivers in New Zealand. She pointed out that there are now more older drivers – and greater car use – than ever before but 51% of her survey participants had walked for travel, 9% had cycled and 31% had used public transport in the previous three months, despite New Zealand being such a car-dependent society.

Continuing the theme of older people, Angela Curl reported their work on outdoor falls. These are common numerically, even if they are a small proportion of all falls in New Zealand. For example, she reported that ACC data showed 11,500 falls outdoors, compared with 260,000 falls indoors. More time spent walking increases the ‘opportunity’ to fall; fear of falling reduces the time spent walking. Thus the relationship is complicated. Older people are also scared of being hit by a bicycle on shared pathways (although it is actually a rare occurrence) but are more accepting of poor environments. Work by an Engineering Doctoral student at UCL on unsegregated shared use pathways has shown that the path width and the density of occupants – both walking and cycling – are the two most important factors in determining users’ comfort.

Evidence from other countries puts falls outdoors as a significant cause of morbidity and healthcare use. In the Netherlands, hospital admission due to falls while walking for travel is five times as common as admissions of pedestrians due to collision with a vehicle, yet only the latter is included in official road travel injury statistics. In England, we found that (using conservative figures), there were at least 2.5 times as many hospital admissions for pedestrian falls as for pedestrians hit by a vehicle.

Victor Andrade spoke to us by electronic means, from Rio de Janeiro. He described their team’s involvement with a company that wanted to monitor and influence their employees’ commuting behaviours to improve environmental sustainability, employee health, and social justice. Long Chen described the various geographical information science (GIS) techniques he will be using in his PhD to explore active travel to school.

Chris Button, opening a session on Facilitating Active Living, spoke about teaching Water Skills for Life to children in open water environments, where a greater range of competencies are required than when learning to swim in a pool. Kimberley King told us about the proposed Catalyst Project within the BEATS research programme. If funded, this project would include roadshows and support the students from rural secondary schools in Otago, New Zealand to conduct their own research projects and develop innovative ways to encourage healthy behaviours in their schools and communities. Kathleen Galvin and colleagues had found that physical activity reduced the odds of men taking androgen deprivation therapy having sexual dysfunction in their international study of men with prostate cancer. Kirsten Coppell rounded off the session with a talk on findings from the BEATS study on diet of adolescents in the Otago region, given that more than one-third of adolescents in New Zealand are overweight or obese. They found that adolescents in urban areas were more likely to consume junk food more often than their peers in rural areas.

After a lunch spent networking, the fourth plenary session started with Professor John Spence, from the University of Alberta, Canada, speaking about autonomous vehicles (AVs) and their potential for reducing active travel. He pointed out the essential biology of organisms has a number of consequences we need to remember. We are programmed to conserve energy and therefore minimise our physical activity levels. We therefore seek energy efficiencies and love ‘progress traps’.

The environment, such as food availability, shapes our physical activity. Therefore exercise-based interventions are constrained by our biology and are ineffective if the environment and structural factors are not considered. He advocated having 24-hour movement guidelines that include sleep and sedentary behaviour as well as physical activity. To be maintained, physical activity must be FUN: fulfilling; useful (active travel can save money and time); and/or necessary. He referred to work by Milakis et al and Crayton and Meier. One advantage for many people of autonomous vehicles is the value of travel time to do other things. There could also be fuel savings. Proponents of AVs welcome the ability of those who can no longer drive to use motor vehicles, and the ability of AVs to be involved in fewer crashes than when people are driving, thus saving lives from road travel injuries. However, the adverse consequences of the loss of physical activity could swamp the health benefits. [JM to insert photo of John Spence in the WordPress version]

Gareth Fairweather, now at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport, spoke about his work in London. As a former town planner there, Gareth had modelled the scenario of a predicted increase in London’s population to 10.8 million by 2041, needing 66,000 new homes for this projected growth plus the current backlog in housing, and a 23% increase of 5 million additional trips per day. He spoke about the importance of developing vibrant streets for a better public realm.

Ben Wooliscroft reiterated that New Zealand is dominated by a car culture. He spoke about ‘nudging’ – pushing people towards the path of least resistance without engaging the conscious. Supermarkets do it through the positioning of items in the store and on the shelves and checkouts. Major multinational food and drink brands promoting high-calorie, nutrient poor (junk) food and drinks do it all the time. He pointed out that mode shift is a wicked problem – one with no easy solution. There have been huge changes in travel modes over decades but roads have not changed much, in general. In the 1960s, Christchurch had the same mode share as the Netherlands.

He also talked about the latent demand problem and therefore the importance of bringing marketing tools to bear on modal choice. Most research falls either into the area of infrastructure research or of consumer decision research (for example material culture, aspirations, social norms, and habits). He explained the importance of the ‘messy’ cultural and societal bits inbetween these, such as enforcement, the media, law, and stereotypes. He pointed out that cars and firearms have similar energy levels but the legal responsibility is very different. He also referred to the ‘hate-ism’ against bikes (often referred to as bikelash). Infrastructure is necessary but insufficient for mode shift – and is not always necessary if the culture is appropriate. For example, the approach in the Netherlands of providing separate infrastructure for cycles and cars is now changing back to shared use. We need to monitor and measure, understand, and change much more than just the roads – a culture change is required.

These are brief comments on the talks and what I took form them. Further information is available in the TALES Proceedings booklet.

I will describe the debate the Future of Transport in a further blog. Watch this space!

Friday’s outrage has caused huge sadness across New Zealand. We went with our hosts for today to visit the Dunedin Mosque this afternoon, where about 200 people had gathered to show solidarity and sympathy. Children were drawing symobls and messages of peace and love on the pavement outside, while the Imam came out to speak to the crowd. A very sombre mood.

Postscript: Lutfer (Sandy’s Bangladeshi PhD student) says about 1,000 people came overall.

Please note that these various blogs are not in chronological order but are in the order that one of us has got round to writing it or to sorting out our photos! We went to Milford Sound on Monday 18th February – after Te Anau and a few days before Queenstown.

Up bright and early in the sunshine for our day trip to Milford Sound. The drizzle started as we left our room (Explorer Motel). Some of the mountains we had seen the previous evening were barely visible. We took the coach to Milford Sound so we could both see the scenery. David slept. As we left, there was a rainbow, but then the many-layered cloud cover prevented any sunshine.

We were driven along Milford Highway, through the Fjordland National Park of beech forest. The trees grow on the rock (there’s no soil), as their horizontal roots spread out and link up. Counterintuitively, the mountain beech grows only low down, while the red beech and silver beech grow on the mountains. The coach driver kept telling us how much more amazing the views are in the rain because most of the waterfalls occur only when it rains…. This is lucky, as it rains 200d per year, with an annual rainfall of 7m to 8m.

We stopped to see the Mirror Lakes, where the scenery is mirrored perfectly in good weather. The photos look better than it did at the time, bizarrely.

There were very few birds around, apart from some gulls, but quite a few seals.

The more spectacular waterfalls are there every day but the hundreds of smaller waterfalls we saw were less usual, being temporary starting and stopping within minutes or a couple of hours of it raining.

Judi, thanks for the advice to bring layers. We wore almost all of them! We cruised almost to the Tasman Sea, then returned.

On the return voyage, we saw some sealions and the major waterfall en route to Milford Haven, then had the return coach trip back to Te Anau.

Before getting dressed, we had sprayed ourselves all over with the DEET that Judi and Ivor had brought back for us. One benefit of the almost incessant rain was that the notorious sandflies dislike getting wet more than we do!

The average car in NZ is 14 years old. In North Island there is no frost and no salt on the roads. If you are a young buck, you fettle your Honda or Subaru by lowering the suspension, enlarging the exhaust and spinning your wheels after every turn. These people are called w*nk*rs in the local dialect. In town the roads are hugely wide. There is a side road near us that is at least three lanes wide. It has no traffic. [Note from Jenny – when cycling on it yesterday, she was passed by two cars!]

Apart from the above, everyone drives in a totally civilised way, keeping rigidly to the speed limit with no aggressive braking or acceleration. This makes crossing the road or turning out from a side road really difficult. You often arrive at, say, a T-junction: you have to wait for traffic to clear before turning but there is not a car in sight. You can’t just turn out because a car might jump out at you. So you wait…still no cars. Finally, one comes into sight half a mile away and moving very slowly, so you wait for it to pass. Then there is one more going the other way equally slowly, so you have to wait for it to pass. In England you would have squeezed into a constant stream of cars accelerating towards you at illegal speed but in NZ you somehow can’t. It can take ages to turn out into an empty road.

All the main roads here are two lanes, one each way. The gradients, bends and camber have to be seen to be believed. But people don’t overtake. Perhaps their cars are programmed not to. If you are a tourist pottering along looking at the view you will often attract two or three cars full of ‘working people’: vets; farm machinery engineers; a Ute carrying four sheep, who stick behind you until there is a passing lane even if the road is straight and empty. People have obviously forgotten how to overtake.

We would strongly recommend the car hire company we have used (New Zealand Rent-a-Car). They do reduced rates for cars over three years old. Neither the ‘vintage’ Toyota, nor the ‘vintage’ Mazda we got have caused us the slightest problem. The company has a bizarre and unique way of doing business: they provide the car you booked; no-one checks your documents; no unexpected surcharges are levied and they don’t try to sell you unnecessary insurance waivers. You return the car at night and post the key through the letterbox. I phoned up the following day to see if everything was OK all prepared to argue about the new scratches they claimed to have found or the amount of cleaning they had to do: “No, everything’s fine, why shouldn’t it be?”

Day two, third plenary session of The Active Living and the Environment Symposium

Andrew Jackson began the morning, telling us that people in New Zealand now walk only 9 minutes per day, on average, as car use has increased massively over time. Modelling had shown that public transport on demand (where the bus comes to you and drops you at your destination) would lead to a slight increase in deaths because of reduced physical activity.

Walking or cycling to and/or from public transport stops contributes to physical activity levels, which is why some people include public transport as ‘active travel’. It can even fulfil the weekly target levels of moderate physical activity on its own.

Modelling an increase in active travel would lead to a net 1,300 deaths prevented, because of the benefits of physical activity on non-communicable diseases (even allowing for deaths due to road travel injuries). In the model, use of autonomous vehicles would lead to an additional 600 deaths because of the loss of active travel. The results also depend on whether population growth forecasts are correct: if population growth is high not medium (as now seems likely), carbon and air pollutant emissions and other adverse consequences from motor vehicle use will be worse, sooner. Radical change is thus needed to reduce carbon emissions. In Kuala Lumpur, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to control traffic lights. Andrew painted a (to me) dystopian picture of our travel decisions being controlled by AI.

Claire Pascoe, from the New Zealand Transport Agency, introduced me to the concept of adaptive challenges vs technical problems and to the 2002 survival guide for leaders by Heifetz and Linsky. We are all familiar with technical challenges; the problems come (or don’t go away) when we try to deal with adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. Adaptive challenges have a gap between aspiration (or people’s perceptions) and reality; involve stakeholders who cross boundaries; and have long timeframes (no ‘quick fixes’). The differences are summarised in this table.

Relating this to the TALES theme, Claire proposed slowing motor traffic and making car drivers feel that they are the guests on the road. We need to frame the issue differently, changing the language to change people’s attitudes (as was done for tobacco control – see summary by Simon Chapman and Melanie Wakefield, and Simon Chapman and Deborah Lupton’s book on media advocacy.

Claire pointed out how important it is for people to understand the losses from a car-based society. Her wonderful slide (reproduced below) made the very impactful point that storing private property on public roads is considered really weird – except for cars!  Her third point related to ‘how ripe is the issue?’, i.e. has it become unacceptable? Referring to ‘For the love of cities’ by Peter Kageyama, she talked about the importance of love in the TALES context: if we have a strong emotional attachment to something, we look after it and are willing to suffer some pain to preserve it. In summary, cities should be dog-friendly, walkable, and cycleable.

The final speaker in the session was Simon Kingham, in his role as Chief Scientific Adviser to the New Zealand Ministry of Transport. He alerted us to his lay summaries of research ‘Simon says’. I was flattered to see that in Issue 7 of the Ministry of Transport Intelligence Digest, he recommended a recent article by a public health trainee and me.

It was heartening to hear that New Zealand Transport Agency is committed to ‘a transport system that promotes wellbeing and liveability’. Engagement is the key to success. Stakeholders need to be included at the stage of project development plus ongoing involvement during the project – and it needs to be genuine engagement (on both, or all, sides). Finally, when writing up any research, policy implications need to be stated clearly.

I have tried – and failed – to create a separate page for my work-related Transport and health blogs. I was able to create one, but have not been able to add new blogs to that page, only to this main page. So people looking for reports of TALES will either need the very specific URLs or will need to scroll through my travel ramblings. Sorry!

Dunedin buses – “Common courtesy”

For a Londoner, buses in New Zealand are strange in several ways.

Disadvantages, compared with London

There are very few routes and buses are very infrequent (just as in much of the UK, outside London and a few other places). Presumably the argument goes that so few people use the buses, it isn’t worth running more. But if they were more frequent, and didn’t stop running so early, more people would use them! If we go to salsa (which starts at 9pm in Dunedin), we have to leave after an hour to catch the last bus back to Maryhill – or get a taxi.

Some routes have one number when travelling in one direction, and an adjacent number for the return journey. So the two buses that go to and from Waverley are the 10 / 11 and the 19 / 20. If you don’t know that, and the driver has forgotten to change it round, you miss your bus – which is a greater inconvenience when they come only once every 30 or 60 minutes.

Ths bus times are approximate, so it behoves one to arrive at least 5 minutes if not 10min before the stated time, to avoid missing it.

Advantages

Every bus has a rack at the front (outside) that takes two bikes. The only problem is you have to put it on without the driver’s help but it is so low I expect I can manage. I may cycle to the university but if it’s pouring or I’m too tired to tackle the very serious hills, I can wimp out on the way home.

The bus driver waits for passengers to be seated before driving off! Truly! The first time I took a bus, I walked towards the back, as usual, leaving front seats for those less able to walk (but I have seen very few of them on buses – maybe they don’t use buses or maybe they travel at different times from me), took off my backpack, and realised we were still stationary, so I sat down quickly and the bus then moved off. I know I have grey hair and I was touched that the driver waited for me to sit. Later in the journey I realised that he waited for each passenger to sit down, not just the apparently old. This morning I was on an almost empty bus and chatted with the driver. He was surprised when I asked if it was company policy and training to wait for passengers to sit down before driving off. “It’s common courtesy”, he replied. “Dunedin isn’t like London: we have plenty of time.”

Day one of The Active Living and the Environment Symposium, held at the University of Otago, Dunedin 13^th to 15^th February 2019 www.otago.ac.nz/active-living-2019

This was the second such symposium organised by Assoc Prof Sandra Mandic (my host in Dunedin), who runs the BEATS Study (Built Environment and Active Transport to School) in Otago, New Zealand. The 55 participants came from across New Zealand (plus Canada, Germany, Ireland and the UK, as well as a range of disciplines and professional backgrounds: local government politicians (from across New Zealand); practitioners from the public sector and private consultancies; government advisers; NGOs; academics; and students.

After a formal welcome from the Mayor of Dunedin, Mr Dave Cull, including a traditional Māori welcome, Dr Hilary Phipps, Head of Sustainability at the University of Otago outlined the many actions the university is undertaking to improve environmental sustainability (https://www.otago.ac.nz/sustainability/). University of Otago 2014 Travel Survey (to be repeated soon) found that the weather, the hills, and safety concerns were cited as the main barriers to active travel. Having now been in Dunedin for a few weeks, I understand these concerns only too well! After a welcome from the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor, Prof Richard Barker, the audience were re- (or de-?) energised by joining in with two dances led by local schoolchildren Sophie and Feidhlim, and assisted by Sophie’s mum, Kim (one of Sandy’s research assistants).

They were a hard act to follow – and my Keynote Lecture was the very next item! I spoke about community severance – the barrier effects of busy roads for local people and our work at UCL to develop a toolkit to measure severance (www.ucl.ac.uk/street-mobility). All the toolkits I had taken with me were grabbed quickly, including by a couple of the local government politicians and some practitioners. I look forward to hearing from them if they actually used any of the toolkit, what they found, and whether any actions resulted – useful for our ResearchFish submission in March 2020 on the impact of our EPSRC/ESRC/AHRC funded research.

It was great for many of the attendees that some of the presentations were updated results from studies that had initially been presented at the symposium two years previously. One example was the TALES organiser, Sandy Mandic, providing updates on results from the BEATS Study (Built Environment and Active Transport to School www.otago.ac.nz/beats) in Otago – but that will be a separate blog entry in a few weeks’ time.

Assoc Prof Melody Smith, from the University of Auckland, spoke about the Neighbourhoods for Active Kids study https://kidsinthecity.ac.nz/?page_id=219. This study has examined how children use neighbourhoods, and have related measurement of children’s obesity and physical activity to aspects of the built environment. Distance to school is an important factor when choosing travel mode, so promoting connectivity (or pedestrian permeability), could be crucial in promoting active travel. 50% of the Auckland parents who were interviewed believed that transport safety was the main issue. The researchers noted that two-thirds of schools had clustering of advertising of or outlets for unhealthy products (mostly calorie-dense, nutrient-poor food and drink, I imagine). The researchers had observed that children tend to go to places where there is unhealthy advertising; I suspect that canny advertisers tend to buy marketing space they know susceptible groups frequent.

The final plenary talk was from Dr Enrique García Bengoechea, from the University of Limerick, Ireland. Enrique spoke about the benefits of including participatory research at every stage of a research project. Based on Cargo and Mercer’s principles and recommendations for participatory research, he described five elements: Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) for an intervention to be scalable.

Two parallel sessions followed, after a networking afternoon tea break. In the session on Policy and Workplaces, Anna-Lena van der Vlugt, from Dortmund, Germany, reported on her work with Angela Curl and Dirk Wittowsky on perceived accessibility. Their surveys in Hamburg, Germany, and Nottingham, UK, found that safety after dark and satisfaction with public transport were the two most important factors that affected perceptions of accessibility. She discussed the influence of ‘fear points’ on how accessible places actually are, taking into account people’s perceptions, and how this can differ considerably to practitioners’ assessment of accessibility. And congratulations to Angela Curl, a co-investigator of this work, on her new job, as she leaves her lectureship post at the University of Canterbury and takes up a senior lecturer post in public health at the University of Otago in Christchurch in April 2019.

Selena (Mingyue) Sheng from the University of Auckland’s Business School discussed policy instruments for an environmentally-sustainable road transport network. She differentiated three types of sustainability – environmental, economic, and social – and the importance of internalising the externalities of congestion climate change, and injuries.

Lisa Malde (Hawke’s Bay District Health Board) and Louise Baker (WSP Opus) spoke about the ‘Go well’ travel plan to increase active commuting among staff and reduce non-attendance for hospital appointments. More on-site facilities for cyclists, encouragement for active travel, expanded free public transport for patients and subsidised fares for staff ($0.99), a staff carpooling scheme, introducing a staff car parking charge ($1/d), and provision of travel information have increased bus use, cycling and walking and reduced both driving and single-occupancy cars. All patients have to do to avoid paying the bus fare is show their appointment card to the bus driver; this also allows one accompanying person to travel for free.

The final presentation was from Christchurch City Council staff about encouraging active commuting through its Central City Travel Programme, as part of its post-earthquake redevelopment. Their Travel Demand Management programme has been very effective, using a range of approaches to complement each other. The built environment needs to facilitate active travel, rather than causing barriers, but this is insufficient. Affecting cultural and social norms; behaviour change approaches; provision of information; advocacy; and political commitment and funding are all required.

Travel Demand Management was also the subject of John Lieswyn’s talk on school travel planning. He pointed out that the actual process of developing a school travel plan can be the stimulus not only for travel behaviour change but also for closer engagement and collaboration between local government, school administrators, boards, and parents. It is also an opportunity to improve road safety and funding for improved infrastructure.

Jessica Calverley, a Masters student in the Active Living Laboratory at the University of Otago in Dunedin, reported some findings from the rural Otago arm of the BEATS Study. Of the adolescents living within 4.8km from their school, 57% used only active modes for their commute and 31% only motorised modes. Overall, they perceived that walking to school was safer, had better social support, had fewer disadvantages, and also better infrastructure than cycling to school, although almost all believed that both walking and cycling to school were great ways to be physically active. Cycling was perceived as having advantages over walking where distances were longer, the student felt tired, or in cold/wet weather. A fellow student, Brittany White, compared adolescents’ perceptions in rural settlements with small-to-medium urban areas. Interestingly, the rural youth were less concerned about unsafe road crossings. High traffic volumes and too many vehicles stopping or parking near schools were more of a concern in the small-to-medium urban areas.

The final presentation was from Dr Aimee Ward from the University of Otago, Dunedin. With her co-authors, she reported on skateboarding as a form of active travel that is underrepresented in studies and reports. She found that the 14 adolescents in the study who used skateboards for travel were more physically active overall and had better wellbeing than those using any other travel mode. However, their screen time was greater. She emphasised that it is important to consider skateboarding when planning travel infrastructure and policies.

In the second plenary session, Martin Dutton, from the Ministry of Health, reported on New Zealand’s draft response to the World Health Organization’s 2018 Global Action Plan on Physical Activity. The main message will be to make the healthier choice the easier choice. Currently, physical inactivity costs New Zealand $1.3bn annually.  A government objective is to improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders. A government priority is to increase social wellbeing and connectedness. Which brought us nicely full circle at the end of Day 1 of the TALES Symposium, as we had heard all day about the importance of active travel in promoting wellbeing, social connections, and, of course, physical activity. I wrote about the relevance of active travel to WHO goals in my editorial to volume 11 of the Journal of Transport and Health, December 2018.