Innovations in Non-Motorized Transportation (NMT) Knowledge Creation and Diffusion

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to pause temporarily on an almost planetary scale. The creation and diffusion of knowledge about environmental planning and public health are now almost taken for granted. However, such processes were rather different in pre-pandemic times. It took a substantial dose of labor and resources to generate the information needed to produce useful and usable knowledge, and especially to make it available to others in a timely and effective way. As automobility has come to occupy center stage in the lives of an increasing number of suburbanized dwellers, it has taken multiple energy and public health crises, bold leadership, and the real threat of climate change to create the conditions needed to bolster sustainable Non-Motorized Transportation (NMT) as a complement to cleaner and more convenient mass transit options in cities. How does knowledge about sustainable NMT get created? How are sustainable NMT innovations diffused? How can technological and societal transitions to more sustainable realities be nurtured and augmented? This article utilizes a longitudinal and integrated knowledge creation and diffusion model with a Participatory Planning Process to analyze the adoption of measures aimed at reducing the negative consequences of too much automobility and encouraging higher levels of walking, cycling, and mass transportation. The research methods comprised autoethnographic, qualitative, and policy evaluation techniques. The study makes use of the means and ends matrix to discuss cases from five distinct realms: personal, academic, institutional, volunteering NGO, and private sector. The key findings and lessons learned promote scenarios of managed degrowth and sustainable urban transitions.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to pause temporarily on an almost planetary scale [1]. Many individuals worked from home and religiously adopted social distancing in common spaces outside the home. New communication technologies (ICTs) were utilized for teleworking and to reduce commuting habits [2]. Early studies documenting the environmental impact of the pandemic lockdown revealed cleaner air, much less pollution, and an overall lower ecological footprint on planet Earth [3].

Kunzmann hypothesized that some of the pandemic-induced changes could have a continued impact in how most people in the Western world live, work, shop, and enjoy recreation [4]. For instance, in the United States the pandemic caused restaurants to offer outdoor dining in reconquered public spaces that were previously occupied by moving and parked automobiles [5]. The reliance on new technological measures was possible in 2020 given recent advancements in ICT; it would have been, however, unthinkable until the early 2000s, given that the internet only took off commercially in the US in 1993 [6].

How did knowledge about more sustainable transportation options get created and diffused before and in the early days of the information revolution? How have we gotten to where we are today? In an era when open access and CC–BY protocols are utilized to publish materials online, how does knowledge about sustainable non-motorized transportation (NMT) innovations get created? How does NMT get implemented and materialized in specific projects and actions?

Public policy diffusion has been widely studied in areas such as urbanism [7,8], urban revitalization, such as with the case of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) [9] and Tax Increment Financing (TIF) [10], and urban regeneration governance mechanisms [11]. Specifically in the area of sustainable transport and environmental impacts, Hajer studied how the politics of environmental discourse were influenced by relationships between ecological modernization and public policy processes [12]. More recently, Pooley conducted a longitudinal study of pedestrian practices in Britain during the twentieth century and concluded that motorized transport has been normalized and pedestrianism marginalized [13].

In the United States, where the level of motorization is higher than Great Britain’s, Pucher et al. discovered that at the turn of the twentieth century, “cycling levels have increased in both the USA and Canada, while cyclist fatalities have fallen” [14] (p. 451). Reid sensibly analyzed the evolution of bicycle planning in the United States and Britain during the same time period and claimed that in spite of growing motorization levels, cycling in the US has potential to grow in the future [15]. However, there is a gap in the literature on how knowledge about NMT gets created and disseminated and why certain communities (and not others) are improved as a consequence of said knowledge diffusion.

This article utilizes a knowledge creation and diffusion model to illustrate the generation and spread of knowledge in NMT utilizing the author’s more than 25 years of research, teaching, and lived experience in this substantive area, mostly in the United States. Central to the study is how NMT knowledge was studied and deployed in different contexts with relatively similar aims: to create safer, more convenient, and more attractive ways of walking and riding bicycles for transportation. These transfers took place in the mid-1990s and early 2000s and occurred between the Netherlands and Portugal, between Europe and the United States, and in the US between the northeast and the southwest coasts, respectively. While the author’s experience involved countries with relatively similar patterns of development within the Global North, the article also underpins examples of policy diffusion and adoption between the Global North and the Global South (mostly Brazil).

Published materials deal with efforts in the United States starting in the early 2000s. These four papers on NMT in North America are especially salient: (i) the author’s volunteering to teach a brand new NMT course with the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) curriculum in the infancy of bicycle and pedestrian planning in the US [16]; (ii) the need to expand education in NMT, a conclusion derived from a survey of urban and regional planning schools in the US and Canada [17]; (iii) the realization that the amount of materials (articles, books, conference proceedings) was growing and already added to a substantial body of knowledge that would make this sustainable transportation planning, and NMT in particular, a specialized area [18]; and (iv) the need for individual tenacity within a call for more government responsibility in the implementation of US non-motorized transportation planning [19]. In spite of these earlier efforts, a gap remains in how early NMT knowledge gets created, diffused, transferred, and implemented.

Earlier efforts that influenced the author’s advocacy views, as well as those of other professionals and educators, are utilized to illustrate continuous actions on multiple fronts. This article fills a gap in the history of sustainable transportation planning in the Western hemisphere by highlighting transitions facilitated by the author and many other scholars, activists, and policy-makers. It argues that NMT resources are now much more abundant than three decades ago. However, relatively similar challenges seem to still exist, with high levels of car dependency, especially in the United States, as well as in many countries in the Global North, including the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland) and Portugal. Resources (or means) to affect positive change seem to always be scarce; nonetheless, there is ample evidence of free electric vehicle (EV) charging stations (or at a highly subsidized rate), proliferating in the parking lots of federal, state, and city office complexes, shopping malls, and university campuses in the US and elsewhere. It is observed that volunteering and non-profit organizations have helped to increase bicycle and walking levels and conditions in many cities throughout the Global North and in a few in the Global South [20]. However, burn-out precludes more visible results (or ends) to materialize and provide effective outcomes to resolve this extremely serious environmental, safety, and energy problem [21].

An important disclaimer refers to the fact that NMT includes both walking and bicycling (regular and e-bikes) and a whole array of micromobility modes (skates, razers, scooters, etc.) [22,23]. There is a fundamental distinction between walking and bicycling and where they take place. This article is written in four parts. After this introduction, Part One provides the analytical mechanism in two subparts: (i) how to encourage bicycling and (ii) how to shape public policy by creating and diffusing knowledge. Part Two provides brief overviews of the five distinct cases. Part Three is a comparative discussion of the case studies according to the means and ends matrix. And Part Four provides some concluding remarks and avenues for further research.

2. Methods and Analytical Mechanism

The research methods comprised autoethnographic, qualitative, and policy evaluation techniques [24,25]. The data sources comprised refereed articles, papers in proceedings of conferences, scholarly books, design and transportation planning manuals, legal policy documents, and trade magazine and newspaper articles published between the mid-1990s and the early 2020s. The study makes use of the means and ends matrix [26,27] to discuss cases from five distinct realms: personal, academic, institutional, volunteering NGO, and private sector. The five realms were selected based on the author’s teaching, research, and work experience in the field of non-motorized transportation planning, mostly in Portugal, the United States, and Brazil. The criteria for inclusion and exclusion are given in the second column of Figure 1, depending on whether the goal is to create or diffuse knowledge. It is also opportune to disclose at the onset that research on innovation diffusion (e.g., Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory [28]), transition management theory [29], and planning theory [30] have been triangulated and contribute to a better understanding and development of the analytical mechanism and comparative discussions in the article.

The analytical mechanism is given in three parts: ontological arguments, knowledge creation, and participatory planning processes. Figure 1 illustrates the main components of this model. Knowledge is the third stage in Klosterman’s model of information hierarchy [31], which comprises four stages: data, information, knowledge, and intelligence. A revised model for the twenty-first century information revolution assumes that observations, as proxies for the five senses, appear before data and that innovations are the outcomes of intelligent knowledge creation and diffusion processes.

As such, a Janus-like positionality of the revised Klosterman’s model of the hierarchy of information can be utilized to deduct the characteristics responsible for the formulation of intelligence and knowledge diffusion, and these are the lived experiences of one or more individuals via observations, the quantitative and or qualitative conceptualizations of realities, which result in data, the casual exchanges of data that become information, and the formal routines and or procedures, which constitute intelligence creation and knowledge diffusion. This model assumes that knowledge diffusion is influenced by time, resources, freedom, and multiple levels (omni-channels) (Figure 1).

Public participation and public engagement take multiple forms in hopes of involving as many people as possible in those processes [32]. In this study’s model, the participatory planning process (PPP) comprises three distinct steps: debating, considering, and acting. The debating step corresponds to the governance of socio-technical innovations and is based on the means and ends matrix, which applies to both individual as well as collective scenarios, leading to further consideration and action on a given problem. However, action will not occur without leadership taken by issue champions within causal or formal settings. The highly sought-after momentum in the sustainability transition movement likely requires a combination of ad hoc individual leadership and more established and formalized public policies, carried out through the proper institutional mechanisms and forums. The considering step draws on Geels’ Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), consisting of landscape, regime, and niche [33]. Finally, the acting step sets the desirable outcomes with the two most plausible scenarios needed to accomplish the goals of the sustainable transition movement: to decrease automobility and to increase non-motorized sustainable transport levels via managed degrowth and managed transition, respectively.

2.1. How to Encourage More Bicycling

The answers to the question of how to encourage more bicycling are relatively consensual. The ontological arguments consist of two schools of thought: (i) pro-bicycle and pro-bicycle facilities and (ii) pro-bicycle, regular riding. The first school of thought was encapsulated by the Northern European and Scandinavian approach to create the infrastructure of cities with separate cycle lanes and trails and to facilitate bicycle use for everyday transport, which in the US is encapsulated by Pucher and Clorer [34]. The second school of thought was born out of a vision associated with the bicycle as a vehicle, which could replace automobile rides for short distances. The second school of thought was the outcome of a hybrid vision between competitive bicycle racing in tournaments and championships and weekend cyclo-tourism organized as a mode of ecological activism and gathering camaraderie, born out of the 1970s hippie movement and energy crisis. Forester has consistently argued that bicyclists ought to be aware that they are riding a vehicle and as such should behave like drivers when riding with regular traffic on city streets [35]. Earlier discussions on these two schools of thought took place in the pages of Transportation Quarterly in the early 1990s [34,36].

In the US, the two schools of thought led to the prominence of the former, the pro-bicycle and pro-facility approach, due to the National Bicycle and Walking Study 1992 and the 24 case studies [37] financed by the FHWA under President Bush’s ISTEA Legislation. Critical to its partial success were the multiple study trips where planners and traffic engineers traveled the world in search of best practices and lessons learned from pilot programs in Northern European countries (i.e., Germany, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway) and Korea and Japan. In the United States, the cities of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Davis and Santa Barbara, California, were at the forefront of taming automobile traffic and redesigning city streets to better accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians in the 1990s [38].

It is opportune to also recognize that similar efforts to create infrastructure in cities to better accommodate bicycle transportation were taking place in Brazil in the late 1990s and during the 2000s under the leadership of A. Miranda, who was involved in creating two key bicycle planning documents: (i) Cycling Planning: National Diagnosis (Planejamento Cicloviário: Diagnóstico Nacional) 2002 and (ii) Cycle Planning Manual (Manual de Planejamento Cicloviário) 2002 [39,40]. These documents provided a ‘diagnosis’ for cycling in Brazil and advice on planning cycling into the urban fabric [41].

Years later, all Brazilian cities with a population higher than 20,000 inhabitants would be required to develop a plan for urban mobility integrated into municipal master plans for urban development (Plano Director), which now ought to be revised every 10 years [41]. These sustainable mobility efforts were initiatives of the Brazilian Federal Government, initiated much earlier than the more recently and perhaps better known and emblematic programs “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” and “Bolsa Família” [42].

The Curitiba, Paraná, and Florianopolis–Blumenau, Santa Catarina, regions of Brazil, with their high concentrations of Portuguese, German, Polish, Italian, and Ukrainian immigrants, were already rather active in pro-bicycling advocacy in the late 1990s and early 2000s [43]. To a certain extent, their efforts scaled-up to the National Policy of Urban Mobility approved in Brazil in 2012. Said policy promoted the integration of transportation, transit, and urban space planning while prioritizing active non-motorized transportation modes. More recently, for bicycling in the largest Brazilian cities, policies have expanded on the work of Vasconcellos on more transit and transport management [44], and these initiatives gained prominence with the documentary “Bikes vs. Cars”, directed by F. Gertten [45]. The role of bicycle planning advocacy organizations has been critical to encouraging more people to cycle and to improve the infrastructure of Brazilian cities [46].

2.2. How to Shape Public Policy by Creating and Diffusing Knowledge

The how to do it (i.e., implementing sustainable transportation planning measures) obviously varies depending on existing systems in place (socio-economic, technical, legal, cultural, etc.). Nonetheless, an attempt at mapping innovations in the means and ends matrix makes the prioritization of actions slightly easier to visualize and carry out. The means and ends matrix is flexible and adaptable to different intensities, levels, and degrees of resource availability (means), as well as variable political and leadership commitments, such as how forcefully one wants to accomplish or reach the desirable ends. Innovations comprise new ways of doing things and reaching desirable outcomes (ends). Public policy may be needed to regulate innovations, and in other cases, innovations benefit from not being constrained by public policies (the spread of knowledge), whether they are verbal, written, visual, or mathematical (ancient knowledge, undisputable truths, etc.).

The means and ends matrix is particularly useful because of its simplicity and ease of visualization across two continuums. Its use was suggested by Christensen with applications to issues of urban poverty and corresponding public policies aimed at its eradication [26]. Smith et al. applied it to the governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions [27], and Corais et al. discussed it in the context of transition processes for sustainable urban mobility [47]. The four quadrants of the matrix can easily be converted into public policy scenarios with different ranges of reach and time horizons [48]. The range of the continuum enables radical solutions as well as the possibility of innovating incrementally. The ensuing strategic planning processes can be championed by leadership in different contexts. In a context where many advocates and professional associations are striving for professional relevance, the recognition that there are various degrees of comfort and risk creates space for technically sophisticated solutions as well as opportunities to include the opinions of those who are likely to benefit the most from the solutions to be implemented.

To a certain extent, the sustainability transition movement is derived from the resilience movement and from Holling’s Panarchy Model, which comprises adaptability and transformability in four stages: (i) compression, (ii) release, (iii) restructure, and (iv) reorganization [49]. Geels and Schot conceptualized transition models by focusing on disruptive shock, alteration of status quo, incorporation of innovations, visible results, and scale-up programs [50]. The iatrogenic nature of transportation planning is expressed by Badami, who argues that the “tendency to exacerbate the very problems it purports to address, leads to the need for more expertise, and transportation planning (and planners), like personal motor vehicles themselves, [which] become self-perpetuating” [51] (p. 50). One could argue that notions of powerful knowledge (PK) as proposed by Kirby ought to help materialize the implementation of the sustainability transition movement [52].

For the sake of convenience, one could also think in terms of who creates and diffuses knowledge and how. Regarding the who, Dahle identified four types of actors who typically play a role in shaping transitions to future sustainability paths [53]. They include (i) reformists; (ii) impatient revolutionaries; (iii) community activists; and (iv) patient revolutionaries. This article takes a simplified approach by relying on four distinct categories of actors: academia; public institutions; volunteers; and private actors. It starts with personal experiences and then it progresses towards examples from the published literature.

We also know that in the marketplace of ideas creating knowledge has costs (collecting and analyzing data, synthesizing findings, and disseminating results). Open source is increasingly required by some governmental and R&D institutions, given their sponsorship in part or fully for consultancy, studies, and reports, as well as science and technology programs. The sharing of resources (knowledge) obviates the constraints of the marketplace. While this appears to be an evolving field with different and even contradictory practices, more and more open-source publications are being produced to facilitate access to materials, many of them researched with public funds; there are also examples of putting a (symbolic) price on materials in order to foster sustainable financing revenue streams, especially in the case of the volunteering sector and NGOs (e.g., the 2016 Bicycling and Walking in the United States—Benchmarking Report for sale on amazon.com).

Finally, Geels developed a multi-level perspective (MLP) on technological transitions and system innovations, arguing that transitions take place through the alignment of multiple processes [54], some of which are also exemplified in Figure 1. More recently, Bruno studied a novel and systematic application of an MLP to evaluate the relationship between cycling innovations and sustainability goals within a given institutional context [55].

3. Realms

3.1. Personal (Lived Experience)

The personal example is based on the author’s lived experiences, mostly in two countries (Portugal and the United States) and specifically in five main places: Aveiro, Portugal; Gronning (The Netherlands); Amherst and Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Phoenix, Arizona; and Albany, New York. If there is a line of thought running through my own personal experience with sustainable non-motorized transportation planning, it is directly related to knowledge creation based on trust relationships, the trust I put in the professors who supervised my undergraduate and postgraduate work [56,57] and likely the trust (or expectations) others have put in me (to which I obviously fell short to their disappointment). Hopefully, some of the more than two thousand students in the United States who had classes with me were motivated to pursue fulfilling (academic) planning careers of their own [58].

The decision to study urban and regional planning has been explained elsewhere [59]. As such, here I begin with the decision to study abroad in Groningen with a scholarship from the E.U. Erasmus Program in 1994 [60], which upon returning to Portugal influenced my undergraduate honors thesis on the development of a bicycle master plan consisting of both hard and soft components for the medium-sized city of Aveiro, where I had been an undergraduate student for four years [57]. I presented the project at international conferences and published two papers on it. The city was one of the first Southern European cities to create a shared bicycle scheme. I relocated to the US to pursue my graduate education in 1996, and Aveiro remained at the forefront of bicycle planning, if not also at the forefront of the development of bicycle facilities, at least in terms of city branding. However, the network of bicycle lanes, paths, and trails and suggested promotional recommendations likely did not gain as much traction as they could have had I remained in the country. Nonetheless, the academic training gained with that research and applied project served me well in terms of preparation, inspiration, and project skills for graduate school and earlier career advancement.

When I relocated to the United States, I discovered a vastly different country from both Portugal and the Netherlands. It was a country on wheels, dependent on motorized transportation to reach places, especially those located in the suburbs that were not reachable by public transportation. If my interest in the broad area of sustainable mobility and urbanism developed in the mid-1990s when I spent a semester abroad in the Netherlands, the US, especially the college town of Amherst, MA, proved to be an exceptional example of what I believed Southern Europe, especially Portugal, was heading toward: automobile dependence, highway construction, suburbanization, shopping mall development, sprawl development, and the further shrinking of the territory along the Spanish border.

The Netherlands requires their urban and regional planning to be quite different from the equivalent practice in my home country. Within a brief time span, my perspective on social–ecological systems would evolve quite radically with my education in North America. I am not necessarily referring to the continent’s magnitude but to concepts such as the carrying capacity of natural systems and the human footprint caused by global economic systems. Puzzled by the complexity of said challenges (and opportunities), I attempted to learn the intricacies of human development and how territorial practices materialize to enable socio-economic progress to take shape, while also ensuring responsible social and environmental activities.

A summer internship with the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after being in the country for only six months enabled me to learn about a cosmopolitan lifestyle and progressive urban planning in the Boston metro area, especially in the other Massachusetts college town of Cambridge. My participation in the city’s bicycle parking program, where I would contact the city’s merchants and attempt to convince business owners to pay for half of a bicycle rack installed in front of their establishments as part of an innovative public–private partnership and on high school grounds, taught me about the contrasting views of those who deliberately embraced the program versus those who declined to participate in it on the basis that they already paid their taxes and it was the city’s responsibility to pay for the whole bicycle rack. The program had been modeled on a similar program in the city of Toronto. Working with UC Berkeley and MIT alumni at City Hall, as well as countless volunteers for the city’s many transportation, environmental, and community development programs, was extremely rewarding [61]. Cambridge’s two Ivy League schools and the presence of a young, educated, and highly skilled workforce and a growing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure reinforced that it was possible to create more sustainable, safe, livable, and exciting cities in the United States.

By then, I had been exposed to four college towns with varied sizes, typologies, and hinterlands: Aveiro, Groningen, Amherst, and Cambridge. Cambridge was located in the center of a large metro area with 3.2 million people, much denser and dynamic than the small city of Aveiro, with only 60 thousand inhabitants; the City of Gronning, with only 170 thousand inhabitants; or the town of Amherst in western Massachusetts, with 30 thousand inhabitants. The practice of knocking on doors and asking for collaboration for the installation of NMT street equipment was a way of assessing business attitudes and reactions to encourage alternative transport in a relatively youth-oriented and progressive city such as Cambridge.

An earlier and incipient way of bicycle sharing in a college town was the practice of leaving a bicycle for the next visiting scholar who would temporarily relocate to Amherst. Bicycle sharing schemes were formalized in the United States only in the early 2010s after success in Paris, London, and, of course, Aveiro in central Portugal, and they are now widely available in all major cities throughout the world, including North American cities, under the label of micromobility [22,23].

Amherst, given its small-town orientation, proved to be a fruitful place to study bicycle and walking on college campuses in the early 2000s, perhaps analogous to Phoenix, with its high volume of cars, for studying automobility-oriented roadbuilding, parking management, and speed enforcement on arterials and highways through the installation of video cameras [62]. On the East Coast, tactical urbanism was utilized in New York City at a grand scale in the Times Square redesign. While I was not involved directly with said project, I researched its creation, deployment, and initial assessment in Walkable Cities [56]. Times Square’s mid-town location, coupled with its high density of employment; services, especially its specialized retail and entertainment establishments; ample subway service; and many transit routes, led to the deployment of a successful scheme [63], which has inspired, if not been blatantly replicated in, countless cities and towns throughout the country and even the world.

3.2. Academic (Didactic Realm)

As my academic career progressed, I encountered and discovered lasting legacies on the basis of knowledge creation and diffusion in the area of sustainable non-motorized transportation planning. Across the pond in England, two early academics who directly influenced my interests and motivated me deeply deserve particular attention. They were Professor H. McClintock at the University of Nottingham and Professor R. Tolley at Staffordshire University. McClintock’s book “The Bicycle and City Traffic: Principles and Practice” [64] had been instrumental in helping me to write my undergraduate honors project, and our common interests in increasing the knowledge base of planning, urban design, and engineering professionals with new skills on sustainable transportation planning developed in parallel when I relocated to the United States [16,65]. When the internet was still a novel tool in gathering and making knowledge available to everybody, McClintock was also instrumental in spearheading and maintaining one of the first “encyclopaedia”—a comprehensive website of sustainable urban travel bibliographies, no longer active, though (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sbe/planbiblios/) (accessed on 25 September 2025), with a particular emphasis on cycling and walking; all entries are regularly updated, together with a full list of relevant organizations, contact details, and URLs [66]. Professor R. Tolley coordinated a research group at the Centre for Alternative and Sustainable Transport (CAST) at Staffordshire University and edited an impressive tome in 2003 titled “Sustainable Transport: Planning for walking and cycling in urban environments” [67].

Regarding additional examples of powerful knowledge, contributions, and legacies, it is worth mentioning two other scholars who have left lasting legacies in the field: B. Hillier, the creator of the Space Syntax methodology, and J. Fábos, the proponent of a greenway international movement. The former taught and conducted research at University College London (UCL) and the latter at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor B. Hillier created Space Syntax, a way to understand and improve the design of suburban estates built in post-World War II England by identifying and mapping lines of sight and use. The use of computers in urban design in the 1970s was something revolutionary, and successive iterations of software development and refinement by Hillier and many other scholars throughout the world garnered him great popularity worldwide. Across the Atlantic, J. Fábos was following in the footsteps of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Professor I. McHarg, the “fathers” of Landscape Architecture and Geographic Information Systems (GISs), respectively. Fábos conducted many landscape analyses in collaboration with other researchers and many students in the METLAND research group. Multiple studies in the 1980s led to Fábos’ Greenway Network vision for New England, which, similarly to Hillier’s Space Syntax methodology, received national and international visibility and recognition.

Hillier’s two main tomes, “The Social Logic of Space” [68] and “Space is the Machine: A configurational theory of architecture” [69], have resulted in a bi-annual International Space Syntax Symposium to share knowledge about Hillier’s theory and methodologies, now in its 14th edition (June 2024, Cyprus). UMass Amherst J. Fábos (and his former colleague, now Prof. Emeritus J. Ahern) edited an impressive volume of articles on greenway planning research throughout the world, to which they gave the title: Greenways: The beginning of an international movement [70], as well as subsequent special issues of Landscape and Urban Planning. In one of those special issues, Ryan et al. advanced the vision of a Greenway Network for New England [71].

Hillier’s methodology was initially conceptualized within a site design perspective for housing estates and has been applied to a wide range of situations [72]. Fábos’ vision was ecological and connected to transport via trails with potential to be utilized in recreation, such as cyclo-tourism, jogging, and horse-back riding, and everyday transportation. Fábos’ legacy has had an important influence in Portugal, Italy, and Hungary, among others: the Portuguese Greenway Association (Rede de Corredores Verdes) [73] had applications in Lisbon [74], Porto [75], and Coimbra [76]; in Italy, it led to the Associazione Italiana Greenways [77]; and in Hungary, collaborations with various universities have led to the Fábos International Conferences (now posthumous) every three years in alternate locations (Amherst, MA and Budapest, Hungary), now in their eighth edition (Amherst, 2025) [78].

3.3. Institutional (Reformist)

Of the five types of realms discussed in this article, this category is perhaps the better known one. The US love affair with the automobile is well documented [79,80]. The motto “talk the talk and walk the walk” is easier said than done, especially in the extremely large suburban metropolises of the West Coast of the United States, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, where commuters spend a considerable part of their day driving to and from work [21,81]. A territorial development model based on automobility has also become prevalent in other parts of the world, including Southern Europe [82].

Despite this, federal, regional, and national pro-bicycle and pro-walking public policy and activism developed in as early as the early 1990s, with the FHWA ordering research for the National Bicycle and Walking Study in 1994, which comprised 24 case studies covering all sorts of aspects for non-motorized transportation planning and integration with mass transit. As recognized above, some of the case studies involved study trips abroad to other countries for exploration and in loco verification of best practices.

One of the major innovations of this national policy was the requirement that state Departments of Transportation and municipalities hire non-motorized transport planners and implement the 4’Es framework (i.e., Education, Engineering, Encouragement, Enforcement), which later turned into a 5’Es framework with the Evaluation component. The creation and institutionalization of a bicycle coordinator at the state and municipal level was critical to accomplishing results on the ground in the United States. The thousands of bicycle and walking professionals working for the various branches of government have been partly responsible for the myriad of projects, plans, ordinances, pilot projects, new NMT infrastructures, traffic-calming improvements, etc. The policy at the national level has now changed to issues related to equity, justice, and climate change [83].

3.4. Volunteering (Grassroots Advocacy)

A car-free existence has been hailed as the hallmark of the millennium generation. The smart phone has taken the place of a car with new mobility practices (car sharing and bicycle sharing). However, long distances between destinations often preclude the use of bicycles among family members. This situation is rather different in exceptionally large cities (NYC, San Francisco, Chicago) with ample mobility options and in small and medium-sized cities, where places are easily reachable by bicycle. Volunteering occurs at national, regional, and local levels. For instance, the Portuguese Federation of Cycle-tourism and Bicycle Users (FPCUB) has a long history of promoting cyclo-tourism in Portugal. This has led to many localized efforts at creating better mobility and accessibility conditions for vulnerable citizens through lobbying for more extensive networks of bicycle and pedestrian facilities [84].

There is a natural allegiance between ecological and transport advocacy. The Arizona Valley Forward’s Phoenix Pedestrian Freeway is a case in point. The Phoenix Pedestrian Freeway has been promoted by the NGO Arizona Valley Forward since the mid-late 2000s. It comprised the identification of metropolitan-scale regional greenways that could provide alternatives to riding on the regular street network. This was a complement to Ellin’s proposal for Canalscape Urbanism [85] and the vision to reinforce the role of canals throughout the Phoenix metropolitan area as double amenities utilized for transporting water and providing opportunities for recreation, jogging, walking, bicycling and horse-back riding [86].

It is important to clarify that the Phoenix canals in the sunbelt have been purposefully designed, built, and maintained to deliver water from the Colorado river to the various cities, towns, and Indian reservations throughout the Phoenix metro area. The stream restoration efforts in the Northeast studied by Smardon et al. are based on social justice movements aimed at improving access to greenway amenities in disenfranchised communities of the rustbelt [87].

Other early examples of bicycle advocacy and safety include the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition’s workshops aimed at teaching bicycle riding skills [88]. At the national level, other examples of volunteering and NGO activism include the work of the National Bicycle and Walking Center, the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP), the Victoria Transportation Institute spearheaded by T. Litman [22], and multiple Greenway Associations (e.g., Portugal, Italy), which have long promoted landscape architecture projects aimed at open-space conservation, parks, and the reactivation of abandoned railroads as multi-use trails.

3.5. Private (Commodified and Unsanctioned Activities)

There is some research work on the professional practice of urban designers [89,90]. Consulting around NMTs is less understood, with some large consulting companies occupying center stage due to decentralized business models (AECOM, ARUP, Alta Design, Toole Design, and Nelson/Nygaard). Some emerged out of successful advocacy and consulting practices, and large firms created units responsible for NMT planning. Obviously, planning and engineering consulting firms seek further return on their investments; therefore, it is common in certain instances for them to export ready-made (turn-key) solutions without a full understanding of local contexts to countries in lower development plateaus [91]. The types of consulting work include bicycle masterplans, the design of trails and other bicycle facilities, and bicycle share schemes. Emblematic of private practice are the first generation of bicycle master plans produced by sustainable mobility consultants. The design of shared bicycle schemes in the 1990s and early 2000s, which were previously implemented in cities such as Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Aveiro, Portugal, and which are now found throughout most world (big and small) cities, could be considered an example of mobility policies [92]. Unsanctioned tactical urbanism measures aimed at increasing road safety and neighborhood conviviality are examples of low-tech solutions often with big regards for the communities willing to promote them (e.g., chalk on pavement, strawbale parklets, community libraries, etc.).

4. Comparative Discussion and Scenarios for NMT Sustainable Transitions

There are two kinds of possible frameworks utilized to analyze knowledge creation and diffusion: substantive and procedural. Substantive frameworks deal with the subject matter, while procedural ones refer to how such knowledge is created and utilized and how its impact and relevance are diffused. This article focuses more on the procedural nature of knowledge to relate means for knowledge creation with ends and transition scenarios towards which that knowledge can be put (

Table 1. Means and ends matrix with examples.

	Low Means Low Ends	Low Means High Ends	High Means Low Ends	High Means High Ends
Personal	Period in Portugal before Erasmus study abroad (growth of household incomes, motorizing nation)	Aveiro (political leadership, Bicicleta de Utilização Gratuita de Aveiro/Aveiro’s Free Use Bicycle—BUGA), late 1990s and early to mid-2000s	Phoenix growth model (low ends due to more of the same automobility models)	Global Financial Crisis—inversion of VMT (car-peak) 2012–2013
Academia	Teaching transportation (in the 1990s) without considering NMT	McClintock’s online bicycle encyclopaedia	Armchair theorizing without ample real applications	Academic legacy and rich databases of studies
Institutional realm	Status quo is dominated by generalized high levels of automobility	U.S. National Bicycling and Walking Study; Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals (APBP)	Updating ITE’s manuals	State and local bicycle coordinators
Volunteering sector	Cyclo-tourism (NGO of national utility status); cyclo-tourism 1990s	Bicycle riding workshops, Phoenix’s Pedestrian Freeway	Awards/funds given to mobility public work projects that mostly foster an automobility agenda	Pulling together by different constituencies (time commitments, lobbying activities, fundraising)
Private realm	First generation of bike master plans produced by sustainable mobility consultants	Tactical urbanism (low tech—chalk on pavement, and straw bale for parklets, etc.)	Consultant delivered turn-key solutions without an understanding of local contexts	Design of shared bicycle schemes (learning from bicycle planning in Aveiro, Portugal)
Ensuing scenarios	Chaotic transition	Managed degrowth	Business as usual	Managed transition

). As mentioned above, the means here refer to various resources such as time, information, knowledge, funding, technical expertise, media, marketing tools, etc., while ends are represented by goals, outcomes, specific results, and the materialization of goals and objectives. Table 2 comprises scenarios for NMT sustainable transitions.

4.1. Low Means, Low Ends

The personal case refers to the period in Portugal before my participation in the Erasmus study abroad program (i.e., growth of household incomes, motorizing nation), which delivered few (if any) bicycle facilities [93]. The emphasis was mostly on utilizing existing road networks for cyclo-tourism and bicycle advocacy. The Academia case is exemplified by the teaching of transportation planning in the US in the 1990s without considering NMT. This was mostly due to a lack of awareness and knowledge of how to cater to the needs of vulnerable citizens, which also resulted in insufficient demand for better facilities and networks. The institutional case is represented by the status quo, dominated by generalized high levels of automobility. The volunteering activities materialized in cyclo-tourism activities (NGOs with national utility status). And the private realm resulted in the first generation of bicycle master plans conducted by consultants and bicycle enthusiasts as a direct outcome of the energy crises of the 1970s.

4.2. Low Means, High Ends

The personal case is exemplified by rather modest means of acquiring bicycles and creative funding to pay for the operation of the Bicicleta de Utilização Gratuita de Aveiro/Aveiro’s Free Use Bicycle (BUGA). Said innovative scheme benefited greatly from municipal political leadership in the late 1990s and the early to mid-2000s [94]. This involved collaboration with the bicycle manufacturing industry in the Aveiro–Águeda region and utilization of publicity to offset the costs of running the program. In academia, McClintock’s online bicycle encyclopaedia and major cataloging of resources was time-consuming but rather comprehensive in terms of scope and outreach. The institutional example, which culminated with the U.S. National Bicycling and Walking Study, involved relatively tiny amounts of funding, but its comprehensiveness led to broad outcomes. This was followed by a large number of strategies: complete streets and safe routes to school and the professionalization of competences and skills in the area of bicycle and pedestrian planning via the APBP. The volunteering case exemplified by bicycle riding workshops and the Phoenix Pedestrian Freeway vision demonstrates a commitment to safe bicycle riding and a vision of a network of connected trails and nature preserves [95]. The private example comprises technical solutions to help implement tactical urbanism activities (temporary street furniture, chalk on pavement designs, modest streetscape improvements and parklets), which, as hoped, will eventually materialize into more permanent solutions.

4.3. High Means, Low Ends

The personal example reveals that undirected and unfocused means in the Phoenix growth-oriented reality resulted in low ends and the perpetuation of an auto-centric mobility model. The academia example pertains to an overabundance of resources (e.g., hundreds of thousands of research papers and reviews, in certain cases, whose findings may go unread due to their armchair theorizing without real applications/implications). At the institutional level, the updating of the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) manuals to reflect the latest trends in safety, design standards, procedures, and policies is laudable. However, their lack of generalized applicability or high costs may result in ineffective solutions being deployed on the ground. The volunteering case exemplifying high means and low ends is the case of awards/funds given to projects that foster an automobility agenda and are counter-productive to advancing innovative bicycling and walking projects. Finally, the private realm case occurs when consultants deliver turn-key solutions without an understanding of local contexts.

4.4. High Means, High Ends

The “Dutch disease” conceptualization is helpful here. It refers to when an increase in economic prosperity leads to a decline in other sectors. It has also been explained as an easy-to-catch economic illness but a rather difficult-to-cure malaise. In developed societies, resources may become abundant. However, this does not mean that their deployment will help to resolve endemic and wicked social problems. In the case of the United States, my reaction when relocating from Arizona to upstate New York in the mid-2010s was that the typical Arizona car-dominated society was widespread everywhere, with perhaps only slightly more relatively compact development better suited to the successful deployment of non-motorized modes.

The personal case is exemplified by the Global Financial Crisis, when in the context of a lack of funding and dwindling revenues the surge in technical expertise (high means) directly and/or indirectly accomplished high ends, which led to switching from automobility to more sustainable modes, which became known as the car peak, and one of the first inversions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in recent decades occurred in 2012–2013 [96]. In academia, the legacy of rich databases of studies is apparently a bonanza of technical knowledge and advocacy fodder. However, for those innovative ideas to materialize they need to be wisely delivered and implemented in places where they can have influence. The institutional dimension can be exemplified by state and local bicycle coordinators, where their existence in planning and transportation departments enables lobbying for additional resources (means) and the accomplishing of ends via infrastructure improvements and successful promotional campaigns. The volunteering example comprises the pulling together of multiple resources (e.g., time commitments, lobbying activities, fundraising) by different constituencies. Finally, the private case can be illustrated by the design of tailor-made shared bicycle schemes with ample public participation by groups of committed citizens.

Table 2. Scenarios for NMT according to the MLP approach (after [54,97]).

	Landscape	Regime	Niche	Desirable Outcomes
Chaotic transition [Low means, low ends]	Generalized collapse	Collapse of interim regimes	No new technologies	Risk of not accomplishing anything positive
Managed degrowth [Low means, high ends]—likely outcome: (un)desirable automobility	Shortage of resources and some regulation	Phased deconstruction of regime actors	Potentially significant innovation	High level of experimentation and low risk of failure
Business as usual [high means, low ends]	Low probability of fostering positive change	Stable membership in regime actors	Some niche technologies	Uncommitted activities and actions
Managed transition [high means, high ends]—likely outcome: desirable NMT	Sustainable mobility on a grand scale	Strong regulation and policy (funding)	Strong encouragement of new technologies (bike boulevards, skyways, etc.)	Higher certainty of accomplishing positive outcomes

Table 2. Scenarios for NMT according to the MLP approach (after [54,97]).

	Landscape	Regime	Niche	Desirable Outcomes
Chaotic transition [Low means, low ends]	Generalized collapse	Collapse of interim regimes	No new technologies	Risk of not accomplishing anything positive
Managed degrowth [Low means, high ends]—likely outcome: (un)desirable automobility	Shortage of resources and some regulation	Phased deconstruction of regime actors	Potentially significant innovation	High level of experimentation and low risk of failure
Business as usual [high means, low ends]	Low probability of fostering positive change	Stable membership in regime actors	Some niche technologies	Uncommitted activities and actions
Managed transition [high means, high ends]—likely outcome: desirable NMT	Sustainable mobility on a grand scale	Strong regulation and policy (funding)	Strong encouragement of new technologies (bike boulevards, skyways, etc.)	Higher certainty of accomplishing positive outcomes

5. Conclusions

This article utilized a longitudinal and integrated knowledge creation and diffusion model with a participatory planning process to analyze the adoption of measures aimed at reducing the negative consequences of too much automobility and encouraging higher levels of walking, cycling, and mass transportation. Homrighausen and Tan did the impossible by comparing urban development and transport programs in the extremely compact Groningen, the Netherlands, and the extremely sprawly Phoenix, Arizona, United States [98]. This article’s author lived in both cities ten years apart, for a brief six-month-period in Gronning in the mid-1990s and for 10 years in the Phoenix metropolitan area, 2004–2014.

A fivefold criterion was utilized to discuss the involvement of distinct stakeholders in the NMT movement. The early personal testimony of mostly cyclo-tourism activities in the 1990s has received increased attention, and with time and hindsight, regular cyclo-tourism in European countries has experienced wider participation [99,100]. This has led to efforts in Portugal to build new trails and bicycle boulevards (e.g., Murtosa in the Aveiro region) and at rehabilitation of de-activated railroad tracks in Alto Minho [101]. However, there is much more work to be done, e.g., rehabilitating the de-activated Pampinhosa–Figueira da Foz railway in central Portugal.

Multiple efforts in academia have resulted in the U.S. greenway movement also being attempted in sprawly Phoenix of all places, perhaps without attribution to Fábos and Ahern’s effort and with a time lag [70]. The proposed Pedestrian Freeway vision and corresponding mapping of a car-dominated metropolis of the U.S. sunbelt has been a bold endeavor. It augmented the work of Professor T. Cook on greenways in Europe [102], and, more recently, Samples’ Ph.D. dissertation has asked whether landscape architects in the sunbelt should be preaching to the choir more vocally [103].

At the institutional level, progress has been made with Cervero et al.’s award-winning book, distilling successful mobility management strategies in various countries throughout the world [104]. Frantzeskaki et al. advanced new insights into how sustainability transitions unfold in diverse types of cities across the world [105]. Specifically, in the United States, the 2022 program aimed at endowing poor communities with ecological amenities in situations where those communities’ waterfronts are severed by highways and expressways is also worthy of attention and further research [106].

The conceptualization and diffusion of knowledge can be deployed in impactful ways. The concept (and spread) of powerful knowledge can lead to behavioral change at various levels (personal, academia, NGO, institutional, and private realm). Volunteering efforts have materialized into tens of non-profit organizations working to encourage safer and more pleasant walking and bicycle riding [107]. Their activities have also created opportunities for consulting companies to work on innovative NMT projects.

One limitation of this article is that most of the examples and considerations pertain mostly to European and American contexts, which are more familiar realities to this author. Further research ought to test this approach and the means and ends matrix in other parts of the developed and developing world, namely Australia, Asia, and Africa. Low-income countries with extremely resource-poor situations might constitute alternative testbeds to analyze the broad applicability of the model depicted in Figure 1. Nonetheless, one could venture to say that the transition movement is partially also underway in the realm of non-motorized transportation planning in North America. Some progress is being made towards higher levels of sustainability [108]. Otherwise, how could we explain the rise in people’s places [109], which closed-down streets to automobiles and created safer and more pleasant spaces for people during and after the COVID-19 pandemic?

Nonetheless, it is certainly reasonable to ask whether transition thinking needs to be further “worlded” [110] (p. 117). The transferability of findings to the Global South will benefit from relying not only on the now classical sustainability framework but also upon the more recent and alternative soft city approach centered on place, movement, and sociability. The powerful knowledge conceptualization ought to empower and liberate action beyond college campuses, dignifying livelihood-enhancing interventions instead of the typical livelihood-destroying techno-managerial solutions of the ecological modernization paradigm, which have proven not to work [111].

Overall, this is demonstrated by “A window into the world” [3] and Wen et al.’s [112] articles: A planet with fewer cars and more pedestrian places is safer, cleaner, and makes urban areas more pleasant for all. These are the key aspects of this study: personal—knowledge creation based on trust relationships; academic—individual career progression, lasting legacies; institutional public realm—national-, state-, metropolitan-, and municipal-level accomplishments; volunteering NGO—think tank sectorial, transportation activism, and ecology-based movements; and private—consulting opportunities. Finally, evidence-based decision-making ought to be utilized by researchers and city planners to address science-driven concerns [113].