David Banister

David Banister is professor emeritus of Transport Studies at the University of Oxford, where he directed the Transport Studies Unit, and was earlier professor of Transport Planning at University College London. He is one of the most cited European researchers on transport and the city, and has advised the European Commission, the OECD and national governments on how to reconcile mobility with the climate.

His central work is Unsustainable Transport (2005), which diagnoses the failure of the twentieth-century model, based on predicting demand and providing capacity, and his 2008 article on the sustainable mobility paradigm, one of the most cited in the discipline. That paradigm inverts the priorities: first reduce the need to travel, through proximity and mixed uses; then reduce distances, through urban form; then shift modes, towards walking, cycling and public transport; and only at the end improve vehicle efficiency. Technology is the last resort, not the first.

Banister has insisted that travel time is not a cost to minimise but a part of life, against the assumption of traffic engineering, and that speed is not a goal. Inequality in Transport (2018) shows that those who travel and pollute most are those with the highest incomes, and that transport policies redistribute without saying so. His framework lies behind the 15-minute city and Europe's sustainable urban mobility plans.