Urban transport and community severance: Linking research and policy to link people and places

- Community severance is related to transport, health, and several other fields.
- Paper gives an integrated view of an issue previously studied by separate disciplines.
- Projects must link the questions asked by each discipline as a cause-effect chain.
- Disciplines need compatible scales, objects, information, solutions, and outreach.
- Multidisciplinary outputs must be compatible with practitioners' needs and resources.

Urban transport infrastructure and motorised road traffic contribute to the physical or psychological separation of neighbourhoods, with possible effects on the health and wellbeing of local residents. This issue, known as "community severance", has been approached by researchers from a range of disciplines, which have different ways of constructing scientific knowledge. The objective of this paper is to build bridges between these different approaches and provide a basis for the integration of the issue into public policy. A framework for cross-disciplinary research on community severance is developed, built on the results of two workshops attended by researchers from different disciplines. This framework takes into consideration the chain of direct and indirect effects of transport infrastructure and motorised traffic on local communities and the complexity in the methods used for analysing and formulating solutions to the problem. The framework is then compared with the views of practitioners, based on discussions held in a third and final workshop. It was concluded that to better understand community severance, researchers should frame their work in relation to that of other disciplines and develop tools that reflect the diversity of local contexts and stakeholders, balancing complexity with applicability.