Dr Adrian Davis has spent over 30 years working on transport and health and is internationally recognised as an expert in the field. He was a founder member of the Transport and Health Study Group in 1988, has been a consultant to Dept Health, Dept Transport, World Health Organisation, and other public bodies. He drafted the BMA’s first transport policy report in 1997 and the transport paper for Sir Donald Acheson’s Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health, in 1998. He prepared policy papers for WHO Europe for the 4th Environment & Health Ministers Conference in London in 2000. He helped Sustrans establish it’s health programme and active travel team in 2001.
Between 2009-11 Adrian was an adviser to the South West Region public health team. Over a more sustained period he has represented the public health team of NHS Bristol working within Bristol City Council (now part of the Council), being embedded into the City’s Transport department from April 2008 to March 2019. During this time he represented NHS Bristol on the Programme Development Group to develop guidance for NICE on walking and cycling. Initiator and evidence advisor for the implementation and development of the 20mph programme in Bristol (2010-2016), Adrian then co-authored the Council’s Safe Systems Road Safety Plan in 2015 https://www.bristol.gov.uk/streets-travel/road-safety-plans. In August 2018 he reviewed the literature on the effectiveness of 20mph speed limits for the Welsh Assembly Government.
Adrian was a member of the research team at University of Bristol funded by the National Institute for Health Research undertaking a full scale study of walking to work. In 2012-13 he worked on a 6 months contract providing public health support to the Sustainable Transport and Equalities team within the Dept. Transport. Then, for the first half of 2015 he worked for Public Health England in drafting briefings on active travel and health and related topics. In 2017 he acted as an Expert Advisor to Transport for London on congestion.
In recent years peer reviewed papers address social marketing and 20mph, incentivisation for walking to work, commuting and wellbeing, road safety and safe systems, and the meaning of evidence across different professions.
In 2015 the book Planning for Health and Wellbeing (Routledge) https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Planning-for-Health-and-Well-Being-Shaping-a/Barton-Thompson-Burgess-Grant/p/book/9781138023307 was published which included a chapter The fall and rise of active travel by Adrian and Professor John Parkin, UWE.
In 2018 Adrian co-wrote a chapter Translating Evidence into Practice (with Marcus Grant) in the book Integrating Human Health into Urban and Transport Planning, edited by Mark Nieuwenhuijsen and Haneen Khreis https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319749822 .
In June 2019, with Paul Pilkington, Adrian wrote a book chapter on road safety and equity in the book Measuring Transport Equity https://www.elsevier.com/books/measuring-transport-equity/lucas/978-0-12-814818-1
In 2020 ‘Transport and health: a personal and UK perspective’ told the story of the UK development of the inter-disciplinary field the late 1980s. Handbook of Sustainable Transport (elgaronline.com)
Also in 2020, with David Obree, ‘Equality of restraint: Reframing road safety through the ethics of private motorised transport,’ Journal of Transport & Health, 19, 100970, set out the case for a road safety system where the externalised threat from motorised traffic is reduced so that people can positively chose to walk and cycling without fear. This drew on major tenets of western liberalism of do no harm to others by your freedoms.
Adrian has a first degree in history and sociology, and a PhD in inter-sectoral collaboration on transport and health. The latter involved a comparative study of three European cities involved in Health For All and Healthy Cities, Sheffield (UK), Copenhagen (DK) and Groningen (NT).
Adrian is Professor of Transport & Health with the Transport Research Institute at Edinburgh Napier University https://blogs.napier.ac.uk/tri/ and Senior Fellow, Behaviour Change and Translational Research, UWE Bristol Dr Adrian Davis – UWE Bristol
Awards
In 2010 he was made a Fellow through Distinction of the Faculty of Public Health for his intersectoral work.
He was a Visiting Professor of Transport & Health at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) from 2013-2019.
In July 2015 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UWE in recognition of his multi-disciplinary approach and collaboration on transport and health. He can sometimes be found in Bristol Business School where he works part time, linking transport and health through the application on social marketing. He has ‘L’ Plates as a social marketing ‘trainee’ under the tutorship of Professor Alan Tapp.
He holds an Honorary Professorship with the Moray House School of Education & Sport at the University of Edinburgh (2019-22) where he is associated with the Physical Activity and Health Research Centre https://www.ed.ac.uk/education/rke/centres-groups/pahrc .
Adrian is a member of the Board of the Journal of Transport and Health. http://ees.elsevier.com/jth He describes himself as a boundary spanner.
Health and Transport: Making the connections 