This article explores whether women can become the change agents for a sustainable transport sector and how such a change can be accomplished through transport policy. Based on the Swedish case, women still on average have transportation behavior with lower environmental impact than men have; women also tend to have stronger preferences for improving sustainability in the sector. The results imply that there are interesting behavior and attitude characteristics expressed by women that ought to be recognized and applied, e.g., through contesting prevailing norms and methods, in order to achieve sustainability goals for the sector. Altogether this suggests that women, beyond democracy reasons, should become more active as change agents to challenge the dominant male norms. Policy implications of these findings include measures to improve gender equal participation that would, e.g., make it possible to take advantage of these differences by (1) putting more emphasis on the relationships among travel patterns, sustainability, and gendering on all levels in transportation planning as a measure for improved sustainability; (2) implementing new ways of framing the problems to be solved, challenging existing norms working against gender equity and raising consciousness of sustainability issues; and (3) using gender mainstreaming to monitor policy impacts on different groups of men and women. However, today there is a lack of incentives to apply these tools. Since there is a tremendous complexity in the relationships on all levels, more research is needed together with improved dissemination of knowledge for the competence to increase within the transport sector.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly led to some of the most revolutionary changes in private and professional life around the world. While the extent and duration of these changes are not certain, they have already had a great impact on travel patterns. This is also the case in Sweden, despite its relatively liberal approach to restrictions, which relies on voluntary measures such as social distancing and self-monitoring for symptoms. Methodology: Due to the pandemic, a shift to telework and virtual meetings is being tested in what can be seen as a large-scale experiment, and the knowledge and experience from that experiment may have lasting effects on everyday life. This study seeks to analyse the effects of government and public agencies’ recommendations on meeting and travel behaviour on employees at five public agencies in Sweden. Results: The results indicate that the public authorities surveyed were well prepared and had a ‘backup collaboration solution’, at least technically, to make a rapid behavioural shift when travel was not an option. Though the Swedish government’s and Public Health Authority’s strong recommendations have led to the most dramatic reductions in work-related travel in modern times, the operations in Swedish agencies continue to function, along with the employees’ communications and collaborations. These results indicate that there is great potential for digital tools to influence if and how we commute and make business trips. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that such tools can make the impossible possible.

Research into the bicycle level-of-service (BLOS) has been extensively conducted over the last three decades. This research has mostly focused on user perceptions of comfort to provide guidance for decision-makers and planners. Segments and nodes were studied first, followed by a network evaluation. Besides these investigations, several variables have also been utilized to depict the users’ perspectives within the BLOS field, along with other cycling research domains that simultaneously scrutinized the users’ preferences. This review investigates the variables and indices employed in the BLOS area in relation to the field of bicycle flow and comfort research. Despite general agreement among existing BLOS variables and the adopted indices, several important research gaps remain to be filled. First, BLOS indices are often categorized based on transport components, while scarce attention has been paid to BLOS studies in trip-end facilities such as bicycle parking facilities. The importance of these facilities has been highlighted instead within research related to comfort. Second, the advantages of separated bike facilities have been proven in many studies; however, scarce research has addressed the challenges associated with them (e.g., the heterogeneity within those facilities due to the presence of electric bikes and electric scooters). This issue is clearly noticeable within the research regarding flow studies. Furthermore, network evaluation (in comparison to segment and node indices) has been studied to a lesser extent, whereas issues such as connectivity can be evaluated mainly through a holistic approach to the system. This study takes one step toward demonstrating the importance of the integration of similar research domains in the BLOS field to eliminate the aforementioned shortcomings.