Transport causes a third of global emissions. The answer is already on every pavement — we’re just not investing in it seriously enough.
At a recent session on resilient cities and net zero targets, I had the opportunity to speak about something I have been working on, thinking about, and advocating for over the last five years: active travel.
Not autonomous vehicles. Not high-speed rail. Not the next generation of electric buses — although all of these matter.
Walking. Cycling. Wheeling.
The most intelligent transport mode we are still underestimating.
The mode that, in my view, we must think more carefully about, rethink more boldly, invest in more deliberately, and implement more urgently than almost anything else in our transport systems today.
Here is why.
Setting the Baseline: Resilience, Climate, and Movement
Let us start with a definition that matters enormously but is often used loosely.
Resilience is the capacity of communities and settlements to survive and thrive under sudden stresses and shocks. When we talk about climate resilience specifically, we are talking about the ability to withstand sudden heavy rainfall, extreme heatwaves, and unexpected storms — events that are no longer exceptional, but increasingly routine.
Climate change itself is something different: the long-term shift in temperature and weather patterns driven primarily by human activity. And the main mechanism of that human activity is the burning of fossil fuels — in the heating and cooling of our homes, in the production of goods, and most significantly for this conversation, in the moving of people and goods within and between settlements.
Transport accounts for approximately one third of all carbon emissions globally. That figure alone demands that we act — and act differently.
In response to this, the transport sector has spent the last two decades speaking about a mode of movement that had been largely overlooked in the age of the motor car: active travel, or active mobility. Non-motorised modes — walking, cycling, wheeling — that work specifically at short distances and that function as intelligent, low-technology connectors between other transport modes.
Active travel is not a niche preference. It is a strategic integrator.
The modal shift from private car to public transport is one of the most powerful levers we have for reducing emissions. But that shift only works when people can actually reach public transport safely, comfortably, and on foot or by bicycle. Active travel is the plug that makes the whole system function. It is also — and this is something urban designers understand deeply — a place-maker. Streets shaped for people, rather than for vehicles, become places where communities form, local economies thrive, and cities become more liveable.
These are not radical ideas. They are, at this point, common sense across geographies and local governments worldwide. Across the global south and north alike, cities are acting on active travel — both as a contribution to net zero targets and as a tool for making settlements more resilient to climate impacts already underway.
Two Frameworks, One City: Istanbul
Over the last five years, I have had the privilege of working directly with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) on two significant action plans that put these principles into practice.
The first is the GCAP — the Green City Action Plan.
GCAP is a tailored, action-based strategy for addressing and prioritising the specific environmental challenges of a city. For Istanbul, the stakes are high. Projections indicate that temperatures in the city are expected to rise by 2 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, with sea levels rising by 40 to 70 centimetres as a result of warming temperatures.
Working alongside IMM’s Directorate of Climate Change, our team defined 52 actions across nine different sectors. Transport, land use, and solid waste emerged as the most challenging sectors in terms of environmental impact. One of the plan’s core goals was Sustainable Urbanisation and Mobility.
Within that goal, two actions stand out for me personally.
The first was a commitment to expand Istanbul’s cycling infrastructure: from approximately 500 km. today to close to 4,000 km. by 2040. That is not an incremental adjustment. It is a structural transformation of how the city moves.
The second action sat under the land-use sector, but it belongs equally to transport: the creation of a renaturalised and connected blue-green network between urban centres and their surroundings. This means living corridors — tree-lined, with permeable paving — designed not as decorative landscaping, but as genuine climate adaptation infrastructure. Active travel paths running through shaded canopies, offering relief during extreme heat events, managing stormwater, buffering noise and wind.
When a cyclist in Istanbul on a 38-degree summer day rides through a shaded, protected green corridor, that is not a nice-to-have amenity. That is resilience made tangible. It is mitigation and adaptation working together — reducing emissions through zero-carbon mobility, and simultaneously protecting people from the climate impacts we can no longer avoid.
IMM has shown real ambition in this space. Embedding blue-green thinking into mobility infrastructure — rather than treating landscape and transport as separate budget lines — is a significant institutional step, and one that goes well beyond what most cities are currently doing.
The second framework is the SUMP — the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan.
If GCAP defined what needed to happen, SUMP brought the depth of implementation. I served as Design Manager across 25 urban design implementation projects under this plan — covering traffic calming, pedestrianisation, and healthy streets pilots across different parts of the city.
Across all of those projects, three themes emerged consistently.
Short-distance trips should belong to active travel. A significant share of car journeys in Istanbul cover distances that are entirely walkable or cyclable with the right infrastructure in place. Capturing those trips is the single greatest low-cost opportunity in the city’s mobility system.
Active travel enables genuine multimodal integration. A cycling lane that ends at a car-dominated intersection is a fragment. What we designed in these projects were chains — continuous, safe, human-scaled sequences from door to transit to destination.
Public space quality is the unlock. Infrastructure alone does not shift behaviour. When a street is pleasant, shaded, safe, and designed at a human scale, people choose it. This is documented consistently in SUMP evaluations across European cities — and it is what we set out to demonstrate with these 25 projects on the ground in Istanbul.
The streets of Istanbul must change. The distribution of street surface between pedestrians, cyclists, and private vehicles must become more equitable. That is not an ideological statement. It is a planning and climate imperative.
The Bottom Line
Every kilometre shifted from a private car to a bicycle or a pedestrian path is a direct contribution to net zero targets.
But more than that — it is a contribution to resilience. And here is the point I want to leave you with: net zero and climate resilience are not parallel goals moving in the same direction. They are the same goal, approached from two different directions.
The work done with IMM through GCAP and SUMP is, for me, a demonstration that the gap between plan and action can be closed — that a metropolitan government of 16 million people can set ambitious targets and begin building the physical, spatial reality to match them.
Active travel is not a supplementary mode. It is the most intelligent, most climate-responsive, and most human transport choice a city can invest in.
We need to think it, rethink it, invest in it, and implement it — more than we currently do.
This post is based on a pitch delivered at a session on ITS-Intelligent Transport Systems European Congress held in 17-18-19 April 2026, in Istanbul. The session name: Resilient Cities and Net Zero Targets. The author has worked as an expert consultant with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality on the GCAP and SUMP frameworks.