Current role: Freelance consultant and CAST affiliate, Doctoral student in the Department of Psychology, University of Bath supervised by Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh.
Sarah Toy is a practitioner-researcher conducting doctoral research focused on the future of low car, urban mobility. Her doctoral research question is the idea of reducing urban car dependency and asks if it could be made desirable and possible to not own a car. She is complementing practice-led insights with qualitative research and secondary data analysis of Carbon Disclosure Project Cities data. Her research is informed by a range of consultancy roles including recent work Wales Net Zero 2035 Commission and development of a 2030 Net Zero Carbon vision with Bath and Northeast Somerset.
Her interest in sustainable transport has been a consistent theme during her 30+ years working as a chartered civil engineer on global sustainable infrastructure and behaviour change projects. More recently as Bristol’s first ever Chief Resilience Officer, whilst leading the co-creation of a 50-year vision, she became fascinated with the role that city stakeholders can play in mitigating carbon emissions and adapting to the urban challenges of climate change. This led to her doctoral investigations into the policy levers which can be used to increase active and shared mobility and reduce car dependency in cities.
Follow Sarah on LinkedIn and find out more about how you can work with her on her website.