Prof. Ian Walker @ianwalker.bsky.social Profile picture
Environmental psychologist @SwanseaUni. Guinness World Record for the fastest bike ride across Europe. Trustee @wheels4well. Views mine.
Mar 7 15 tweets 5 min read
Showers use lots of water. Quite possibly more than anything else in your home.

We've done some new research on how to address this, and it's a win-win for sustainability!

Grab your favourite loofah and read on for details...🧵1/15 The UK risks running short of water and the goal is to get consumption down to 110 litres/person/daygov.uk/government/new…
Mar 23, 2023 22 tweets 6 min read
We've just published a new study on active travel to school!

THREAD on how the educational benefits of active travel to school are smaller than we hoped (but why you still might want to stop driving your kids to school, especially if you're well-off) Front cover of our new pape... Since the 1990s, several authors have suggested that children who travel actively and/or independently to school might get daily learning experiences, more social interactions, and might be more attentive in class. This could all have benefits for cognitive development
Jan 17, 2023 14 tweets 5 min read
We have a new study out!

The short version is this: "Car Brain" - the cultural blind spot that makes people apply double standards when they think about driving - is real, measurable and pervasive.

Read on for more details... 1/14 @SwanseaUni @UWEBristol @EdNapierTRI This work was carried out with top-class humans @AlanTapp and @Adrian4Davis. We did something deliberately very simple: we had an independent polling agency contact a representative sample of 2157 people across the UK and ask them five questions 2/14
Jun 13, 2022 23 tweets 5 min read
A lot of people are commentating on how dramatic increases in fuel prices don't seem dramatically to be changing behaviour. People are still driving millions of short trips, still sitting with engines idling, etc. So - woo-hoo! - here's a *thread* on the PSYCHOLOGY OF HABITS🎈 A habit is a behaviour that, through lots of repetition in a specific context, shifts from being triggered deliberately by your choices to being triggered automatically by the environment you're in.
Mar 26, 2021 11 tweets 3 min read
Okay, Twitter, I've been looking at how car emissions are related to vehicle weight. We all know there must be a relationship, but I thought I'd see exactly how it looked. Can you check my working?

THREAD 1/10 I grabbed information from Parker's car guide, only using vehicles where the emissions scores used the newer WLTP test protocol, which should more closely mirror real driving.

The cars I included were a semi-random range of those on the UK roads.

2/10
Jul 16, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read
Just been listening to @simonmundie interview MotoGP rider Cal Crutchlow on Don't Tell me the Score podcast. I just have to tell my Cal Crutchlow story. THREAD Me, @AberPsych and @drmcarley were doing research on motorcyclists' hearing loss from wind noise. We used EPSRC money to book a race track and I spent a day blasting round on a motorbike with engineers asking me to go faster and faster. BEST DAY'S RESEARCH EVER.