Accelerating Deliverability and Healthier Returns in Active Travel: A 5-Lesson Framework

The good news is that active travel is on an upward trajectory. 

As an industry, we’ve proven the benefits for individuals, communities and our environment and it’s now widely accepted that’s a much-needed part of urban blueprints — but we’re collectively facing a bigger, double-edged challenge. In the U.K. financial climate, budgets are being constantly reviewed and the public purse is under much greater scrutiny, so active travel projects must focus on deliverability and cost. These are two of the most important factors for local authorities and wider governments for achieving the aims of active travel strategies. Aligned with this is a responsibility to ensure inclusive access to the infrastructure and that sustainability is a filter within all decision-making.

There is no simple, single solution to this complex challenge. It requires smart short-term budget shifts and a longer-term cohesive, collaborative systems approach that trickles down into every street and travel corridor. This is vital for getting the larger-scale network implementation right, but to empower both the shifts and longer-term strategy changes required, we need to focus on deliverability and return on investment. To help with both, we’re sharing five lessons learned from our work in the U.K. and Ireland and drawing on some wider European examples. 

1. Respond to budget reductions with network re-designs and bolstered business cases

While the biggest improvements can be made in long-term strategy, we’re helping our current clients by reworking the delivery priorities for active travel routes and networks within our current projects. The goal is to maximize what our clients can achieve within their short-term constraints — not just financial ones — by re-evaluating the staged delivery of the network. So, for example, where current funding may not exist to deliver a full network of 15 connected active travel routes, we can deliver the priority routes within that network first and ensure that designs are future-proofed to make connections to the wider network as funding restrictions are eased. This will ensure that local communities benefit fully from short-term delivery without compromising the integrity of the future network. 

It's critical to understand that this is not a case of just doing a smaller percentage of what you were doing before. It’s investing more energy and expertise to understand the priorities in network connections and then carefully adapting designs to deliver something meaningful that empowers the community. One of the most recent success stories within our redesigns is the reallocation of existing road space from wide, multilane roads into different facilities, whether that’s protected cycle tracks, bus priority lanes or widened footways and public space. Research by Public Health Scotland reveals that reallocating roadspace in this way increases the attractiveness of active travel, the lengths of journeys made, and the overall health benefits.

It’s a relatively seamless redesign, offering new facilities while helping to de-incentivize car use (linked to the third lesson), a critical long-term goal for many cities. 

The second step is to influence the higher decision-makers with the transport bodies to invest more in public transport and active travel. It’s a constant drive to reinforce the business case of how transport is one of the greatest contributors to economic growth and social value within communities. Understandably, budgets within local authorities are focused on key challenges such as education, health and social security; however, we can prove that public transport investment can help unlock the success of all those other vital policy areas. 

2. Integrate active travel within holistic street design 

Focusing on active travel as an add-on or later consideration drives costs and affects how it should be integrated from a network level. Conversely, if you include it from the start within the larger transport network plans, it provides more opportunities for cost savings and better deliverability, and ultimately, better services for the communities.

One of our best examples of this integrated design is our work on BusConnects Dublin. It will provide better walking, cycling and bus infrastructure for 12 key access corridors in the Dublin area to transform the public transport network, enabling efficient, safe and sustainable mobility around the city and preparing for future demand. By integrating all these transport design and planning decisions and applying multi-disciplinary experience and the latest digital solutions, it has the potential to fundamentally transform Dublin's bus and active travel system and improve the quality of life for the community while supporting the economy and the environment. 

3. Enhance vehicle demand management with the right balance of push and pull

Reducing vehicle use is an undeniable step forward for our health and the environment and to lessen congestion. But getting it right requires carefully balancing the right carrot and stick approaches within cities. It requires an integrated approach within sustainable transport (including active travel) and network route design to make it easier to avoid driving by car.

One key element here is to ensure the ‘carrot’ approaches aren’t counter-intuitive to reducing car use. For example, globally, there are still subsidies and tax allowances for car commuting, company cars and electric fuel cars. While some are driven towards sustainability and some may be necessary for rural connectivity, they still promote driving by car and should be reconsidered as part of the mix. 

Conversely, we also need more ‘stick’ approaches to de-incentivize people to drive in and park wherever they want to. A study by the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies found that more than 75% of the urban interventions that have successfully reduced car use were led by a local city government. The top three were all ‘stick’ approaches: congestion charging in city centers and wider networks (in active policy discussions right now), increased parking and traffic controls and limited traffic zones. 

One of the critical parts of this process relies on effective stakeholder engagement. These stick tactics will be met with higher resistance. Still, we need to explain the ‘why’ behind the changes and, crucially, the benefits, chief of which are creating more livable cities, greater mobility and standard of life (including better health), a lower environmental impact and cleaner air.

4. Drive better results and deliverability with data

We’ve been helping Glasgow City Council develop their full transport strategy. This includes designing the future cycling network, and to do this effectively, we’re relying on data that the University of Glasgow has collected from mobile phone suppliers. Bluetooth technology offers real-time origin and destination data and insights into the two-wheeled movements being made across the city. The key here is that it identifies where the demands for connections aren’t being fulfilled by transport supply. It’s a perfect example of data being used to improve effectiveness and project deliverability.

We have also applied a wide range of data sources for the same client to deliver a Streetspace Allocation Framework for the city network. One of the key issues that many European Cities now face is great ambition to deliver walking, cycling and public transport improvements but limited street space to do all of these effectively. Our Framework for clients in Glasgow and Edinburgh applies our data on travel demand and geometric restrictions to optimize the level of service that can be achieved by each mode at a network level and allocates space strategically on each street to achieve these levels of service at the design stage ensures a cohesive network for all forms of sustainable travel and avoids difficult decisions at an individual project level. 

5. Use a systems-level approach to provide continuity, coherence and safety

One of the most effective global examples of successful integrated active travel is a system called Plusnet in Amsterdam, and it’s very similar to the circulation plans we’re developing in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The key lesson here is that we can’t just focus on active travel across the modes; we must look at a full network or systems level. It goes beyond a street-level approach of measuring cycle or tram lane space and asks the bigger questions: should there be bicycles or trams in the first place? What rules govern each mode in time and space, and how do they interact? It's mapping this all down holistically and relying on data-informed decisions. 

If this isn’t done correctly, it results in a situation where active travel is restricted or poorly designed as you’re trying to squeeze too much into one transport corridor. Case in point, there’s a prominent urban cycle route in the U.K. that we use in our training for cycle designers as an example of what to avoid. It’s a zig-zag route that aggravates both pedestrians and business owners. The result: café and restaurant owners deliberately put chairs and tables on the cycle route. This can be avoided with a system or network-level approach that takes all the transport factors into account for the area, not just that specific street or corridor.

One of the other benefits of this approach is that it can provide infrastructure continuity and coherence. What we tend to do in the U.K. is to build excellent infrastructure for a specific area, but then we don’t answer the question of what the pedestrian or cycle user does at the end of the route. Not only can this reduce the effectiveness of the network, but it can also cause safety issues if you terminate a cycle track in some unsafe location. For example, you can’t have a beautiful cycle track that travels through safe, scenic woodland for the whole route but then end the scheme by putting them back on the road with a 60mph limit just because it's the end of the project. 

If we started with a systems approach to active travel and focused on providing a coherent design with uniform principles that apply a continuous treatment to all the infrastructure and junctions, it would drive efficiencies in cost and time. It would also make it easier for community members to navigate across cities and regions as they understand the junction and street rules and priorities. We're probably a couple of steps behind other European countries in getting to that level of consistency across the U.K. We need more uniformity to cancel out any ambiguity in the design and make user understanding of our infrastructure as intuitive as possible. This forms part of the six principles of design that we use in our training courses: safety, coherence, directness, comfort, attractiveness and adaptability. 

Conclusion

The case for the active travel role within transport has already been made, but now it's ensuring the key decision-makers understand the function of public transport as a social and commercial catalyst, and within that, the essential role that active travel plays in securing healthier, happier communities in the future.