Transform Scotland - For Sustainable Transport

18 April 2012

UK has a lot of catching up to do with the Continent on active travel

• In general there is a lack of leadership when it comes to making the sort of major changes required in policy and expenditure terms to actually make a big improvement on the ground. Looking to the Continent, the countries that have been successful have, for example, taken the view that cities need to be more people friendly and have adopted policies that actively promote walking and cycling and public transport; road transport has been put down the hierarchy so as to favour sustainable travel.
• One outcome of this re-prioritisation is the transfer of significant levels of funding from roads to safer walking and cycling routes, often traffic free, to encourage more commuter and school trips by foot or bicycle. This has added health benefits as well as leading to more attractive and people friendly environments.
• Legislative changes have been made in several countries to put the responsibility on motorists to protect walkers and cyclists and to make them liable for injuries unless evidence to the contrary.

• It is widely perceived that lack of safe, segregated, cycle routes in our cities is a major deterrent to the widespread uptake of commuter cycling. This was also the case in Denmark and The Netherlands after the Second World War when cycling numbers plunged due to traffic congestion in cities making cycling unsafe. More money needs to be allocated by central and local government to fund improvement in infrastructure in favour of active modes of travel as was done in these countries, backed up by Master Plans with clear objectives.
• Planning needs to be tightened up as well because many guidelines relating to active travel are just ignored by developers because they are just guidelines. Councils seem to be afraid of pushing the developers too hard in case they go elsewhere or officials may come under pressure from councillors. The feeling was that some of these guidelines need to be made statutory obligations to ensure more rapid progress in future.

• Inactivity is a big problem with many people in Scotland and the health benefits from walking and cycling need to be more strongly promoted. The view was expressed that in poorer communities there may be little incentive to walk if the environment is ugly and threatening hence the need for infrastructure improvements.
• Transport Scotland seems to be dominated by road engineers who think only of cars and not about walkers and cyclists. Many major road schemes are built with no thought given to including cycle paths. This culture needs to change and more staff appointed who understand walking/cycling infrastructure needs. Why not send staff members to The Netherlands for training?

• Unsafe road conditions for cycling to school can be a major disincentive and training children to cycle in traffic is unlikely to work in urban areas because the danger will still be real although safe routes to school can help in many cases.
• The attitude of many parents is another problem with many preferring to drive their children to school because of the perceived danger or because they are rushing to work.
• Quite often children want to walk or cycle to school but are not allowed. On the other hand, one often finds that children cycle to school until High School age then drop of because it is perceived to be no longer ‘cool’. This is a cultural issue because across much of the Continent cycling is common for all age groups and there is less concern about fashionable clothing and cycles.
• Parking on street around schools by parents dropping off children can often be one of the biggest dangers and curbing parking, along with lower speed limits of about 20mph could help.