New briefing explores Active Travel progress across the UK and Ireland

Wise in 5 cover

A new briefing from PolicyWISE offers a snapshot of the latest Active Travel policies and their outcomes across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland — revealing important variations in ambition, delivery and impact.

Our Wise in 5 on Active Travel highlights the differing approaches to legislation, strategy, intervention, and promotion across the UK and Ireland. England, Scotland, and Wales all have active travel strategies; however, only Scotland has dedicated data monitoring in place, while Wales is the first nation to make active travel a statutory duty.

Takeaways included:

  1. Active Travel overlaps with many other policy areas (e.g. climate, health, ageing population) resulting in multiple standalone and interlinking strategies and objectives. There is opportunity for policymakers to strengthen resource and outcomes through coordinated action.
  2. Approaches to increasing Active Travel are national, regional and local, often with a focus on towns or cities and limited rural attention.
  3. The primary active travel target for most of the nations is to increase the number of journeys made by foot or bike, but no nations have identified significant progress. A better understanding is needed how change can be effectively delivered for Active Travel.
  4. With varied data and collection methods and indicators between nations, policymakers might consider what types of data collection most represents the progress of Active Travel in their respective jurisdictions.
  5. There is significant scope for policy learning and comparative policy research in the field of Active Travel in order to support all nations to make progress. Scoping is needed to uncover whether this is best done on a regional or national level, or both, and how to best compare the current data and evidence available.

PolicyWISE and researchers from Cardiff University have been working with all UK governments to progress important research in this area to be published this autumn as part of our cluster work: PolicyWISE Cross-Nation Cluster Programme | policyWISE.