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news
Scottish Parliament Bike Stands (copyright Simon MacMichael).jpgScottish Government to double annual investment in active travel to £15 a head
The Scottish Government has pledged to double its investment on active travel from £40 million to £80 million from 2018/19 – which based on the country’s population of 5.4 million people equates to almost £15 a head.
It also said that it intends to appoint an Active Nation Commissioner to deliver “world class active travel infrastructure across Scotland,” and to develop a new long-distance cycling and walking route as well as connecting the major trunk route, the A9, to the National Cycle Network through 21 miles of new cycleways.
Other measures included within a document published today called A Nation With Ambition include encouraging Scottish residents to use electric bikes “to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from active travel.”
“We will continue to tackle the challenge of poor public health, matching our actions on smoking and alcohol misuse, with bold new initiatives to reduce obesity, boost active travel, improve mental health and tackle air pollution,” commented First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
John Lauder, Sustrans Scotland Director, said the initiative represented a “bold statement of intent in the new Programme for Government,” which had the “potential to really change how delivery bodies work in Scotland, and massively increase people’s health and wellbeing.
“It also sets an example for the rest of the UK,” he continued.
Lauder added: “This new funding investment is building on the successes to date in programmes for walking, cycling and improvements to local communities.
“The challenge for the future is to build on the creative partnerships already working to make cycling and walking easier, particularly local authorities, regional transport authorities, Scottish Canals, the two national parks and Community Trusts taking active travel to the heart of their communities.
“Walking and cycling is delivering a whole range of benefits across health, environment, transport, education and rural and urban economies. Sustrans Scotland is ready to work with partners across the board to help Scotland realise its potential as an Active Nation.”
With the notable exception of Edinburgh, Scotland has been falling well short of its stated goal of achieving 10 per cent modal share for cycling by 2020.
However, the charity Cycling UK welcomed today's announcement and contrasted it with the money being spent in England and Wales on cycling and walking.
Projected spend of £1.2 billion in England outside London during the next four years equates to £6.50 a head, while Cycling UK estimates annual active travel spend in Wales at between £3 and £5 per capita.
Suzanne Forup,the charity's head of development Scotland, said it was fantastic news for Scotland and cycle campaigners.
"The return on investment will be massive and wide reaching, as the economy, public health and environment are all set to benefit from this news.
“This is an excellent step towards allocating 10 per cent of transport spending on active travel, which Cycling UK campaigns for through the collaborative Walk Cycle Vote campaign.," she added.
Cycling UK’s chief xxecutive, Paul Tuohy, commented: “What a move from Scotland! This unprecedented level of investment into active travel from a national government clearly shows the First Minister means business when she talks of addressing Scotland’s environmental and health commitments.
“Once again, we’re seeing Scotland setting the bar high, and this time on Active Travel. Cycling UK would urge England, Wales and Northern Ireland to look to their own public health and environment commitments, and follow in Scotland’s tyre tracks," he added.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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16 comments
What A9 route? There is some hideously badly surfaced path beside some of it, there are some scary minor roads with blue signs, and there's a narrow path from and to nowhere beside the new dualling by Kincraig. "Route" is stretching a point.
@BTBS
As a stoodent I lived on both Clapham Road and Roff Avenue - the Clapham Road and Tavistock Street traffic are the issues here, you don't get any speed up past The Forreseters or down Roff Avenue anyway (pelican, zebra, parked cars).
The simple solution here would have been to ignore bikes and reduce the speeds of approach on Clapham Road (downhill), and exit speeds onto Clapham Road (2 lanes or 1.5 into 1). This could be done via zebra crossing, raised surface or both. Oh and application of the law on speeding.
Doesn't need cycling money.
Proposed expenditure on "active travel" (weaselly enough to mean anything at all, frankly) £80 million. Actual cost of Queensferry Crossing £1.35 billion. What do they really care about?
not exactly a fair comparison seeing as the £80 million is per annum and the bridge cost is one off.
So in 14 years they might spend as much on active travel as they have on one bridge. Not to mention all the other road building they'll do.
Sure, it's nice that they think to mention cycling occasionally. Be nicer still if they actually spend the money on something useful, rather than giving it to Sustrans to build rubbish and ad companies to produce fatuous dribble about ebikes. Wanna bet?
Duplicate post deleted
To be fair, although the new bridge is for motorised transport, the building of the new bridge has freed up the old bridge for exclusive use by busses and active travel. So you could equally look at the cost of that bridge to be equally to create more infrastructure for active travel.
The paper they produced does actually go into some detail about the what they plan to do with the money which includes:
"We will work towards delivering a long distance
walking and cycling route, offering an experience
equivalent to the successful North Coast 500 and
continue our investment for walkers, cyclists and
equestrians on the A9 corridor, including 35 km of
new cycle track to connect the A9 route with the
wider National Cycle Network."
Fair point - presumably there will be no other spending on infrastructure for cars for the next 17 years.
Spending £15 per person is a vast improvement on the current situation and if this is continued in the future, will eventually have a significant effect. Of course it can be argued that this is insufficient to achieve the rapid change that is needed, but we can hope that there will be a snowball effect, and with more people cycling and walking, demand for better facilities will increase exponentially.
And of course, it puts the spending in England to shame, so that means we can put more pressure on our "leaders" to increase it.
Is it really though? There is nothing there as to WHAT they actually plan to spend it on. HOW they plan to deliver these "improvements" and over what timescale?
It's a political "look we're spending money so it must be good!" statement.
What if they spend all this wonderful new money on the same shit that is currently delivered? Bits of paint that end at junctions. Shared use pavements that are too narrow and that simply shift the conflict from cars/bikes to bikes/pedestrians. A traffic-free route that requires an MTB and a full waterproof suit to use it in any other time than 4 days in summer.
And then once all that is built and it's not used, it *increases* conflict as drivers shout "use the bloody cycle path!" and then councils go "oh but we built this and no-one uses it so we'll redicrect the funding to roads and cars".
Rather than an announcement of how much is being spent I'd like to see a detailed plan of what is being built and then the cost/budget allocated to that.
Quite. It's not what you spend, it's the way that you spend it.
Or perhaps classify it - governments are fond of changing the labels on the same money to make it look like it's a multiple of itself.
Slightly too cynically (I hope) and WRT to comments about the new Forth Bridge, the old one is now for "active travel" and buses. The multi-million pound annual budget for its maintenance would previously have come from the roads budget - I wonder if will now be part-classed as maintaining "active travel" infrastructure. It would be a helluva expensive cycle path!
How much are they proposing to spend?? (Well, now: zero times zero, carry the zero, that comes to...)
£80 million. literally tells you in the first sentence of the article.
Sorry - my phone doesn't have a sarcasm mode...I'd intended to emphasise the initial "how" to express my doubts that the amounts they were announcing would actually be spent in the way that they were implying it would be spent. SOP: announce spending, announce it again six months later, fritter the bulk of it on "assessments", then send Bob from facilities to go buy some paint.
We have a massive issue with spending 'active travel' or cycle safety money on schemes that are anything but and often approved by the likes of Sustrans, CUK et al.
Beford turbo a few years ago cost £300,000 taken out of cycle funding, it ended up being a way to delay people on bikes, expose them to more danger, increase flow for motorists http://www.cyclinguk.org/blog/chris-peck/cycle-safety-fund-and-bedford-t...
And the very long thread on the CTC forums https://forum.cyclinguk.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=84180&hilit=Bedford+turbo where I and many others criticise chris Peck regarding the ridiculous situation of spending money specifically meant for cycling safety on such crap.
I hope those in Scotland get much better value.
As the first link shows, CUK opposed and still opposes poor infrastructure, and has run campaigns about providing quality infrastructure. Unlike Sustrans, they don't seem to just accept anything they are given and be grateful for it, and continue fighting for decent infrastructure.
As a long time member of CUK, I'm extremely grateful for their approach and hard work in trying to improve things and tackling the system that gives us such poor infrastructure, which is really the problem. Until we can get the system changed, we will continue to get poor compromises which still prioritises motoring instead of active travel.
Yes, one battle was lost, but some of us are still fighting and we can win in the end.