“Chronic” underfunding of active travel across England is undermining efforts to tackle road transport emissions and is fuelling traffic gridlock across the country, campaigners have warned.
Analysis published by the IPPR think tank this morning found that between 2016 and 2021, an average of £148 per person was spent on roads, more than 10 times the amount spent on facilitating active travel across the country.
The disparity in spending is despite evidence shifting short journeys from cars to forms of active travel brings a host of economic and health benefits to the country, including saving the NHS £17bn over 20 years through improved health and wellbeing, IPPR said.
The think tank also stressed that meeting the UK’s 2030 climate targets depended on reducing car miles by 25 per cent, which would in turn require cycling levels to increase by at least 20 per cent within a decade.
Currently, just two per cent of the total transport budget is spent on infrastructure to support active travel, with London delivering £24 per head of investment in active travel, compared to £10 per head in the rest of the country, according to the analysis.
IPPR has called on the government to increase active travel spending to £35 per head per year over the coming decade, including delivering at least 25,000 miles of protected cycle paths.
It also recommended Ministers invest a further £15 per person per year for a decade on interventions to change behaviour, such as training for cyclists, incentives to increase access to bicycles, and loans of e-bikes.
Active travel funds should be provided through long-term funding settlements to local and regional authorities, not the short-term, competition-based system in place today, the think tank added.
“Cycling in the UK peaked 75 years ago,” said Maya Singer Hobbs, senior research fellow at IPPR. “Since then, UK government policy has locked in car dependency, making people walk wary and cycle cautious, at the expense of our health, our environment, and our economy.
“Investment in active travel infrastructure to get more people walking and wheeling is crucial to cutting emissions and improving growth.”
The research also highlights the high value for money delivered through investment in walking and cycling infrastructure. For every £1 spent on active travel infrastructure, there is an average return on investment of £5.62, compared to just £2.50 for roads, it notes.
Sarah Mitchell, chief executive of Cycling UK, said investment in active travel in England was lagging that of other devolved nations.
“When it comes to investing in active travel, Scotland and Wales are investing to reap the benefits that come from increased spending, while England remains the poor relation,” she said. “It seems the UK government didn’t get the memo and we therefore hope this new research will shift attitudes across Westminster so that walking, wheeling and cycling shoots up the list of investment priorities.
“It’s never been more important to prioritise investing in schemes like the National Cycle Network and we fully support IPPR’s call for the NCN to have a ten-year investment plan.”
The Department for Transport was considering a request for comment at the time of going to press.
The research is published just a few days after Parisians backed plans to increase the price of parking passes for SUVs in a vote on Sunday.
Some 54.5 per cent of voters in the referendum backed a tripling in the price of parking passes for cars weighing more than 1.6 tonnes from outside the city.
The cost of SUVs in the capital city’s central district that do not have a special license from local authorities is set to rise to €18 per hour for the first two hours, compared to just €6 for smaller cars.
Prices after the first two hours will ratchet up further, meaning that a six-hour stay with an SUV would cost €225 compared to €75 for smaller vehicles.
In the wake of the ruling, campaigners at the Badvertising Campaign have launched a public information campaign which calls for a tobacco-style ban on adverts that promote SUVs.
The campaign, issued by a fictional ‘Ministry for the Climate Emergency’, features a spoof motoring magazine called ‘Carwash’, which highlights the car industry’s role in lobbying against climate action and use of advertising which relies on images of nature and questionable green credentials.
Open-source assets from the campaign have been made available for campaigners to access, alongside a new animation detailing the polluting power of ‘greenwashing’ SUV ads.
“Paris has taken one important step to make its streets more people friendly, another is to stop promoting these anti-social, over-sized vehicles with a tobacco-style ban on SUV adverts,” said Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, one of three organisations behind the Badvertising Campaign. “The greenhouse gas emissions as a result of car advertising could be anywhere between 191 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, more than the annual emissions of the Netherlands in 2019 and 572 million tonnes of CO2e, more than Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.”
Don’t forget to get your entries in for this year’s UK Green Business Awards ahead of the March 1st deadline.
