Transport changes, so must the plan

Adrian Betteridge from

Wokingham Active Travel Community Hub (WATCH) writes:

CHANGES in how we travel are seldom out of the news, be it escooters, home working, electric cars and more. Public planning for this can be tough, with long term projects often proving obsolete before they are finished.

The dominant change is the decarbonisation of transport, with more walking and cycling one of the compensations. But how much and when?

To help answer this, the Department for Transport publishes regular reports on how we are travelling (the National Travel Survey NTS) and our attitudes to transport (the National Travel Attitudes Survey - NTAS).

The NTS tells us that we average 4.5 trips per week, of which two-thirds are under 5 miles.

The government thinks we need half of all local trips to be walked or cycled by 2030, so let’s call this one-third of all trips.

In England, we currently walk or cycle just over a quarter of all trips, so we can see the change required.

We don’t have this data at a local authority level, but the NTS does tell us that we walk and cycle less on average in Wokingham, sitting 20 places below the England average in a ranking of all local authorities.

And we are doing less year on year.

Given the benefits, and level of media attention, why is active travel growing so slowly nationally and going backwards in Wokingham?

The NTAS offers a view.

Sixty five per cent think it is too dangerous to cycle on the roads.

Fifty five per cent say more segregated cycle paths would encourage them to cycle more and 74% that better maintained pavements would encourage them to walk more.

Three times more support than oppose the creation of dedicated cycle lanes in their local area, even if this means less road space for cars.

The next Wokingham Local Plan needs to accommodate how we will travel over its long duration.

The demand for change is increasingly clear, and we have a great opportunity to disentangle our transport policy from the past and embrace a greener, healthier and less congested future.