Executive Summary

In 2024-25, Scottish Government Active Travel infrastructure spend exceeded £107m, delivering a range of infrastructure interventions and projects across several programmes. This expenditure, through seven key programmes supported transformational infrastructure projects across Scotland and delivered the following headline outputs in 2024-2025.

Figure 1 shows:

• Over 900 interventions funded;
• Over 136km of new and upgraded Active Travel infrastructure;
• More than 80 new or improved controlled pedestrian/cyclist crossings; and
• Over 50 junction and uncontrolled crossing improvements.

Improvements made to project data collection mean that it is now possible to collate project type data across all funding streams, capturing both what has been built and what is being design for construction in future years. Table 1 below shows that shared footway/ paths are the most common intervention type.

Table 1: Counts of active travel intervention in 2024-25

Note: ‘Other’ includes various design stage elements such as community engagement, and other interventions like purchase of equipment, barrier removal, and street-lighting.

Figure 2 shows Active Travel Programmes represented as proportion of overall expenditure. Figure 2 shows how infrastructure investment in each programme was distributed in 2023-24, as a proportion of overall expenditure. Walk Wheel Cycle Trust (WWCT, formerly known as Sustrans) ’Places for Everyone (PfE) was the largest programme (£43.7m or 41% of the total investment), then Tier 1 (£33.8m/32%), and then the National Cycle Network (NCN) (£11.5m/11%). Following this, it shows Tier 2 representing £9.7m/9%, then Trunk Roads (£4.1m/4%), Road Safety (£2.4m/2%) and Ian Findlay Path Fund (£0.8m/1%).

With Tier 1, Tier 2 and Road Safety funding combined, a total of £45.9m/ 43% funding was provided directly from Transport Scotland to LAs.

Figure 3 below show how funding was distributed across local authority areas, ranked from highest to lowest.

Figure 3: distribution of Active Travel Infrastructure funding across a map of Scotland