Best practice in infrastructural and behavioural active travel interventions

This paper was produced in 2020, prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, following a broad literature search conducted on IDOX and Google in conjunction with the Scottish Government Library. The review does not include any research undertaken during since 2020. The research identified was a mixture of large scale reports produced for government bodies and peer-reviewed academic literature.

The purpose of this section is to assess best practice in active travel, covering what works in terms of having the greatest impact on improving rates of walking and cycling. The resulting review will discuss what has been found to work, and what has not, as well as case studies of successful interventions in order to create a framework for success.

The evidence of what works, both in terms of infrastructure and behavioural interventions, is quite expansive but in many instances lacks a robustness necessary to be able to definitively say what the quantifiable result would be on a larger scale. The direction of causality for many of the interventions are clear, however, the quantitative effect of these interventions is much less clear, in part due to the effect of external factors such as local weather, topography and population density. As a consequence, the findings of this report focus on the actions associated with success rather than trying to quantify success.

This section will begin with what works, separated into infrastructure and behavioural interventions with tables detailing different interventions and their success. It will then move on to look at what the literature states does not work and where there are gaps in the literature which should be kept in mind. The section will further look at successful case studies in several different cities focussing on what they did in order to succeed with another section looking at possible comparison cities for Scotland to consider in order to draw lessons. Finally the review will detail what the literature suggests as being important factors in order to achieve successes in policy interventions and attempt to create a roadmap for policy makers to follow.