Part One

Observations of Current Active Travel Delivery in Scotland

Investment in Infrastructure

The Scottish budget for Active Travel for 2023-24 is currently £189m with a commitment from the Scottish Government to invest at least £320 million or 10% of the transport budget in active travel by 2024-25. There is more money than ever before being put towards how we invest in our shared space in favour of being more active in Scotland but without the will, skill and commitment to work together to achieve a whole systems change approach, this money cannot be spent effectively. There remains a siloed and restrictive approach to spending this money which is impacting upon Local Authorities and their ability to deliver the changes required. Staff capacity, relatively low rates of pay and single-year funding models are most regularly identified as challenges to the delivery of active travel infrastructure projects. Furthermore, our engineers and designers within local and national government are having to adapt from their traditional focus on roads and pavements to integrated, attractive and fit-for- purpose active travel design. We need more specialists from further afield to help up-skill our infrastructure experts in Scotland and strong, united messaging on the importance of this. The biggest challenge to how we move around may be infrastructure based, but without the solutions being developed with people and planet health prioritised, , and a willingness to embrace radical reimagining of our public spaces, all the money in the world will not achieve the change we require. For example, a simple and inexpensive solution to pedestrian priorities could be made by adopting continuous walkways in our towns and cities. Doing so would transform how our streets feel to walk, wheel and cycle but bold leadership is required to make such a change.

Investment in active travel infrastructure goes much further than the design and building of segregated cycle ways. Pleasant and safe conditions to walk,wheel and cycle and an accessible, affordable, integrated public transport system are arguably more important factors in achieving modal shift away from private cars towards active travel. In fact, although important, these measures often overshadow the need to shift the culture within bus and rail.

Since trains have come under public ownership and Covid has shifted how public transport is being used away from commuting and towards recreation, we have witnessed a real shift in the culture of rail in particular to make the integration of walking and cycling easier and fairer for more people. The recent scrapping of peak rail fares, for example, is a welcome step in the right direction but we have a long way to go in Scotland before buses and trains become the affordable and convenient option for traveling longer distances outwith our intercity services. However this shift has begun and changes to new train rolling stock are finally in place to accommodate more bikes, buggies and wheelchairs than ever before. In the meantime, more could be done for rural areas by standardising bus fares, consolidating service providers and including space for bikes, buggies and wheelchairs on intercity services.

Behaviour Change

There are several active travel delivery partners currently working across Scotland to change the narrative around active travel. This cluttered landscape of organisations have all been tasked with promoting walking, wheeling and cycling and are all dependent on funding from Transport Scotland so that they might continue to work with and for communities year on year. These projects and partnerships are under constant threat and scrutiny and many fail when the yearly funding allocations are halted or reduced, meaning teams of experts on the ground move elsewhere to ensure a sense of job security. This lack of commitment to multi-year funding ends up costing us more emotionally and practically when projects are forced to constantly adapt to the precarious nature of funding.

An important aspect of any successful behaviour change initiative is bringing public opinion along in the process. Involving community members in designing the changes proposed to their local area is commonly considered effective community consultation but this model comes with two problems:

1. The people who turn up to a town hall or fill in an online form in answer to a call for consultation on active travel measures will, by necessity, have the vocabulary and confidence to make comment. In Scotland, these people are usually a privileged, white, educated, time-rich section of that community. Typically they will be asked by their local authority what changes they would like to see made to their shared spaces and, although this consultation is open to everyone, only a small demographic ever know a consultation is taking place let alone feel a willingness to attend and help answer questions that have no bearing on the immediacy of everyday existence.
2. By asking people, “what changes to this piece of public space do you want to see?” or “how should we deliver a free bike to every child in Scotland who cannot afford one?” we are asking for answers to a problem that has already been identified and from people who aren’t necessarily experts in project delivery or public service design.

The Scottish Government invests a great deal in outsourcing community consultations and commissioning impact assessments but the kind of co- creation model offered by organisations such as Young Scot, the Institute for Community Studies and Involve are more relationship based, process (rather than outcome) driven, meaningful for participants, engaging of diverse personalities and, ultimately, better value for money.

If we conducted more co-design processes with a randomly selected section of a community and asked those small panels questions that maximised on their area of expertise (i.e. “how do you feel about the place you live?”) then we could come up with a design brief that we could give to the engineers and place-makers to fulfill on behalf of a community.

An example of the effectiveness of this approach can be found in a co-created report by Children in Scotland assessing the effectiveness of the national cycling scheme, Bikeability. Rather than press children to come up with a solution to the adult identified problem of “how do we make more people travel places by bike?” children were given the opportunity to offer answers to the more pressing question of “what makes you want tonot want to ride your bike?”. The answers revealed that many children found the current Bikeability programme restrictive, boring and unintuitive and that if there was more play on bikes as a focus of Bikeability then they would be more likely to become life-long bike riders, eventually (possibly) adopting the bike as a form of transport for short everyday journeys as well as for recreation, sport and nature connection.

Policy and Governance

Currently active travel policy sits under Transport Scotland with a small team responsible for ensuring the effective delivery of the walking, cycling and wheeling agenda. However, this agenda spans Net Zero, Public Health and Social Justice with implications for the Sport, Education and Tourism areas of government too. With the acknowledgement that infrastructure development (which Transport Scotland is well placed to oversee) must run alongside behaviour change measures such as policy, training, education, community growing, skills development and communications campaigns, we must ask the question; is transport the best place to hold all of these essential aspects of the development of active travel? Making the economic, health and social justice case for a population wide shift in the direction of active travel takes time, resource and expertise and within Transport Scotland there appears to be competing and conflicting demands that makes prioritising this messaging, and offering consistent support to community based behaviour change initiatives very challenging. Might it be that the Scottish Government Wellbeing Economy Directorate is better placed to help make this economic, health, PLACE and climate case on behalf of active travel across government portfolios,to encourage a joined up approach to solving this joint health / climate / inequality problem?

In addition to consideration of where active travel behaviour change sitswithin central government, is the extent to which each of our 32 Local Authorities and our 7 Regional Transport Parternships are willing and able to make the necessary changes in their local areas to encourage a modal shift. The recent Verity House Agreement between Scottish Government and Local Authorities sets out the vision for a more collaborative approach to delivering shared priorities for the people of Scotland. This increase in a Local Authorities fiscal autonomy comes with its own risks but without the acceptance and trust that a local government is best placed to deliver vital change for the communities they represent, power will continue to be held centrally and generic change interpreted by communities as being out- of-touch and forced upon them.

Edinburgh and Glasgow each have ambitious active travel initiatives to the value of £40 million respectively that arealready underway. Other Local Authorities, to a greater or lesser degree, are putting in place their own budget of measures that they feel will encourage change to their own unique areas of Scotland. A good example of a Local Authority Area working well across private, public and voluntary sectors can be found in the South of Scotland.

The South of Scotland Cycling Partnership is a coalition of professional partners, national agencies and Local Authorities who represent the views and opinions of thousands of South of Scotland residents, enterprises and visitors and covers a diverse range of interests. This collaborative strategy has a ten year vision: to shape all South of Scotland communities around people and to embed cycling into the daily fabric of the lives of residents and visitors to make cycling the most popular choice for shorter everyday journeys. Driven this way, based on a broad range of policies from central government, the South of Scotland has a unique opportunity to deliver a modal shift away from cars and towards active travel to reach their own health, economic, climate and social justice objectives.

Reflections on the role of Ambassador for Active Travel

The role of Ambassador for Active Travel offered a unique opportunity to break the active travel conversation out of the echo chamber it often finds itself in and to provide a conduit for lesser heard voices into the space where decisions are made. Unfortunately, although recruited to this role as a trusted and authentic voice (i.e. with personal messaging and practical experience of the active travel landscape) I have never felt able or encouraged to use my creativity and initiative to break out of the closed government system in order to help make the change it insists is needed. While I developed some excellent working partnerships with individuals within key delivery partner organisations, I felt that the organisations tasked with active travel behaviour change are part of a cluttered and competitive landscape which is not conducive to collaborative or creative working. It appeared to me that anxiety and defensiveness originating from the precarious nature of their funding situation meant many third sector active travel initiatives were spending disproportionate energy on justifying their existence rather than on collaborative working.

Left to use my own voice and personal messaging to help change the public narrative around active travel was no easy task. In reality, the role of the Ambassador for Active Travel had no administrative support, autonomy or budget of its own to realise the objective of broadening and depending the public conversation around active travel. Frustratingly, while I witnessed comparatively large sums of money being spent ensuring bureaucratic processes were adhered to, inexpensive, person-centred, creative projects that I believed would better engage a younger or harder to reach audience were drowned in procurement processes or dumbed down to avoid any possibility of debate or controversy. But debate and controversy are the cornerstones of any change making agenda. Doing things the way they have always been done is a tried and tested way to ensure that things stay the same. This was the unique potential of this role but it was hamstrung from the very beginning by its own governance.

On countless occasions it has felt to me (and to others attempting to deliver change in favour of active travel in local government, health, education and through delivery partnerships) that bureaucratic process is inhibiting progress and, just as importantly, devaluing the excellent individuals trying to make the changes we so desperately need. It is my strong opinion that we simply don’t have the time or the justification to behave this way any longer.

In my time as Ambassador for Active Travel, I developed and delivered a well-received keynote presentation based on social values to help Transport Scotland and our Convention of Scottish Local Authorities address our health and environmental conundrum. This presentation was based on research conducted by the Common Cause Foundation which revealed that the vast majority of the UK’s population identifies more with compassionate values (social equality, environmental protection, the promotion of health and well-being) than selfish values (fame, success, money and status). Furthermore, an even greater percentage believe that our statutory services should be governed by these compassionate values and our country run in accordance with them. In transport terms this would mean more space allocated for people to be active and socialise in rather than it being dominated by roads that predominately move and store privately owned cars. It would mean better air quality particularly in the most deprived areas of our built up towns and cities. It would mean more subsidies to our public transport system rather than continuing to make driving the most affordable option for those who can already afford car ownership. It would mean prioritising pedestrian walkways, enforcing the pavement parking law and restricting the movement of private cars in places where our children live, play and learn. Unfortunately, it is still a well-organised, privileged minority of people from a narrow demographic who are given the broadest platform to express their views and this is undermining the individuals and institutions we know are in the majority and who wish to live by compassionate values. This, in turn, makes those people feel that they are instead in the minority and that upholding their compassionate values is pointless because everyone around them is simply out for themselves. This is why cultures of selfish values become self-actualising. It is the responsibility of our statutory services and political leaders to make bold, fair, health and environment- centred decisions based on facts and the carefully considered opinions of a broad range of our diverse population, not only the loud and privileged few. Real transformation in active travel is possible - and I’m delighted that the new Verity House Agreement will give Local Authorities more autonomy to make the bespoke changes their communities need to walk, wheel and cycle more. This, coupled with record levels of funding, mean that we’re closer now to achieving our shared vision as a more active nation than we’ve ever been before. We must continue to be bold and less risk averse if we are to continue on this trajectory. We must finally find a way to join up government agendas and write cross cutting policies in favour of health and environment and at the same time support the incredible grassroots organisations and passionate individuals striving to make our shared public spaces feel like they belong to everyone. And we must do this quickly in order to bring about the change that is so desperately needed for our health, wellbeing and our climate.