Transport Futures

What’s next for active travel?

4th June 2025

Webinar two takes place on 4th June and explores Active travel and living local – we’ve debated localised communities regularly, but fast-forward 25 years and it’s time to get real.

As a first step, let us imagine an incoming government that is at last both serious and clear eyed about the dangers of the environmental crisis and the social costs of our degraded social realm. This administration creates a Ministry of Place and makes transport, education, health and planning subordinate to it. No more silos when it comes to capital investment. Everything is developed holistically to ensure that there is always a high degree of local integration that maximises access to amenities, minimises the need for travel, and promotes mixed use everywhere.

Walking, wheeling and cycling can be a key part of such local living – if it’s built into everyday life.

“Designing activity back into our neighbourhoods and creating places where children have transport independence is achievable – it just needs smart planning,” says Chris Boardman CBE, National Active Travel Commissioner.

We do not have to keep living with the mistakes of the past. By taking emphatic action, local living could become the norm for people and every type of family construct in the UK in the very near future.

The infrastructural demands of booming car travel and the mistaken rationalism of planners who believed they could exploit it to anatomise human lives into different functions of work, home, health, education, play and so on – zoning them out for efficiency and connecting them by road and (sometimes) rail – has created urban and suburban places that are notable (sometimes notorious) for their feeling of soullessness or lack of a sense of ‘place’.

It’s simple. Stop designing for the car. The future planners’ mandate is: if it’s not accessible to essential daily services, you can’t build it.