An Active Travel Future? 

Active travel - walking and cycling for everyday journeys - can help deliver health, environmental, economic and social benefits and contribute to meeting local authority and Scottish Government objectives.  

Our vision is of a future where pedestrians and cyclists will have priority over motorists.  We will live in towns and cities where our children play safely in streets that have become the places of social interaction that they were in the past.  Cars will become marginally accommodated in residential areas and, for most of us, our workplace will be within walking or cycling distance of our home.

Looking at current travel options in Scotland  this may seem radical but much of this is already reality in many European cities.

Where we are now:

26% of all car trips are less than 2 miles and 56% are less than 5 miles.

69% of people travel to work by car, as compared with 11.8% walking and 1.6% cycling.

In the UK passenger cars account for 12.6% of all carbon emissions.

In 2003, 64% of men and 57% of women were overweight. This is an increase from 1995 when the figures were 57% for men and 47% for women.

A recent report predicts that 60% of us will be clinically obese by 2050 with car dependence and sedentary lifestyles being strongly implicated in this.