A Healthy Street is a safer street. But Healthy Streets don’t deliver themselves.  The Mayor of London is committed to delivering Transport for London’s flagship Healthy Streets programme but he needs help. RoadPeace is keen to support the protection and promotion of healthy travel modes but we need the local boroughs to also commit to delivering Healthy Streets.

So London Boroughs were given a nudge this week with the publication of the London Boroughs Healthy Streets Scorecard.  This monitors their efforts to promote active travel through four key activity indicators:

1. Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes
2. 20mph speed limits
3. Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs)
4. Physically protected cycle track

As well as four key output indicators

1. the proportion of trips made by ‘sustainable modes’ (walking, cycling, public transport)
2. active travel rate (the proportion of residents walking or cycling more than five times a week)
3. collisions resulting in serious or fatal injuries for active travellers, per million journey stages
4. car ownership rates, to ascertain the level of reliance on cars.

As the Evening Standard highlighted, inner boroughs scored better on delivering healthy streets than the more car reliant outer boroughs. But the scorecard also revealed that high rates of walking and cycling did not always translate into lower rates of deaths and injuries for those walking and cycling, as seen in Hackney. So a lesson appears to be that it is not enough to rely on increased walking and cycling to reduce road danger and casualties. This requires additional effort.

RoadPeace was proud to be a member of the coalition which produced this scorecard. Led by Campaign for Protection of Rural England, other members included London Cycling Campaign, Sustrans, Living Streets, Sustrans,

The monitoring does not stop here. This first report produced a baseline. There will be annual updates with the focus being on how much boroughs change over the years and do more to contribute to reducing road danger.

An our focus should not be restricted to the boroughs. The police also have a key role in reducing road danger. So RoadPeace, under our London Traffic Justice project, will be producing Police Healthy Streets Scorecards for the Met (by borough) and the City of London Police.

Read the press release

View the score card and the associated data sets.

Updated on: 22 July 2019