Evaluation of Active Travel Fund 2

The DfT has published a two-part ‘process evaluation’ of Active Travel Fund 2 (ATF2).

Although only published on 9th January 2025 the reports, which were written by Transport for Quality of Life, the University of Westminster, Sustrans and UWE, date from:

• July 2023 – Process Evaluation Stage 1 and
• February 2024 – Process Evaluation Stage 2

Evaluation Stage 1

The Stage 1 report focuses on consultation and engagement.

The researchers conducted four focus groups in Autumn 2021, with a total of 30 officers from 28 local authorities.

The council officers complained about:

• staffing resources to develop schemes and bids
• the difficulty of knitting together patchworks of funding into something coherent
• the lack of a clear definition of success, e.g. is it outputs (km of cycle track) or outcomes (more people cycling)?
• perceived extra difficulties for rural councils

The council officers who took part in the focus groups said that schemes which impact motor vehicles, such as LTNs, have more active travel benefit but are harder to deliver.

Another point to emerge from the focus groups is that political support is crucial, particularly from council leaders and transport portfolio holders.

Timescales

Some officers said that the timescales for bidding, consulting and implementing the schemes were unrealistically short.

Councils that had LCWIPs were at an advantage, because LCWIPs contain strategic active travel projects which join up to form a coherent network.

Political Leadership

The report says that political leadership is key.

‘It was important for key local decision makers to have a deep understanding of the need for and potential for transport behaviour change (such as concepts of induced traffic and traffic evaporation, referring to the tendency of new infrastructure to encourage more usage, and conversely, the tendency of a reduction in capacity to reduce demand)’.

Cabinet Members for Transport were cited as being crucial.

Engagement

The officers said that it is important to create a narrative, to explain why changes are being put forward. Contexts could include rat-running, the climate emergency and public health.

They also mentioned that it is difficult to get a representative sample of the community to respond to consultations. It tends to be affluent, white, middle-aged and older (40 to 70), car-owning men who respond, and schools and young people (18 to 35) are hard to reach. Paying people to respond is one way of getting younger residents involved.

There were also concerns about multiple consultation responses from the same people, and harassment of officers.

Experimental schemes are sometimes helpful – being able to go in and show people the scheme, and avoid the fear element of ‘if you do this, it will break the city’.

One officer described their consultation process as ‘we’re doing it, how would you like to shape it’, rather than being a referendum on ‘do we do it at all?” (That was certainly not North Yorkshire Council).

It was noted that LTNs can be low cost, but require significant communication and engagement efforts because of the perceived impact on motor vehicles.

Success or Failure

There is a tension between acceptability (to the local community) and effectiveness (in enabling more walking and cycling). Which represents the correct definition of success?

Officers considered cycling schemes to be more difficult, and anything that involves a reallocation of road space away from motor vehicles as contentious. School Streets are relatively uncontroversial, but as they only involve one street for 45 minutes twice a day they have little impact on modal shift.

Success in terms of being able to implement a scheme and ensure it stays in may cut against success in terms of achieving measurable objectives, e.g. cycling uplift.

Delivering only part of a route or network means that benefits are suppressed, and councils may not have the budget to do a whole route including difficult junctions. There needs to be a critical mass of proper cycling infrastructure and proper walking infrastructure to see change.

Cycling More Controversial than Walking

‘I think when you add cycling schemes into the mix, I think is where it gets nasty, is my perception’.

Nevertheless, some walking schemes are controversial, for example footway widening that impacts space for motor vehicles. Also, some councils find that their cycling schemes get a positive response.

One officer identified that if an area already has cyclists, it helps a lot, otherwise it can be a Catch-22 situation.

‘…the biggest support with the LTNs was among the cycle groups and the walking groups, but the cycling groups were at the top, so I think it’s kind of this Catch-22 situation. If you haven’t got the cyclists you can’t do things for cycling, which means you don’t have cyclists, but if you’ve got the cyclists you should start doing more for them’.

LTNs

LTNs are regarded as difficult because they impact motor vehicles.

It’s important to add public realm/beautification and pedestrian improvements alongside motor vehicle restrictions.

One officer said that LTNs are easiest when it is a case of closing off a clearly-identified rat-run. ‘If you focus on “it’s a cut-through, it shouldn’t be a cut-through”, people tend to support that’.

Another said that anything that impacts motor vehicles is difficult.

‘We’re finding success off road but not on road. It’s really difficult. We’ve got politicians not interested in using highway space and taking parked cars away’.

But those who had managed to reallocate road space to create routes for walking or cycling often felt that there were substantial benefits that could not be gained through less controversial measures.

Rural or Smaller Councils

Rural authorities said that it was harder to make schemes fit the template provided by the DfT, and appraisals of benefits were harder with sparse populations and longer distances between settlements.

‘Many rural participants said they felt that LTN 1/20 was urban-focused, with some of them challenging the idea that currently defined minimum widths should apply to rural settings, for instance’.

Responses from the focus groups revealed resistance to good standards.

‘Based on the LTN 1/20 guidance, we shouldn’t really be doing shared cycleway footways. However, within Authority M, it would be so out of keeping to have a segregated pedestrian and cycle route: it just wouldn’t get approval. It wouldn’t work’.

Out of keeping with what? This appears to be resistance to change and clinging to a status quo that fails sustainable transport.

Other officers said that taking out car parking is really difficult. No one said that providing proper cycling infrastructure was going to be easy.

Short-Term Funding

Councils also complained about a lack of long-term funding. ‘The lack of a long-term funding settlement completely cripples local authorities in doing the best job that we could’. Short-term funding and competitive bidding make it difficult to do long-term network planning.

‘We need revenue spending – to design up schemes, consult, iterate and get involved over a multi-year period, rather than just random 1 year capital pots’.

A smaller council said that it has lost in-house resources such as walking and cycling officers, and begun relying entirely on consultants.

Highways Network Management

‘DfT needs to look at how highway authorities deal with their network management responsibilities and if they want to get a shift to make it more prescriptive that they’ve got to kind of reclassify the network, and the outcome of that classification is: ‘this type of road should have that type of approach,’ whether it’s cycle tracks on main roads or LTNs in neighbourhoods, that kind of thing’.

Evaluation Stage 2

I’ll look at Evaluation Stage 2 in a separate post.