Brian Deegan at Active Travel Café 9th January 2024
Brian Deegan, Head of Inspections at Active Travel England (ATE), was the special guest at Active Travel Café on Tuesday 9th January 2024.
He gave a talk about ATE’s recent activities and future plans, and answered questions. These are the most interesting points that emerged.
1) The Government’s Mantra is ‘All Modes’
As far as I could gather, the government’s mantra on transport is that schemes must deliver for all modes. ‘Schemes that work for everybody’ is their idea.
As part of that agenda, the active travel budget has been cut. The government is trying to make all schemes work for active travel, and active travel doesn’t necessarily need specific funding, is the thinking.
The Minister with responsibility for cycling and walking, Guy Opperman, is pushing ATE to be ‘more integrated’.
Brian was diplomatic and as positive as possible when explaining this – necessarily, because he is a government employee.
I’m not a government employee, so I don’t need to be diplomatic. I can point out how flawed the government’s agenda is.
Most often, there is limited road space and you can’t please everyone. Fear of motor vehicles is the biggest deterrent to cycling; a government that is not prepared to manage motor traffic is not serious about active travel.
For one thing it rules about Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods, which are among the cheapest and most effective interventions to boost cycling and walking.
There’s intellectual dishonesty in pretending that all modes can be winners at the same time and in the same space. Most likely what it really means is maintaining the car-dominated status quo.
Further, we know that to decarbonise transport we need to reduce vehicle miles travelled very significantly (by about 20% by 2030). A government that won’t reduce vehicle miles travelled will not meet its legally-binding climate goals.
2) ATE Now Looking at All Government-Funded Schemes
These are not Brian’s words but mine: ATE is making the best of the situation. What Brian did say is that the reduction in the active travel budget was a good opportunity for ATE to ‘poke their noses’ in other areas.
‘We’re now looking at everything [all local authority schemes] to see if we can make them better’.
brian deegan at active travel cafe
This means working on transport schemes for the betterment of people walking, wheeling and cycling.
The relevant funds include:
- Active Travel Fund
- Levelling-Up Fund
- City Region Sustainable Transport settlements for Mayoral Combined Authorities
- the major roads network
Whatever the investment is, ATE wants to influence the scheme and get good wins out of it. ‘If it’s being paid for by government, we have a remit to get involved in it and look at it’.
This is an enormous amount of work for Brian and his team
Part of the current philosophy is that rather than make a couple of things perfect, ATE should try to make everything a little bit better.
Highway Maintenance
Another budget which could contribute to active travel improvements is general highway maintenance by local authorities.
ATE recently ran a session with highway maintenance leads across the country.
3) Centre of Excellence
One of ATE’s roles is to be a Centre of Excellence on active travel.
They are starting to do research on designs, and on the economic benefits of active travel. In the next 12-18 months, there should be a steady flow of results from that research.
ATE will be launching a website soon. In 2024, they will be making the public more aware of the impact they are having.
The research will show that quality is important.
Design quality is the bread and butter of what Brian’s team does. They have tools that they use (route check, junction assessment, place-making), and local authorities all have copies of them.
The tools are used to spot issues, then ATE can help local authorities to resolve them.
4) Poorly-Performing Local Authorities
Brian said that ATE have been working intensively with lower capability local authorities. It’s like an ocean liner – difficult to turn around quickly, but he believes it is starting to happen.
Poorly-performing local authorities is the subject that interests me the most, because I live in North Yorkshire.
North Yorkshire Council’s attitude to cycling continues to stink, and they continue to get absolutely nothing done. If ATE have intervened, it has had no noticeable effect so far.
5) Having a Plan and Making a Change
Brian acknowledged that it is difficult to get some councils to spend money on making a change. Part of ATE’s role is to persuade people to have a plan and make a change, instead of maintaining the status quo.
ATE have been trying to get pipelines of projects together for the next 5-10 years. Then they can look at the whole plan, and funding blocks, rather than dealing with individual projects piecemeal.
ATE are trying to gather up councils’ LCWIPs and collate the information.
A lot of effort is going into rural network planning.
6) Planning
The planning team is going through all planning applications for 150 or more houses. It is a lot of work, and dealing with the demand is the problem, but the planning team is performing very well.
ATE want to start influencing planning policy and guidance more, but that may have to wait until after the next General Election.
7) Can Councils Prioritise Walking Over Cycling?
There was a question about the balance between walking and cycling. The questioner had heard that councils could meet 90% of their active travel targets by focusing on walking, and cycling might get left out.
North Yorkshire Council has been telling Harrogate Cycle Action that it is shifting its focus from cycling (not that the council has actually done anything for cycling over the last 10 years) to walking.
Brian somewhat dismissed this idea.
He said that there is a massive latent demand for cycling, as all surveys show, and not as much latent demand for walking.
‘Build it and they will come’ applies to cycling much more than walking, so a focus on cycling means a greater uplift in active travel.
Even a scheme that is billed as being for walking still has to work for cycling.
8) How Can Campaigners Be Most Effective?
ATE will be advising local authorities to involve campaigners.
For campaigners to be most effective, they should ask ‘who can give you what you want?’, and speak to those people.
People can flag local schemes to ATE if they think that ATE is not aware of the issues. This can be done by copying the Regional Manager in to emails to the council.
Brian said that ATE will not feedback to you, but they will try to sort the issue out.
An Unsatisfactory System
The system he outlined is better than nothing, but still highly unsatisfactory.
For one thing, if the Regional Managers can be contacted by campaigners, their contact details should be published and there should be a clear system for raising concerns.
For another, it is bizarre if you can contact them but they don’t reply.
Still, it’s better than nothing.