The UK government has just committed £108 million to active travel programmes across England — part of a broader £626 million, four-year package. It got about a day of media attention before being buried under whatever was happening with interest rates. That’s a shame, because this is the kind of policy that will do more measurable good for public health and NHS sustainability than most things that actually make the front pages.
For those of us in Scotland, though, the picture is more complicated.
What England has committed to
The March 2026 announcement spread the money across several programmes:
- £78 million for Bikeability, the national cycle training scheme that has trained over five million children since 2007
- £16.1 million for Living Streets’ Walk to School Outreach programme
- £8 million for Cycling UK’s Big Bike Revival, which works with adults, disabled people, and women who’ve stopped cycling
- £3.1 million for Modeshift STARS, a schools and workplaces accreditation scheme
- £2 million for accessible active travel in National Parks
Chris Boardman, England’s Active Travel Commissioner, said: “This is a practical investment that changes how people move every day… Those small shifts add up quickly — to healthier lives, lower costs, and less pressure on our roads and NHS.”
The health case
A systematic review by Oja and colleagues (2011) looked at 16 cycling-specific studies and found a clear positive relationship between cycling and cardiorespiratory fitness in young people, and a strong inverse relationship between commuter cycling and all-cause mortality and cancer mortality in middle-aged to elderly adults. Six of those studies showed a dose-response gradient — more cycling, more benefit — which is about as clean a causal signal as epidemiology tends to produce.
The mental health picture is newer and, in some ways, more interesting. A 10-wave longitudinal panel study by Kroesen and De Vos (2020) specifically tested which direction the relationship runs: does active travel make people healthier, or do healthier people just happen to cycle more? For BMI, it was the latter. But for mental health, the effect ran clearly in the other direction. Active travel improved later mental health; better mental health didn’t independently predict more active travel. That means cycling and walking programmes are genuine interventions, not just activity correlates.
The case for children goes beyond cardiovascular fitness. Research on young cyclists shows that hazard perception in traffic is experience-dependent, not just age-dependent (Zeuwts et al., 2017). Children who ride regularly develop situation awareness that doesn’t come from maturation alone.
Infrastructure alone won’t do it
Here’s something that gets lost in most active travel debates: building cycle lanes, on its own, is not enough.
A scoping review by Kelly and colleagues (2020), published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined 129 studies and reports from 20 countries and identified 145 distinct cycling promotion initiatives. The conclusion was straightforward: communities and organisations need a wide range of actions beyond physical infrastructure — training, social facilitation, confidence-building, workplace schemes. Remove any one of these and participation stalls.
This is backed up by an evidence review on cycling confidence (Gill et al., 2019), which makes the point that perceived safety and competence are the primary barriers to cycling uptake — not just the presence or absence of a lane. People need to feel capable and safe before they’ll use infrastructure, however good it is.
The gap nobody talks about
Bikeability is the biggest single line item in the package, and rightly so. But there’s a problem that school-age programmes alone can’t solve.
Cycling participation drops sharply between 11 and 16 — and it’s not alone. Participation in most sports falls in that age group, but cycling is more vulnerable than most because it also depends on infrastructure and perceived road safety. Children who were enthusiastic cyclists at primary school stop riding as secondary school brings longer distances, less safe routes, and nobody actively keeping them on a bike.
The window between 14 and 25 is probably the most important one for establishing adult transport habits. Investment that bridges that gap — secondary school schemes, affordable bike access, infrastructure that makes urban cycling feel safe rather than heroic — addresses something that Bikeability can’t.
Cycling in later life
Research by Sakurai and colleagues (2016) followed 614 community-dwelling older adults and found that those who continued cycling regularly — even with mobility limitations — maintained significantly better instrumental activities of daily living and social function than non-cyclists with equivalent limitations. The ability to ride a bicycle is a meaningful predictor of functional independence in later life, not just a fitness metric.
For older adults, when conditions are right, cycling is a mechanism for preserving independence and staying socially connected. Investment in accessible design, e-bike provision, and training for older cyclists is also investment in reducing care dependency.
Where Scotland stands
Scotland’s active travel record is genuinely one of political ambition. Investment grew from around £80 million before the 2021 election to a record £226 million. More than 60 organisations across Scotland have issued a joint active travel manifesto calling for multi-year budgets, better public transport integration, and improved road safety.
But the most recent budget has unsettled people working in the sector. The capital element is maintained at £15.5 million. The resource funding — which pays for staff, training delivery, and community engagement — has been cut by 60%, from £7.9 million to £3.2 million. Capital without resource funding builds infrastructure that goes unused.
Scotland has no equivalent to England’s £108 million announcement.
The Scottish health case is particularly urgent
McCartney and colleagues (2015) pooled data from 18 nationally representative cohort studies. Scotland’s all-cause mortality was 40% higher than England’s after adjusting for age and sex, falling to 29% higher after accounting for socioeconomic and behavioural factors. Known risk factors explained only about a quarter of the gap.
A Scotland-specific programme at comparable per-capita scale to England’s announcement would cost around £10 million a year. Against the direct NHS costs of physical inactivity — estimated at £7.4 billion annually across the UK — the arithmetic is not difficult.
What makes these programmes work
The research literature is consistent on this. Effective active travel investment:
- Spans age groups, not just school-age programmes (Sakurai et al., 2016)
- Pairs infrastructure with behaviour change — routes matter less without confident cyclists using them (Kelly et al., 2020)
- Addresses confidence and competence directly, not just physical access (Gill et al., 2019)
- Runs for multiple years — habits take time to form
- Targets the adolescent participation gap specifically
The newly elected SNP government now has both the mandate and the moment to act. Matching England’s investment — not just in infrastructure, but in the grassroots programmes that actually create cyclists — should be an early priority. Without it, Scotland risks building routes that nobody uses, and losing a generation of young people to the car at exactly the age when the habit could have gone the other way.
References
- Gill, J., Baba, C., Baker, G., Broadfield, S., & Coles, A. (2019). Confidence to Ride, Confidence to Invest — Evidence Review.
- Kelly, P., Williamson, C., Baker, G., Davis, A., & Broadfield, S. (2020). Beyond cycle lanes and large-scale infrastructure. British Journal of Sports Medicine, April 2020.
- Kroesen, M., & De Vos, J. (2020). Does active travel make people healthier, or are healthy people more inclined to travel actively? Journal of Transport & Health, 16, 100844.
- McCartney, G. et al. (2015). Explaining the excess mortality in Scotland compared with England. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 69(1), 20–27.
- Oja, P. et al. (2011). Health benefits of cycling: a systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 21(4), 496–509.
- Sakurai, R. et al. (2016). Can you ride a bicycle? Journal of Epidemiology, 26(6), 307–314.
- Zeuwts, L. et al. (2017). Hazard perception in young cyclists and adult cyclists. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 105, 64–71.
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