Are plans to get Londoners walking on the right track?

The Mayor has declared his intention to make 2011 the ‘year of walking’ and allocated millions of pounds to the cause, but will his proposals see more Londoners making their journeys on foot?

Caroline Pidgeon AM will lead an investigation on behalf of the Assembly’s Transport Committee to assess the effectiveness of current plans to get people walking and look at what more could be done.

Almost a quarter of all journeys in the capital are made on foot – nearly 6 million trips every day – making up nearly a third of the total time Londoners spend travelling. The Mayor’s Transport Strategy states that he wants to see the share of all journeys made on foot increase to 25 per cent by 2031 – an extra million journeys a day.

To help meet this target, the Mayor and Transport for London have allocated over £200 million over the next three years to ‘Better Streets’ - which includes schemes ranging from de-cluttering streets to pedestrianisation - and ‘Better Green and Water Spaces’ to improve access to London’s parks, rivers and canals.

Caroline Pidgeon AM said:
“The Mayor wants 2011 to be the ‘year of walking’ but to encourage more Londoners to make their journeys on foot he will have to carefully tailor his proposals and investment.

“There are real benefits to getting people walking, especially when you consider that Londoners make more than a million trips of less than a kilometre by car every day. I want to identify the best ways to make it easier and safer for Londoners to walk instead, not just next year but in the longer-term.”

The investigation will identify programmes that should be prioritised and any further actions that need to be taken to ensure ‘the year of walking’ results in a sustained increase in walking.

Larger aspirational projects like the London Promenade and Living Streets’ plans to create a pedestrian network in central London will be considered alongside signage schemes like Legible London and local authority initiatives aimed at improving the streetscape for pedestrians, including Walworth Road in Southwark, Exhibition Road in Kensington and ‘naked’ Camden High Street.

The investigation will involve site visits and evidence gathering from organisations including TfL, SusTrans and Living Streets. A full report will be published in the autumn.

You can read an article about Caroline's investigation on the Living Streets website.