Since 2013, the Welsh government has spent over £218m getting the nation to walk and cycle, but so far, nothing has made an impact
It’s 8.30am Monday morning. As usual, a giant steel snake of cars winds through Cardiff city, spewing clouds of noxious gas. Looking closely, you can see cycling paths spanning parts of roads, weeds growing up through walking paths, the occasional cyclist pounding through the fumes, outnumbered fifty to one. It’s been over ten years since the 2013 Active Travel Wales Act (ATW), but this story hasn’t changed a bit.
The ATW set out to promote active travel (AT) across the nation. AT is classed as traveling by human power, like walking to work or cycling to the shops. This tax year, the Welsh government has set aside £65m, up 8% from last year, in a bid to encourage more AT. But according to a report by Audit Wales, AT has stagnated since 2013, despite the government spending £218m since the 2018 Welsh Active Travel Fund.
But what’s the problem?
Emissions, reduced physical activity, noise and social exclusion through excessive car use shortens lives. According to Baroness Randson in her address to the Lords, there are 40,000 excess deaths every year due to air pollution. Children are particularly at risk with developing lungs, faster breathing and height being closer to exhausts. Every month, 1,000 children are injured on UK roads around schools.
Although air pollution from cars causes heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, strokes, cancers, and asthma, it’s not the only hazard. Professor Ian Walker, head of psychology at Swansea University, suggests even car noise can kill saying: “Traffic noise at night causes fragmentation and shortening of sleep, elevation of stress hormone levels and increased oxidative stress in the vasculature in the brain. These factors promote vascular dysfunction, inflammation and hypertension, thereby elevating the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
The low drone of traffic also inhibits cognitive development in children. According to a report in the National Library of Medicine: “school-outdoor exposure to road traffic noise was associated with a slower development in working memory… and greater inattentiveness.”
Making a city more bicycle-friendly is not simply a matter of painting a few lines
Walker, expert in transport behaviour, says: “The reduction in noise reduces hypertension and a bunch of other really unpleasant illnesses. So you get enormous public health benefits from the AT itself, but also from the reduction in driving, because driving really causes a lot of death that people don’t recognise.”
Get on y’er bike
Action group Cardiff Cycle City found cycling on average 9.5 minutes faster than driving to the city centre and costs £8.50 less. Additionally, Andre Neves and Christian Brand estimate half of all car trips in Cardiff are under three miles. These findings together create a convincing argument for AT’ing into Cardiff.
A World Health Organisation report found AT can reduce risk of cardiovascular disease by 10% and lower risk of developing diabetes by 30%. It has also been shown to reduce rates of depression and dementia.
The mental health benefits of spending more time outdoors as well as interacting with people are known, but people also feel safer when there are more people on the streets and are more likely to forge community ties. This sense of community is something Walker thinks reduces crime simply by having more eyes on the streets.
But how good for you is Active Travel?
1- Mental Refreshment: Active travel can offer a break from the stresses of daily life. Helping both mental clarity, focus and problem solving abilities.
2- Reduced Pollution Exposure: Little known, but cycling and walking to work generally exposes you to less, not more pollution than driving in a car
3- Better Sleep: Daily exercise has been show to greatly improve sleep quality
4- Lowers you chances of certain Cancers: In particular, bowel, breast and womb
Not everyone’s convinced
Tom Overton, 52, said: “Two, three times a week, I get abuse from a car driver because they’ll want to turn across me. They’ll give me some abuse about it.”
When talking about his experiences commuting, Overton, daily cycle commuter, says education is key to safe cycling.
Overton, who runs social-enterprise The Bike Lock where coffee drinkers can lock their bikes up for the day, went on to say: “If we genuinely want people to move in a more active way, the infrastructure needs to make it easy for people to make that choice, and at the moment… it’s nowhere near good enough,” Though he said it’s much better than 15 years ago.
Catrin Phillips, 23, works as a paralegal in Cardiff. She finds it entirely impractical to actively travel to work: “It just wouldn’t make any sense,” she said. “Neither I nor my place of work are well connected in terms of public transport.” She went on to say she wouldn’t entertain the idea of cycling to work but might consider AT as part of her journey if it would cut down her current traffic-heavy 45-minute commute.
£Millions later and still no closer
So why then, with all these benefits and millions of pounds in investment, hasn’t the Welsh government been able to get legs over crossbars? Peter Cox, senior lecturer at the University of Chester said in an article: “Making a city more bicycle-friendly is not simply a matter of painting a few lines… It requires cities to work with cyclists as participants in redesigning the city.”
Chair of the Welsh Active Travel Board, Dafydd Tristan Davies, believes a large part of the limited uptake of AT is down to the government’s “scattergun approach” . He feels putting a good cycle path in one village and a great bus service in another creates a piecemeal system that isn’t useful.
Davies says: “What we know is that you get the best return for investment if you do all those as a package together.” Using this model, Davies thinks we are more likely to see a larger shift toward AT, especially if it makes it easier to cycle and more difficult to drive.
Watch this video for a quick rundown:
Walker thinks it is not enough to “encourage” people to AT. Instead, we should focus on “enabling.” He says, with the current infrastructure, we have an environment that is very good for driving and not good for AT. “Nobody’s goal today is to drive a car.” He says: “Their goal is to go to the supermarket or drop the kids at school.” What we need to be doing says Walker: “is focusing on enabling people to meet those goals in the healthiest, greenest way possible.”
At 10.30am the streets of Cardiff have calmed. The snake has split into a bustle of walkers, drivers and cyclists. However, if the last 65 years are anything to go by, at 5.30pm the snake will be back. Without strong leadership and innovative, thoughtful design, we will wake up to the same struggle day after day.
