Active Travel

The urban environment and how children and families use streets to get from place to place across neighbourhoods is a vital part of the system to promote physical activity. Despite much increased national attention on active travel over the last decade and the importance of reducing air pollution through reducing travelling via motorised transport, being active as a mode of transportation (walking, cycling, scooting) is not the social norm for most journeys undertaken by children and families in Bradford or nationally. Furthermore, parents and community members in our area have reported that playing out in the streets has drastically decreased over the last decade and more. Barriers to children’s active travel and being active in the streets are multiple; research from the BiB team shows (Ahern et al, 2017).

Two active travel advisors (part-time) were funded to support JU:MP action groups to co-design their Action Plans and also work with JU:MP schools and organisations to develop active travel plans for their individual settings. They also work in partnership with Bradford Council’s Active Travel champion and Highways team to find opportunities to make changes to the highway infrastructure to make it safer and easier to walk, scoot or cycle. Sport England’s funding did not extend to funding highway infrastructure changes, so close working with Bradford Council on this has been essential. Timeframes have been a challenge, with environmental changes often taking years to plan and deliver, so success has been limited so far. Often JU:MP has had to focus on behaviour change interventions to encourage active travel rather than being able to make the environmental changes needed to support this.