Greg Searle, Senior Inspector, Active Travel England

Active Travel England is the government’s executive agency responsible for making walking, wheeling and cycling the preferred choice for everyone to get around in England. Greg Searle outline ATE’s work to improve active travel routes to stations

For improving active travel routes to stations we’re looking at five key design principles. Firstly routes should be coherent, should link together with no gaps, be easy to navigate and well signposted and it needs to be clear where to go and if you are cycling where to park your bike once you’re at a station.

Routes should also be direct, as direct if not more so than routes for motorised vehicles, which means putting in suitable crossing facilities based on desire lines rather than having to go around the houses to get to your destination.

The third principle is they should be safe. That means creating places that are well lit so if you are coming out of a station late at night and heading to the bus stop, it should feel safe. Cyclists need the right protection and provision.  

Principle four is about providing comfortable routes to use – cyclists need good surfacing, walkers shouldn’t have to encounter trips hazards and there should be adequate tactile paving.

The last principle is that the active travel infrastructure should be attractive – and contribute to stations and surrounding areas being nice places to spend time in.

A particular challenge, and it’s one John Lauder has already outlined, is providing step free access at stations. Lifts need to be large enough for adapted bicycles (a lot of existing Network Rail station lifts aren’t big enough). And if we’re encouraging people to cycle to stations, we should make it easier to take bikes on trains so they can use their bikes for their onward journeys. That’s become a lot harder over the last few decades, but we need to reverse that with suitable rolling stock to support people travelling with their bikes. There’s a lot to go at, but we are trying to upskill local authorities to help them achieve those end to end journeys.