Active Travel and Community Planning
Community planning is a way of developing a strategic vision for each area that is widely shared and which incorporates local responses to national priorities. Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) were given a statutory basis in the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, and are now established in Scottish local authority areas, bringing together local statutory bodies with the voluntary sector, community groups and businesses. 
CPPs, working alongside national health promotion initiatives, are ideally placed to work towards changing both the physical and social environment, to encourage a shift away from over-reliance on motorised transport, towards a return to walking and cycling as the norm for short journeys.
Active Travel Scotland aims to build on the capacity of CPPs to get more people to travel actively more often, on foot and by bicycle. Active Travel Scotland will:
- help partnerships to build a better, stronger delivery structure, by helping to enhance staff knowledge and skills;
- provide practical information, evidence-based best practice and support to help community planners to see how active travel initiatives can contribute to meeting objectives in a wide range of policy areas;
- develop demonstration projects as model solutions.
CPPs co-ordinate a range of thematic sub-groups, many of which are relevant to developing community infrastructures to encourage active travel. Active Travel Scotland will raise awareness about the importance of active travel for health improvement, not only to sub-groups with an explicit health focus, but to those with a focus on transport, land-use, social inclusion and regeneration. The intention is that objectives relevant to encouraging active travel will be incorporated not only in Joint Health Improvement Plans but in other thematic sections of each Community Plan, and that these objectives will be carried through into actions and outputs in the corporate and business plans of all community planning partners.