London mayoral elections 2021: candidates’ active travel commitments

Candidates from all the major political parties in London have published their manifestos for the upcoming London mayoral election.
  

We've pulled together a one-stop-shop of information to see what the candidate from each major party is committing to. 

In alphabetical order of the name of the party, we've outlined the key commitments made by each candidate in relation to active travel.

Walking and cycling

• Ensure that all children have access to cycle safety training across London.
• Broaden the network of cycling centres to ensure that every borough has good access to bicycle training.
• Promote active travel with hire-scheme electric bikes.
• Work with local councils to ensure that there are more cycle hangars in all new development.
• Invest in active travel measures, including cycleways, for every resident in every community.
• Double the routes provided by the Walk London Network and ensure that these high-quality walking routes are made more attractive.  
    

Place and liveability

• Hold public consultations with every community located near a TfL-funded low traffic neighbourhood and remove the traffic measures if a majority of residents favour the removal.
• Turn London’s grey spaces into green by creating 300 new pocket parks.
• Appoint a Chief Placemaker to ensure that new major developments in London incorporate good design and significant amounts of natural beauty into every new neighbourhood.

Read Shaun Bailey’s manifesto.

Walking and cycling

• Deliver a fully connected London cycle network, investing both in new cycle routes and in improving existing cycle routes, ensuring that all signposted Transport for London cycle routes meets the cycleway quality criteria by 2024.
• Introduce a comprehensive smarter travel choices programme to bring about travel behaviour change.
• Bring cycle hire to the whole of London, with safe parking areas for well managed dockless and hub-based schemes.
• Expand current borough programmes for putting in secure bike hangars.
• Ensure cycle routes benefit disabled people who use buggies, scooters and cycles as their main mode of independent transport.
• Prevent electric vehicle charging infrastructure from being placed on pavements.
• Introduce a programme of upgrading pavements to be level and wide enough for social distancing.
• Provide more crossing points with dropped kerbs and tactile paving and ensure they are accessible for people with wheeled mobility aids such as rollators, and buggies – preferably with raised crossings at side roads, bus stop bypasses and safe bike lanes.
• Develop a strategic plan to expand the Walk London network, with at least six new high-quality green walking routes that link green spaces.
• Support the creation of a Central London Walking Network with easy, attractive and low pollution routes.
• Lobby the Crown Estate Paving Commission to build the case for traffic removal from all the Royal Parks in London.
    

Place and liveability

• Empower and fund councils and community groups to develop low traffic neighbourhoods.
• Increase the rate and pace of delivery in the low traffic neighbourhoods and Liveable Neighbourhoods programmes.
• Set a central London zone, some residential areas and key town centres across London, to be permanently free of all private car journeys by 2030.
• Make it a condition for boroughs to receive funding for walking and cycling measures that controlled parking schemes are in place across the borough.
• Ensure there is a programme of reducing on-street parking spaces to allow for parklets and space for bike lanes and bus priority schemes.
• Review the streets outside every school in London, and massively expand investment from the Mayor for councils to help schools and communities introduce School Streets and Play Streets schemes.
• Create a new programme to extend the school streets programme to roads outside colleges and universities.
• Use low traffic neighbourhoods investment to address some of the local barriers to mobility experienced on the streets today by people using aids such as white canes, rollators, wheelchairs and adaptive pedal cycles.
• To complement the low traffic neighbourhood schemes, invest in work on main roads especially where people live, work and shop to make these roads less hostile and traffic dominated.

Read Sian Berry’s manifesto.

Walking and cycling

• Continue the rapid expansion of London’s cycle network — connecting communities and town centres with protected cycleways on main roads and low-traffic routes on local streets — so it reaches a third of Londoners by 2025.
• Ask TfL to work closely with the NHS in London to encourage more people to build healthier travel options into their daily lives.
• Pilot a ‘well-being station’ on the TfL network — providing local public-health information and details on local walking and cycling routes.
• Invest to modernise and expand the Santander Cycle Hire Scheme so it can be accessed by more Londoners, as well as introducing e-bikes.
• Continue walking and cycling community grants, and bike training for adults and children will be increased to keep up with demand
• Continue to deliver cycle parking plan, providing 5,000 new residential cycle hangars, cycle parking hubs at stations, and more cycle parking on our high streets.
• Ask TfL to provide guidance on removing access barriers - ensuring the design of pavements, parks, and paths considers everyone’s needs and helping to diversify cycling.
• Work with London boroughs to ensure communities and stakeholder groups are properly consulted on recent temporary schemes, refining them where necessary, and making them permanent where they are successful.
• Work with businesses to support greener last mile alternatives such as cargo bike schemes.
• Ask TfL to consider an Outer London Town Centres Fund to improve public transport and walking and cycling options in boroughs on London’s outskirts.
• Improve London’s network of green corridors and open spaces that connect with town centres, public transport, places of work and people’s homes.
• Develop a new plan for connecting parks and green spaces with local communities, making sure these green routes are accessible for everyone. This will include improving existing walking routes, such as the London Loop and Capital Ring.
• Improve the safety of the most dangerous junctions, including a programme of new pedestrian crossings at those junctions currently lacking them.
    

Place and liveability

• Lead work to protect, adapt and enhance high streets, and to help those that have lost some of their spirit to find a new lease of life.
• Ensure that town centres are made more liveable and put people, rather than cars, first.
• Continue to support the innovative use of timed changes to streets across the capital through ‘School Streets’, ‘Summer Streeteries’ and ‘Lunchtime Streets’.
• Explore options for future car-free days in central London.
• Commit to review how to further involve local communities in the planning decisions that affect them, including by making the most of interactive technology.

Read Sadiq Khan’s manifesto.

Walking and cycling

• Make the Santander cycle hire scheme free to use every Sunday for a year.
• Commit to the biggest extension of the cycle hire scheme since it began, working with all neighbouring boroughs to expand the network and reach more potential commuters.
• Support people to take up the [cycling] habit through encouraging take-up of the Cycle to Work scheme and more safe cycle parking.
• Double expenditure on cycle infrastructure by 2024.
• Fund the creation of a Green Walking Network. This includes mapping all of London's existing walks as well as linking up walks with green spaces.
    

Place and liveability

• Seed fund the creation of flexible, outdoor performance spaces across London - from local high streets to central London locations – to maximise the potential for safe, socially distanced events.
• Be the first to publish a Statement of Community Involvement. A promise to Londoners that there will be proper community engagement and participation in all planning decisions in the capital.

Read Luisa Porritt’s manifesto.

Read our manifesto for London 2021.