Active Travel England (ATE) is the Department for Transport’s new cycling and walking executive agency with a £5.5 million investment to be made in cycling and walking schemes.

ATE will be responsible for driving up the standards of cycling and walking infrastructure and managing the national active travel budget, awarding funding for projects that meet the new national standards set out in 2020. It will inspect finished schemes and ask for funds to be returned for any that have not been completed as promised or have not started or finished by the stipulated times.

ATE will also begin to inspect, and publish reports on, highway authorities for their performance on active travel, and identify particularly dangerous failings in their highways for cyclists and pedestrians.

It will be a statutory consultee on major planning applications to ensure that the largest new developments properly cater for pedestrians and cyclists. PJA’s Phil Jones is leading on this workstream.

As well as approving and inspecting schemes, ATE will help local authorities to train staff in spreading good practice in design, implementation and public engagement.

As part of the Consultant team, PJA will helping to establish processes and protocols, as well as carrying out inspections of planned designs referring to Local Transport Note 1/20 which we authored.

Chris Sibthorpe, PJA’s Active Travel Director said “We are delighted to be part of the consultancy team assisting DfT, local authorities and developers in meeting higher standards of infrastructure design for walking and cycling so that these become mainstream activities for short trips. With the climate change emergency and focus on health and wellbeing following the COVID pandemic, the need for thoughtfully designed streets to enable walking and cycling has never been greater”.

For more information, contact [email protected]

PJA were the lead author of LTN1/20, the new cycling infrastructure design guidance which was published alongside ‘Gear Change’, and co-authored the guidance on Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans. Made up of some of the UK’s leading transport planners, engineers and place makers we work together to create better places through great design.

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