The Scottish Parliament’s Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee is holding an inquiry into “Active Travel – walking and cycling”. The Committee is keen to hear your views on walking and cycling. The Scottish Government says that it would like to see 10% of journeys being by bicycle by 2020.

The formal remit of the Committee’s inquiry is to consider – the progress being made in developing active travel; any barriers to further progress; and the further action that may be required by the Scottish Government, local authorities and other bodies to ensure that significant progress is made in the development and implementation of active travel in Scotland.

You are invited to respond to the issues identified by the Committee and posed in the six questions below. You are free to answer as many or as few of these questions as you wish.

The six questions:

  1. What more can be done to encourage people to change their travelling habits and walk and cycle more?
  2. Is enough progress being made in developing and delivering improvements in the uptake of walking and cycling?
  3. If not, what are the barriers to progress? (for example, lack of policy development, lack of political leadership, lack of funding/investment, the lack of prominence given to active travel in transport policy development, project planning and construction etc.)
  4. Why do walking and cycling policies set out in national, regional and local transport plans not result in a greater modal share for walking and cycling?
  5. What further action is required by the Scottish Government, local authorities and other bodies to ensure that significant progress is made in the development and implementation of walking and cycling, particularly if transport is to make a greater and more meaningful contribution to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions?
  6. What can Scotland learn from good practice/successful implementation in other countries?

The closing date for written submissions is Friday 11 December 2009. To make things easier I created a MS Word doc file you can down load here (16kb).

They ask that before you submit your views, that you read their policy for handling information received in response to calls for evidence (pdf 15kb). Information you provide will be treated according the Scottish Parliament’s privacy and data policy. Your views may be published by the Parliament and will be treated as a public document unless you indicate other. Your views will be made available to the Committee. For more information see here.