In addition to a more personal response to the online survey, I responded to the North East Combined Authority’s Local Travel Plan from the perspective of my work as both an academic and an activist focused on questions of social geography and mobility, especially for children, young people and families.

Children, Young People, and Families

• It was really positive to see that NECA launched a survey designed specifically for children and young people (CYP) and supported through resources for schools.
• CYP are amongst the primary benefactors of a shift to a fairer, greener, connected transport system in the north-east.
• The consultation documents rightly underline the intersections between our transport network and child poverty, childhood obesity and physical activity levels, exposure to poor air quality and pollution, and children and young people at risk of road violence and KSIs.
• The plan’s focus on CYP seems to be twofold:
  • Simple, affordable public transport fares for CYP, with an aim of introducing free travel for under 18s between 2027 and 2032
  • Journeys to school, with the delivery of sustainable school travel projects and cycle training
• There is a brief mention of travel for school education visits in discussion of the coach industry.
• There is a strong and welcome focus on safety for girls (and women) in our regional transport network.

Key Actions for Children and Young People

• It is extremely concerning to read that only 36% of journeys to school in the north east are made by active travel, the second lowest region in England – urgent research must seek to understand why this figure is so low and to identify actions to remedy this, actions which must go well beyond school journey planning and cycle training.
• The Local Travel Plan commits to developing sustainable school travel projects by 2032. Taking seven years to implement these would mean that none of the region’s current secondary school children would benefit. Moreover, slow delivery of school streets in recent years and the apparent withdrawal of key local authorities from delivering and supporting such schemes suggests that there is a real political challenge to delivering sustainable travel to school.
• For active travel, the urgent development of safe, high quality, connected walking and cycling infrastructures will have a much greater impact on journeys to school than cycle training and/or school journey planning.
• Investments in walking and cycling infrastructures across the north-east should prioritise routes to schools, through local cycling and walking infrastructure plans, with the financial and technical support of NECA. A KPI should focus on delivering safe routes, in some form, to all schools by 2027.
• Changes that support CYP’s use of our public transport and active travel networks must be rolled out urgently; if improvements are delayed, another cohort of CYP will miss out.
• Free travel for under 18s is targeted for 2027; any delay in rolling this out will again risk more CYP missing out. In the interim, “Take the kids for free” initiatives should cover all children (until 18) when travelling with an adult; there is no logical reason why the cut-off for these schemes should be 11.
• Embedding public transport and active travel habits amongst CYP has the potential for huge future benefits, for health and the environment, as an alternative to more cohorts of 17 and 18 year olds opting for private car travel as soon as they legally can; this would also enable future generations to avoid the financial costs of car dependence.
• Girls and young women, rightly, are identified for targeted support in terms of safety on the transport network, but there is no mention at all of the particular needs of boys and young men in the sphere of active travel and public transport. Boys and young men are often habitual users of public transport and of bicycles for transport, travelling to school, employment, and for leisure and socialising. They are, however, often demonised and stigmatised as troublemakers, can be at particular risk of road danger, and rarely feature positively in transport policy making. Attention to their needs in and uses of the region’s transport network could reap real benefits in terms of reducing the appeal of private car ownership, improving road casualty rates, and supporting the mental and physical health of boys and young men.
• The focus on journeys to school, while critically important and enabling of other local journeys, underplays the value and importance of non-school journeys for CYP. As their independence grows, CYP should be supported by our transport network to also travel, for example, to see local friends and family, to sports clubs, leisure centres and other activities, for socialising and nights out as they grow older, and to part-time work, by active travel or public transport. This would be enormously supportive of their physical and mental health and their connections to their communities.
• Younger children’s journeys are often accompanied by family members, such that efforts to enable sustainable school travel must be supported by coherent and reliable onward routes to town and city centres, to key employment sites, and other local destinations. Parents and carers will not opt for sustainable travel to school, or other children’s venues, if it makes their onward journeys more difficult; local active travel and public transport networks must be viewed from the perspective of ‘trip chaining’ (where a sequence of trips start and end at home and involve multiple destinations and purposes). Women are much more likely to engage in these kinds of trips, so this resonates with the Local Travel Plan’s commitment to enabling women and girls’ travel.

Wider Mobility Geographies: “Travel is Good”

• The Local Travel Plan insists that “travel is good”, reflecting rightly that travel enables access to education, employment, healthcare, community and much more, but if the region is take net zero seriously then reducing the number and length of transport movements must also be considered as a positive goal.
• The covid-19 pandemic marked a shift to the numbers of people working from home for at least part of the week: this creates an opportunity to shift longer commutes by private motor car to more shorter local journeys, more likely to be carried out on foot or by cycle, to local centres for work- and consumption-related trips. There is an opportunity here not only for net zero ambitions but also in support of local economies and communities (not least in the context of the mayor’s recently announced commitment to the region’s high streets).
• Other policy initiatives that might serve a reduction of unsustainable journeys and an enabling of more sustainable trips that are not mentioned at all in the Local Travel Plan include those around low traffic neighbourhoods and 15-minute cities.
• It is possible that working to reduce the number and length of some unsustainable journeys will benefit not only the environment, but also the region’s health and wellbeing.
• It is also worth noting that if “travel is good”, the Local Travel Plan should also value travel for non-essential reasons, i.e. travel to see family and friends, for nights out, just to potter, etc. – not only for reasons of access to “employment, education, health care provision, leisure opportunities and other essential services”.