Travel in London Travel in London

9. London’s air quality and greenhouse gas emissions and transport and public health
Figure 9.11
Average number of minutes spent walking and cycling per adult per day,
2008/09-2014/15.
30
25
Minutes per person per day
20
15
10
5
0
2008/09 2009/10 2010/11 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15
Walk
Cycle
Source: TfL Planning, Strategic Analysis.
‘Activating’ London’s population
Given the importance of active travel for enabling adults to meet their physical
activity needs Transport for London has developed an ambition in line with the
cross-London partnership. This ambition is for 70 per cent of adults in London to
achieve 150 minutes of active travel per week in periods of ten minutes or more. It
is not possible to directly extract weekly physical activity levels of London’s
population from the one-day LTDS survey and so it is not possible to directly
measure the proportion of Londoners achieving 150 minutes of active travel per
week in periods of ten minutes or more.
Physical activity recommendations are to get some activity on most days; dividing
the 150 minutes into periods of ten minutes spread over the week translates into
achieving two ten-minute periods of activity each day. The Active People Survey
collects data on activity over a four-week period and this indicates that people
achieving two ten-minute periods of activity in one day are highly likely to achieve
the 150 minutes of activity per week. This can therefore be taken as a proxy
measure of LTDS data for adults meeting their physical activity needs. This
approach is quite conservative, given that 27 per cent of adults do not manage
three ten-minute periods of activity in a week in London from any activity source,
not just active travel.
Figure 9.12 shows that, on average across the age groups, 34 per cent of adults in
London achieve two ten-minute periods of active travel per day. The proportion of
adults falling into this category would therefore need to approximately double to
meet the ambition by 2050. Travel in London report 7 showed that car ownership
was a strong determinant of adults travelling actively in London, so declining car
ownership could be an important contributor to meeting the goal.
181 Travel in London, Report 8