Merton
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2026 Healthy Streets Scorecard results
Merton fell from 16th to 18th place this year, with its final Healthy Streets Scorecard score dropping from 4.46 to 4.33 out of 10. This is a slightly frustrating result: the borough remains one of Outer London’s stronger performers on several practical measures, but worsening casualty-rate indicators pulled its overall score down.
Merton has a relatively good profile among the Outer London boroughs. 20mph coverage is effectively complete at 97.8%, CPZ coverage is high for Outer London at 46.9%, and LTN coverage is also comparatively strong at 34.3% (although this figure is unchanged since the time of the pandemic). School Street coverage stands at 41.4%, the third-highest proportion among Outer London boroughs, while bus priority rose slightly to 15.2%. Sustainable modeshare increased from 61.9% to 64.2%, one of only five boroughs to record a rise of more than two percentage points.
However, casualty rates moved in the wrong direction, especially for cycling. Protected cycle track coverage remains modest at 3.5%, and Travel for Life participation is still weak. Car ownership also remains high, with only 34.2% of households car-free. Merton has ingredients for a strong Outer London Healthy Streets borough, but the next step is to turn this into safer conditions, greater provision of protected cycling and stronger school travel.
The Healthy Streets Scorecard combines scores for ten indicators to create an overall Healthy Streets score for each borough. See the graph below for 2026 results (includes 2019–2025 results for comparison). For more detail visit the London-wide overview of the 2026 results. You can also:
- Review summaries of this year’s results for outcome indicators and input indicators
- Read our in-depth explanation of the ten indicators
- View results for other boroughs
Scorecard (factored score) chart explained
In the chart above, each borough has been given a factored score. Factor scores are composite variables which provide information about a borough’s placement on a scale. Factor scores are given by F=XB, where X is the indicator normalised score for a borough and B is the factor score coefficient (or weight). Each indicator is weighted as 1, or 0.5 if there are two parts to one indicator, for example Modeshare has a weighting of 1, Active travel – walking has a weighting of 0.5 and Active travel – cycling has a weighting of 0.5. The borough’s total factored score is the sum of all indicator factored scores which is then factored to 10 (multiplied by the number of indicators/10) to give a value on the scale between zero and 10. We can then compare boroughs against each other on the scale.