The Healthy Streets Scorecard ranks London Boroughs on how healthy their streets are according to ten indicators (six input and four outcome indicators). By combining the indicator scores, each borough is given a final Healthy Streets score.
This page sets out detailed results for the outcome indicators:
8. Active Travel Rate (A) Walking (B) Cycling
10. Car Ownership Rates (A) Cars per household (B) Households with no car (C) Polluting vehicles
The 2023 Sustainable Modeshare statistics remain the same as 2022. There was no update this year as the Active Lives Survey 2021/22 data collection was significantly impacted by Covid restrictions. Transport for London, who source and supply the data, advised that they had to make changes to the method and sampling strategy, and the sample size was much smaller than in previous years, meaning borough level analysis was not possible.
We use 2021 data for the sustainable modeshare indicator.
This was our 2021 sustainable modeshare summary:
Sustainable modeshare is the proportion of trips made by ‘sustainable mode of transport’ i.e. walking cycling or public transport. This is for trips made by borough residents, rather than all trips made in and through the borough. The target in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy is to increase this across London to 80% by 2041.
London-wide mode share rose again this year by 1% to 66%. If London continues at this rate, the mode share in 2041 will be well over his target. But while some boroughs are likely hitting their ceiling for sustainable mode share, others have done little to boost theirs. And, of course, the Mayor’s Transport Strategy was written before London declared a climate emergency. With a backdrop of the government shifting forward targets, will 80% be enough by 2030, let alone 2041?
The City and Hackney retain the tops slots this year, with Bexley and Hillingdon at the bottom. But there remain huge variations in the contribution of each sustainable mode (walking, cycling and public transport) to the results, showing that most boroughs have significant scope to make changes to improve their score. And while some boroughs are rapidly increasing sustainable modeshare, others are falling back.
Our summary is that, to deliver on the climate emergency, all boroughs need to be far bolder on these results.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs to help show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
The Walking and Cycling travel statistics remain the same as 2021. Whilst new active travel data is available for 2023, Covid restrictions have impacted the quality and usefulness of the data.
We use 2021 data for the active travel indicator.
This was our 2021 active travel summary:
The proportion of people who regularly walk or cycle (over five times weekly) is a strong indicator of healthy outcomes and of streets healthy enough to enable those outcomes. On running this indicator for the third year, we have tried to smooth out some of the large fluctuations that we see in the annual results at a borough level (which comes from the Sport England Active Lives Survey). As the cause of these fluctuations are the sample size of the survey that Sport England uses, we are using the average of two years’ worth of data. So, for the 2019 Healthy Streets Scorecard results, the data used is the average for the years 2015/16 and 2016/17, for 2020 HSS it is the average of 2016/17 and 2017/18 and for 2021 HSS it is 2017/18 and 2018/19. It is important to note that all of the data that has been used pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic and none of the changes that occurred in travel patterns as a result of that have fed through into these results.
There is a moderate (0.58) correlation between levels of walking and levels of car ownership across the 33 London boroughs. Unsurprisingly, most residents walk regularly in central London – with over half of City residents walking five times a week, and nearly half of Westminster residents. At the other end of the scale, in eight boroughs, less than one third of residents were walking five times a week prior to the pandemic. In order (of lowest levels of regular walking first) that’s Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Enfield, Hounslow, Harrow, Redbridge, Brent and Sutton. Only ten boroughs saw more than 40% of residents walking five times a week (and, credit where it’s due, two of these were Richmond and Waltham Forest in Outer London). There have been successive increases in levels of walking across the three Healthy Streets Scorecard years with the proportion of Londoners walking five times a week rising from 36% in 2019 to 38% in 2021. The fastest rising boroughs have been Wandsworth, Westminster, Hounslow, Brent, Havering and Ealing each of which have seen the proportion walking regularly rise by more than 5 percentage points.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by colour (light blue = Inner London, dark blue = Outer London). This graph helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
We use 2021 data for the active travel indicator.
This was our 2021 active travel summary:
Although there has been a small increase in the proportion of people who cycle regularly in the last two years (+0.2%) of the scorecard, still fewer than 1 in 20 of us (4.5% in 2021) are cycling 5 times a week or more. That’s nowhere near enough the shift that London needs given the climate, air quality and inactivity crises we face.
It is only in Southwark and Hackney that over 10% of residents cycle five times a week, while in eight boroughs, Sutton, Havering, Harrow, City (which can be discounted owing to its small numbers of residents), Barking & Dagenham, Redbridge, Bromley and Bexley less than 2% of residents cycle frequently.
There has been a huge increase in the amount of cycling infrastructure created in the past year in London with the Streetspace for London plan rolling out segregated cycle lanes and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods that are essential for safe cycling. It is to be hoped that this action combined with the ongoing work of the most progressive boroughs such as the City, Hackney, Lambeth and Waltham Forest, will see these figures shift far more dramatically in future years.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by colour (light blue = Inner London, dark blue = Outer London). This graph helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
As in 2022, the HSS indicator for road casualties has had to make use of 2021 data and the scores for the boroughs remain unchanged. Data for walking and cycling rates by borough was once again not be collected in 2022 owing to the continuing impact of the pandemic preventing research in this area. There is, however, a significant amount of new data around casualties in London more generally.
Provisional 2022 data on road casualties in London has recently been published. This is not likely to change significantly before the final 2022 casualty data is released in September 2023. The TfL Vision Zero Action Plan has a goal that by 2041 there will be no serious or fatal road casualties on London’s roads. The 2022 data is significant as, as part of the Plan, there is an interim target that road casualties will have fallen by 65% from the baseline levels which is the average of serious and fatal road casualties for the years 2005 to 2009. 2022 data is also significant as traffic levels are now much closer to what they were before the pandemic began. The large declines in casualty numbers that were seen in 2020 and 2021 are no longer continuing as traffic levels have risen again. Overall, as of 2022, London has seen a decline of 38% from the 2005-09 baseline compared with the target of a 65% fall. This 38% fall masks large differences between the principal modes of travel with those protected by a vehicle continuing to see greater declines than for those who are not. Amongst car occupants, in 2022 serious and fatal casualties have fallen by 70% compared to the 2005-09 baseline and for bus or coach occupants the figure is -49%; amongst pedestrians, however, the figure is lower at -39% and for motorcyclists the figure is -36%. Amongst those cycling, serious and fatal road casualties have risen by 39% from the 2005-09 baseline and the increasing casualty numbers and rates amongst this group are a real concern (while cycling rates have risen massively, so overall risk of harm may be lower, the Mayor’s Vision Zero approach still means there have to be no serious or fatal collisions – not fewer against a rising mode). Please note the above casualty data is that reported by the police. The total number of people seriously injured will be greater with under-reporting a particular problem for cyclists and car occupants.
In terms of fatalities only (rather than fatal and serious road casualties discussed above), there were 101 fatalities on London’s roads in 2022. This compares to 75 in 2021, 96 in 2020 and an average of 119 for the 3 years prior to the start of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is over and funding is once again in place, it is important that there is a focus on getting the Vision Zero casualty targets back on track. Needed are strengthened policies on:
Note: We have graphed 2023 Scorecard casualty data as total KSIs per borough, however, this is not comparable to previous years, or as a measure of borough performance, as it does not account for the frequency of these modes of active transport.
We use 2021 data for the road collision casualties indicator.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by grouping. This graph helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by grouping. This graph helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
The latest data shows 2.45 million cars registered in London, a steady but slow downward trend from 2.47m and 2.51m in the two previous years.
The number of cars per household dropped in almost every borough from the previous year, with the biggest drop in Newham. There remains huge variation between boroughs: Hillingdon and Havering have the most (109 and 107 cars per 100 households respectively) and City of London, Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney with fewest (all below 40 cars per 100 households).
We also track the number of households with no car and this year we have accurate (2021 Census) data for the first time (previously we relied on sample survey data). However, the basic picture remains similar. In 2021, 42% of London households had no car (last year we reported 45%). The boroughs with the highest proportion of households with no car were City of London at 77%, Islington at 67%, Tower Hamlets and Westminster at 66% and Hackney at 65%. Even in Havering and Hillingdon (the boroughs with the most cars per household), more than a fifth of households have no car.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by colour (light blue = Inner London, dark blue = Outer London). This graph helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
The proportion of households with no car by borough data is not available from TfL for 2023, so this year’s data uses Census 2021 data.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by colour (light blue = Inner London, dark blue = Outer London). This helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
Looking at the two indicators together tells us how many cars on average each car-owning household has. At one end of the scale, the car-owning households in Islington (where only 33% of households have a car) have, on average, one car per three households. At the other end of the scale, the car-owning households in Hillingdon (where 78% of households have a car) have on average 1.1 cars per household.
The two indicators correlate to some extent i.e. the higher the proportion of car-owning households, the more cars each of those households owns, on average. There are exceptions like Ealing, however, where the car owning households have a higher-than-expected number of cars per household.
Vehicles are the single largest source of both the harmful pollutant Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter, and new analysis published by the Clean Cities Campaign shows monitoring sites in central, inner and outer London recorded illegal levels of NO2 in 2021. Legal limits in the UK and EU for NO2 were meant to be met by 2010 at the latest.
For a second year the Healthy Streets Scorecard has included data to examine how boroughs are doing in the race to switch away from polluting cars by comparing the proportion of cars by fuel type. Car registration data obtained from the DfT has been weighted in accordance to how different fuel types contribute to London’s poor air quality. A factor of 3 for diesel cars, 2 for petrol cars, and 0.5 for electric cars (all types) shown on a 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) point scale.
Data shows that it is Outer London boroughs that need to be taking firmer action to discourage residents from owning polluting diesel and petrol cars. The Ultra Low Emission Zone which extends to Outer London in August 2023, will help to form a basis for action but the boroughs cannot rely on this scheme entirely as it does not affect any petrol cars built from 2006 or diesel cars built from 2015.
There are some positive changes noted in the Inner London boroughs, for example Camden has a proportion of 15% diesel cars, down from 17% in 2022, and 15% electric vehicles, where a diesel surcharge was introduced on residential parking permits. Other higher scoring boroughs for the proportion of electric vehicles are Westminster and Tower Hamlets (both 15%), and City of London and Newham both on 14%. However, we can’t just rely on electric cars to solve the problem. The Mayor of London has stated that, at the very least, we need a 27% reduction in all car kilometres being driven across the capital to meet the target of reaching net zero by 2030.
The graph below shows Inner and Outer London boroughs differentiated by colour (light blue = Inner London, dark blue = Outer London). This helps show how boroughs are doing compared to other Inner or Outer boroughs.
Find your borough’s results homepage:
Review detailed results for the six input indicators:
Review all the indicator charts for this year: