The Healthy Streets Scorecard ranks London Boroughs on how healthy their streets are according to nine indicators (five ‘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:
7. Active Travel Rate (A) Walking (B) Cycling
9. Car Ownership Rates (A) Cars per household (B) Households with no car (C) Polluting vehicles
The 2022 sustainable modeshare statistics remain the same as last year. There was no update this year as the Active Lives Survey 2020/21 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 last year. Whilst new active travel data is available for 2022, 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.
The 2022 indicator for the road casualty rates remains unchanged from 2021. Although robust casualty data is available from TfL, owing to the pandemic, data on walking and cycling rates by borough is not available. As a result, the 2022 Healthy Streets Scorecard indicator cannot accurately be updated. In terms of the number of road casualties in London, there were 75 fatalities on London’s roads in 2021. This compares with 96 in 2020 and an average of 119 for the 3 years prior to the start of the pandemic. There were 3,581 fatal and serious casualties in 2021. This compares to 3,070 in 2020 and an average of 3,950 in the 3 years prior to 2020.
Overall, there was a significant decline in fatalities in 2021 from the previous year but an increase in the number of serious road casualties. For the different modes of travel, in 2021 casualties amongst those cycling and those using “other vehicle” were above the pre-pandemic average levels. The other vehicle category is now seeing the impact of increasing numbers of casualties amongst those riding e-scooters. TfL remains committed to its Vision Zero policies and in November 2021 produced a Progress Report to update its July 2018 Vision Zero Action Plan.
Note: We have graphed 2022 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.
One of the big stories of the 2022 Healthy Streets Scorecard is the big drop in car ownership across London, particularly among boroughs which have done well in this year’s Scorecard.
This is shown by the latest Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) data on the number of cars registered (data point December 2021), from which we can also calculate ‘cars per household’. (We have not been able to update the ‘% of households with no car’ this year as data was not available.)
London wide
The total number of cars registered in London has dropped each year we have published the Scorecard but this year’s drop is significantly bigger (1.47%) than previous years (2020 data showed a drop of 0.01%, and 2021; 0.49%). There are now 38,923 fewer cars in London. This is good news – though as of December 2021 there were still 2,609,165 cars registered in London taking up 30 million square metres – a space the size of more than 4,200 full-size football pitches.
Borough results are quite varied and are also very interesting. The biggest drop in number of cars in the past year was in Newham with 4% (or 2,860) fewer cars, followed by Southwark with a 3.7% drop (2,145) Camden 3.2% (1,331) and interestingly Waltham Forest – which is the Scorecard’s leading Outer Borough – with a 2.9% decrease (or 2,260 fewer cars).
Bigger than averages falls in car ownership were seen in boroughs which do well in the Healthy Streets Scorecard. It seems likely that the introduction of ULEZ, the squeeze on household budgets and the price of petrol are all having an impact – but there are also signs that local policies to encourage a switch to walking, cycling and public transport are working.
Looking at cars per household gives a slightly different perspective for some boroughs e.g. Tower Hamlets which was one of only 3 boroughs where the total number of cars actually increased (by 0.5%) though the number of cars per household decreased (by 0.5%). (Bear in mind the starting point for boroughs varies a lot and in this case, i.e. Tower Hamlets, car ownership is actually already extremely low relative to other boroughs.)
*Excluding City of London
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 2022 (as the sample size does not support borough level analysis due to changes made to data collection as a result of Covid).
We use 2021 data for ‘Households with no car’ part of the indicator.
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 Tower Hamlets (where only 29% 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 76% of households have a car) have on average 1.2 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.
Whilst there needs to be a significant overall reduction in car use, there is also a pressing need for local authorities to recognise the role they play in discouraging polluting diesel and petrol cars, as well as supporting residents to use cleaner, battery electric cars. There are encouraging signs that some boroughs are on the pathway to driving out diesel cars for good, such as in Islington, where just 69 new diesel cars were estimated to have been purchased in 2021.
For the first time, the Healthy Streets Scorecard has included data to examine how boroughs are doing in the race to switch away from polluting cars. Car registration data obtained from the Department for Transport 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 (and all tail pipe emitting) cars, and 0.5 for electric cars (excluding hybrids) shown on a 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) point scale.
This analysis does not consider the total volume of cars in each borough but instead examines the proportion of cars by fuel type. It therefore doesn’t matter whether one borough is more car dependent than another because every borough should be taking action to incentivise ‘cleaner’ cars. Despite this, 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 Mayor of London’s proposal to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone to Outer London will help to form a basis for action, if taken forward, but the boroughs can not rely on this scheme entirely as it does not affect any petrol cars built from 2006 or diesel cars built from 2015.
There is also a clear difference within the Inner London boroughs between the likes of Camden (17% diesel cars), where a diesel surcharge was introduced on residential parking permits and in Wandsworth (22% diesel cars), where there are no emissions-based parking tariffs. Wandsworth will be one to watch given the newly elected administration have an uphill task if they are to address one of the most polluted streets in the UK – Putney High Street – and to fulfil a manifesto to “tackle the climate emergency by putting the environment at the heart of everything we do”.
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 five input indicators:
Review all the indicator charts for this year: