The Healthy Streets Scorecard ranks London Boroughs on how healthy their streets are according to nine indicators (four ‘outcome’ and five ‘input’ 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:
2. Active Travel Rate (A) Walking (B) Cycling
4. Car Ownership Rates (A) Cars per household (B) Households with no car
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 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.
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.
There is a strong positive correlation (+0.87) between the number of daily walk stages in the boroughs and the number of pedestrian casualties that occur indicating a relatively close relationship across London between the levels of daily walked journeys and the number of serious and fatal pedestrian casualties. Amongst the individual boroughs, the Hackney has the highest overall casualty rate with 29 pedestrian serious and fatal casualties for every 100,000 daily walk stages (as identified by the London Travel Demand Survey). Hackney is one of three boroughs with a casualty rate of more than 22 with the others being Redbridge and Barking & Dagenham. At the other end of the scale there are three boroughs with a casualty rate of below 12 – Richmond, Bromley and Greenwich.
Overall casualty rates are similar in the 2021 HSS between the Inner (18) and Outer (19) 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.
As with walking, there is a strong positive correlation (+0.90) between the number of daily cycle stages and the number of serious and fatal cycling casualties across the 33 London boroughs. Overall casualty rates for cycling are far higher than for walking with an average in the 2021 HSS of 4.62 serious and fatal cycling casualties per 1,000 daily cycling stages compared to the London average for walking journeys of 0.18. Overall casualty rates are higher in the Outer boroughs (4.79) compared to the Inner boroughs (4.53).
Amongst the individual boroughs, there are two boroughs which stand out in relation to cycling casualty rates. Compared to the overall average rate of 4.6, the casualty rate in Barking & Dagenham is 20.9 and in Hillingdon the rate is 14.9. There are three other boroughs with a cycling casualty rate of more than 7 – Croydon (9.9), Bromley (8.1) and Kensington & Chelsea (7.6). There are five boroughs with a cycling casualty rate of below 3.0 – Sutton, Hammersmith & Fulham, Lewisham, Enfield and Havering.
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 number of cars per household varies dramatically, the least being 34 per 100 households, the most 122. Between 2019 and 2020 the overall number of cars registered in London reduced by around 13,000 to 3,543,000, even with a small rise in the number of households. This indicator is going in the right direction, but not fast enough.
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.
There are now six boroughs where 70% or more of households don’t have a car. In half of all London boroughs, the majority of households don’t have a car. The number of car free households increased by half a percentage overall, but the picture in boroughs varies.
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.
Find your borough’s results homepage:
Review detailed results for the five input indicators:
Review all the indicator charts for this year: