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
’Sustainable modeshare’ is the proportion of trips made by ‘sustainable modes 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 (up from 63% in 2015). As part of their Local Implementation Funding from TfL, each of the boroughs has a different sustainable mode share target that they are aiming for by 2041 with the average target being higher amongst the Inner London boroughs (88%) than the Outer London boroughs (69%).
For the first time since the pandemic, we now have new data about modeshare from TfL (in the 2022 and 2023 Healthy Streets Scorecard reports we had to repeat the data that we had from 2021). This has meant that in 2024 we are relying on just this one year’s worth of modeshare data (rather than taking the average of three years as we had done previously). Overall, the data may be more volatile and less reliable than we might like.
Caveats aside, there is a positive story in 2024 with the London-wide sustainable modeshare rising from 65.6% (the figure we had used for 2021/2022 and 2023) to 67.6% in 2024. This means that overall, after 6 years’ worth of data on modeshare since the MTS target was set, London is broadly on target to reach the 2041 goal. Twenty-three of the 33 boroughs have seen their scores improve with six boroughs seeing their sustainable mode share grow by 5% or more (Richmond upon Thames: 9.9%, Harrow: 8.7%, Redbridge: 8.5%, Hillingdon: 6.6%, Hammersmith & Fulham: 6.2% and Kingston upon Thames: 5.0%). Nine boroughs saw their sustainable modeshare decline with the largest falls being Newham (-6.2%) and Enfield (-5.9%).
A sign of the improvement in sustainable mode share amongst the Outer London boroughs is the fact that in 2021, no outer borough had a sustainable modeshare score of more than 70%. In 2024, there are two boroughs with a score of 70% and above – Waltham Forest (72.6%) and Richmond-upon-Thames (71.4%).
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 and/or cycle is a strong indicator of healthy outcomes and of streets that are healthy enough to enable those outcomes. To smooth out some of the large fluctuations (from the sample size of the survey that Sport England uses), we use the average of two years’ worth of data. So, for the 2019 Healthy Streets Scorecard (HSS) results, the data used was the average for the years 2015/16 and 2016/17, for the 2020 HSS it was the average of 2016/17 and 2017/18, and for 2021 HSS it was 2017/18 and 2018/19. From 2022 to 2023 data was not available or the Covid-19 restrictions impacted the quality and usefulness of the data, so we continued to make use of the last available data from 2021. This is the first post Covid-19 update. The 2024 data is the average of 2020/21 and 2021/22 and for walking (over five times weekly) this can now be compared to the pre-Covid-19 period. The only data available for cycling, however, is for ‘at least once per week’ (where previously we used ‘over five times per week’), and this is, therefore, not comparable to previous years.
The data shows an overall decrease in walking over five times per week between 2023 and 2024 across almost all boroughs, with the exception of Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham and Camden. The highest walking rates, at almost 45%, are in Hammersmith & Fulham, Wandsworth and Kensington & Chelsea. At the other end of the scale, we note that the City of London is an anomaly – going from best borough (at 55%) to worst (at 17%) and this is attributed to the very small sample size for the City in the Sport England survey, rather than a very large drop-off in walking rates. The boroughs (excluding the City anomaly) which have the lowest regular walking rates are (from the lowest) Barking & Dagenham, Redbridge, Brent and Hillingdon – all at less than 25%. London-wide, there had been successive increases in levels of walking across the three pre-Covid-19 Healthy Streets Scorecard years, with the proportion of Londoners walking five times a week rising from 36% in 2019 to 38% in 2021. However, the latest data for 2024 shows a decrease in regular walking to lower than 2019-levels, with an average rate of 33%.
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.
Due to the low numbers of adults in the Sport England sample who are cycling, some data has been suppressed at a local authority level as small sample sizes lead to lower reliability in outputs for these categories. Data for cycling five times and three times per week was not available. For 2024, we are, therefore, using statistics for people cycling at least once a week, and we cannot compare previous rates for regular cycling (five times per week) to the 2024 figures.Â
Hackney does very well with over a quarter of residents cycling at least once per week; Hammersmith & Fulham, Southwark, Islington and Wandsworth all have rates above 20%. In Havering and Harrow less than 5% of residents cycle once per week, and a further 13 boroughs have less than 10% cycling rates. We also note that cycling data in Harrow, Havering & Hillingdon is 2021-adjusted data as the sample size was too small for any data (in both years). Cycling data in Barking & Dagenham, Bexley, Bromley, City of London, Croydon, Redbridge and Sutton had only one year’s data available.
With little new cycling infrastructure being built over the past year (just 13.5km across the whole of London), we are unlikely to see significant improvements in cycling rates over the next few years until more safe cycle provision in the forms of protected cycle routes and cycleways coupled with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods is delivered.
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 Healthy Streets Scorecard looks at road casualties in London amongst those walking and cycling through the prism of casualty rates i.e. the numbers of serious and fatal reported road casualties amongst those who are walking and those who are cycling in each borough in relation to the number of journeys (trip stages) that are walked or cycled in that borough. The number of casualties is taken from the most recent three years of casualties (2020 to 2022) of those walking and cycling in each borough (based on TfL STATS19 data). As trip stage data has not been available for the last three years, we have made use of one year’s worth of trip stage data from the London Travel Demand Survey (LTDS 2022/23). This has made comparison with previous years difficult owing to significant variations in the data, so we are providing a commentary on the 2024 results only.
In relation to walking casualty rates, for the 2024 Healthy Streets Scorecard, Greater London is seeing overall a rate of 4.9 serious and fatal casualties/100,000 daily walking stages. The rate is higher in Outer London (5.3) than Inner London (4.4). Amongst the Outer boroughs, most of the boroughs sit within a casualty rate range of 4.0 to 7.0. There are, however, two boroughs with significantly higher walking casualty rates, Hounslow (8.4) and Barnet (7.2) and four with lower rates Greenwich (3.9), Bromley (3.6), Kingston-upon-Thames (3.2) and Richmond-upon-Thames (2.8). In Inner London, many of the boroughs are close to the Inner London borough average with Southwark (3.2) and Islington (3.5) being the lowest scoring boroughs and Haringey (5.6), Hammersmith & Fulham (5.4) and Lambeth (5.3) having the highest casualty rates.
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.
With cycling casualty rates, please note that the trip rate (the denominator) is different from walking (and is set at 1,000 daily cycling stages). Overall Greater London in 2024Â is seeing a rate of 2.2 serious and fatal casualties/1,000 daily cycling stages. The rate is higher in Outer London (2.5) than Inner London (1.8). Two boroughs which stand out in particular for cycling casualty rates are Bexley (4.4) and Bromley (5.8). The Bromley figure is more than triple the Greater London average and suggests far higher rates of risk for people cycling in this borough. The rate in Enfield (1.1), an Outer London borough that has invested heavily in protected cycling routes in the past decade, is far lower than even the Greater London average. In Inner London casualty rates are typically below the average level (1.8) with Hackney having a score of 0.9 but three boroughs Southwark (2.2), Tower Hamlets (2.7) and Lewisham (3.3) have higher than average scores.
We need to treat this year’s data with some caution owing to its reliance on just one year’s worth of trip data and we will need to see whether these patterns continue as more trip data is added in future years.
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 total number of cars registered has decreased in every London borough, and the number of cars per 100 households has decreased from 76 in 2019 to 67 in 2024 for London as a whole (and this is the first year the figure has gone below 70).
The trajectory for car ownership is going in the right direction and the 2041 target (to reduce car ownership by 250,000 under the 2018 baseline of 2,507,585) is on course to be met by around 2027.
There will, however, still be over 2 million privately owned cars in London. Reducing this number further, and quickly, will help ensure other goals of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (MTS) are met. Evidence shows people who use car clubs (rather than having a privately owned car) make fewer car trips. Supporting the introduction of car clubs can promote further shift away from car ownership which will also help London meet modeshift and active travel targets more quickly. A move to electric car clubs would also enable electric vehicles to be used more widely, thus helping meet air quality targets.Â
The proportion of households with no car has risen steeply in some boroughs. Nearly half of all London households do not have a car (47%). In three boroughs, the proportion of households with no car is 70% or higher. In a further eight boroughs, the proportion is 60% or higher.
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 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 30% 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 75% 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.
Motor vehicles are the single largest source of both the harmful pollutant Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter, and recent analysis published by the Clean Cities Campaign showed 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 third year the Healthy Streets Scorecard has included data to examine how boroughs are progressing in switching away from polluting cars by comparing the proportion of cars by fuel type. Car registration data obtained from the Department for Transport (DfT) has been weighted to reflect 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.Â
Data shows that Outer London boroughs are benefitting from the introduction of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) which was extended to cover the whole of London in August 2023. There was 3.3 percentage point reduction in overall diesel car ownership, as a percentage of all vehicles, between 2023 and 2024 (from 20.4% to 17.1%). The decrease can be partly credited to the ULEZ expansion and the almost 5 percentage point reduction in Outer London borough diesel car ownership, as a percentage of all vehicles (from 22.6% in 2023 to 17.7% in 2024). Over the same time period Inner London boroughs had a 1% percentage point reduction in diesel vehicle ownership (from 17.5% in 2023 to 16.4% in 2024). Implementation of this policy helps to form a basis for action, but boroughs cannot rely on the ULEZ scheme entirely as it does not affect any petrol cars built from 2006 or diesel cars built after 2015. All boroughs need to be taking further action to discourage residents from owning polluting diesel and petrol cars.Â
The overall average switch to electric vehicles (including ULEVs, PiV and hybrid electric) has risen across London from 10.0% to 12.3% in one year, with Inner London boroughs averaging 13.5% and Outer London boroughs averaging 11.3%. There are some positive changes noted in the Inner London boroughs; for example, Camden has a proportion of 14% diesel cars, down from 17% in 2022, and 17.2% electric vehicles (up 2% points from 2023), where previously a diesel surcharge was introduced on residential parking permits. Other higher scoring boroughs for the proportion of electric vehicles are Tower Hamlets and Westminster (17% and 16.7% respectively), the City of London (16.1%) and Newham (15.5%). Barnet is the Outer London borough with the highest levels of EV ownership (14.9%), followed by Harrow (14.8%) and Brent (14.7%). However, London cannot 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 (from 2018 levels) in total 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: