Investing in and encouraging active travel is a key part of the Scottish Government’s plan to decarbonise transport, but while last year 203 miles of walking, wheeling, and cycling routes were added, funding has been a massive issue.
The Scottish Government’s draft budget for 2025/26 allocated £188.7m for active travel, bus infrastructure, sustainable travel integration, and behavioural change initiatives to encourage walking, wheeling, and cycling. This was a steep cut from the 2024/25 budget which was £220m. The government also appears to have deviated from its commitment to allocate at least £320m or 10 per cent of the transport budget to active travel by 2024/25, according to Holyrood Inside Politics.
Jillian Anable, a commissioner of Scotland’s Just Transition Commission, says while investing in subsidised ticketing and cycle infrastructure might increase uptake somewhat in sustainable transport, it tends to be “people that already use those services using them more often”.
“While they are worth doing, we are at the stage where the scale of the change required, even if you invest a lot in public transport, cycling and walking, you can’t get away from the really hard issues of reducing car kilometres to reach our decarbonisation target.”
Despite the acknowledgement that car use must be reduced, a report by Transform Scotland in March last year estimated £900m of the £1.3bn designated for transport infrastructure in the City Region Deals across Scotland has been directed towards high-carbon projects, including new roads. “We are continuing to build new road capacity and that is incentivising people to double down on car usage, rather than using sustainable modes of transport,” Howden says. He adds the government needs to “show leadership” and switch funds away from road building and into specific areas of public transport or active travel.
In January, an Audit Scotland report described spending by councils and the Scottish Government on reducing car usage as “complex, fragmented and lacking transparency”.
Auditor General Stephen Boyle said: “The Scottish Government set an ambitious and very challenging target to reduce car use by 20 per cent by 2030. But there has been a lack of leadership around delivering this goal. It’s now unlikely the government will achieve its ambition, so it needs to be clear how this will affect its wider ambitions to achieve net zero emissions by 2045.”
The Scottish Government is now consulting on a new official plan to guide the decarbonisation of the transport sector. The Just Transition Plan for Transport aims to identify the key challenges and opportunities facing the sector today. The draft highlights a commitment to ensuring that no one is left behind, with a particular focus on rural, island, and disadvantaged communities. It emphasises that the transition should generate new economic opportunities by supporting green jobs in areas such as transport innovation, infrastructure, and services. The plan must also align with broader national goals, including reducing poverty, tackling inequality, and improving health outcomes.
But despite this, Anable thinks Scotland will not achieve its 2045 target of achieving net zero. “And certainly, we’re not going to reach a 75 per cent reduction by 2030”, she says.
“It’s not whether I think it [Scotland will achieve the 2045 target], it’s that I know it [won’t]. We have really got to acknowledge it.” Based on this acknowledgement, she offers suggestions of what success is in decarbonising over the next 20 years with that reframing.
“While electric cars are not the be-all and end-all, we need to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) by lower-income car owners, and that means investing in our charging networks in place we aren’t yet.”
She describes EVs as the “main decarbonisation lever” we have and says the government needs to find a way to get cars and vans with internal combustion engines off the roads quicker than in 2045.
Anable also suggests that 15-minute neighbourhoods will “be an absolute minimum” and a hierarchical plan for public transport that delivers a minimum number of services per day for “places of all different sizes”.
“The big headline is if you don’t restrict car usage how we see it today, you can improve all the alternatives as much as you like, but if we don’t deal with the problem, we will just be left with more of everything. That’s what has happened in the Netherlands and Germany, they’ve got some amazing examples of public transport and active travel, but they still have very high car usage and ownership.
“It boils down to the fact we really do have to electrify everything. The problem is we can’t do that quickly enough.”
(Pic: Amey)
