Journeys by active travel

Description of the measure(s)

This indicator measures the proportion of short journeys made by adults (16+) that are made by walking or cycling.

Performance is assessed based on two measures:

• The percentage of journeys less than 2 miles that are made by walking.
• The percentage of journeys less than 5 miles that are made by cycling.

Source:

The data for this indicator are gathered through the  the Scottish Household Survey (SHS), which is a National Statistics product, produced by the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) is a major population survey conducted annually amongst a representative sample of people living in private residences. It is published in the Scottish Household Survey Annual Report, which can be found here. An interactive data explorer for the SHS can be found here.

Each year, as part of the SHS, around 10,000 adults complete a Travel Diary recording all the journeys they made the previous day, including details about the mode of travel used and information that can be used to calculate the distance of each journey.

Transport-specific results are published in Transport and Travel in Scotland publication.

Definitions

Journey distance is calculated using road network distance.

Criteria for change:

The performance arrow is assigned based on the performance of both the cycling and the walking measures.

• If both measures are increasing, then a performance improving arrow is assigned.
• If one measure is increasing whilst the other is maintaining, a performance improving arrow is assigned.
• If both measures are decreasing a performance worsening arrow is assigned
• If one measure is decreasing whilst the other is maintaining, a performance worsening arrow is assigned.
• If both measures are maintaining, a performance maintaining arrow is assigned
• If one measure is increasing whilst the other is decreasing then a performance maintaining arrow is assigned.

In order to determine whether the individual cycling and walking measures are increasing, decreasing, or maintaining, statistical significance at the 95% confidence limit is used to assess performance.

If there is no statistically significant difference then any change is likely due to variation in the data rather than actual change, so this is classified as maintaining performance. Any statistical significant difference in either direction means that there is likely a real change that cannot be explained by variation in the data and we can assign improving/worsening in these cases.

Future issues or reviews:

For 2019 and earlier years, the following thresholds were used in order to determine whether the individual cycling and walking measures were increasing, decreasing, or maintaining. If the most recent change in the figure was less than the value of this threshold, performance was considered to be ‘maintaining’.