A few initial thoughts - which some may see as overly critical, but I have been reading active travel documents for decades and am immune to admirable sounding flim-flam. Just remember that this document opens with the following paragraph:
This Cycling Framework and Delivery Plan for Active Travel in Scotland builds on the progress made through three iterations of the Cycling Action Plan for Scotland (CAPS) between 2010 and 2020.
There was no progress made during those ten years. The target of 10% of trips by bike set out in the first CAPS (demoted to 10% of "everyday trips" in subsequent versions) was missed. In fact, the proportion of trips made by bike hovered about 2% for that entire period.
Anyway, despite the title including the words "delivery plan", there are no targets, interim targets, milestones or measures against which delivery of actual cycle infrastructure will be measured. The only requirement placed on local authorities appears to be the production of yet more strategies.
Much seems to rely on a, as yet unpublished, Active Travel Transformation Project which will set out "a new delivery model" for active travel - which may include "changes to the TRO process". Rather worryingly, the output of this project will be a report to Ministers. In practice this means the final report will only include proposals that Ministers are happy to go along with. Any that require legislative change will then take at least a year or two to see the light of day.
This is a document that say the right things around network planning, resourcing and the like. All old hat to any CCEer, but new for Scottish Government plans. What isn't new is the dreaded "delivery gap" - where cycle lanes are delivered by magical thinking rather than councillors and officers (often themselves opposed to cycling) working in a world of concerned local residents and compensation hungry local businesses.
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