Transport is fundamental to the life of a Londoner and impacts all aspects of our lives from where we choose to live, work and study to our health and the air we breathe. In Lambeth we face significant challenges and opportunities to make sure that the transport network works for all of us.
We aim to ensure that our transport system is safe, accessible to all, allows us to make choices and to lead healthier lives. We will take into account the needs of disabled people. Inclusiveness, tackling inequality and cleaning up our air are at the heart of our Strategy. Added to this is the urgent need to tackle climate change and we will need to make significant changes to the transport network – a major source of CO2 emissions – and the way we live our lives, in order to tackle the climate emergency we face.
We support the Mayor of London’s intent to take control of local rail services so that they can be modernised, better co-ordinated, more reliable and affordable. We need to make our streets and stations more accessible to the whole community and make healthy, active travel a genuine option for many more people. We need central government to continue to invest in London to accommodate growth and help drive the national economy. We need to continue to create world class places and liveable neighbourhoods across our borough to make Lambeth a place where more people want to live, work and do business. All this will help us to accommodate growth in jobs and housing and create a better borough for everyone.
Lambeth is a walking, cycling and public transport borough. The vast majority of trips are already made in these ways and most households do not own a car. But we want to be more ambitious. Our aim is for everyone to have the genuine choice of how to move around the borough and to reduce reliance on private cars. In the future, we expect new technology to help with this, with more shared transport services and less use of private vehicles. We will prioritise buses, walking and cycling on our roads in response to these trends and because enabling active travel is key to the health of the borough. Most of the main causes of early death in London are linked to inactivity and motor traffic is also a major source of pollutants that are harmful to human health, as well as being a significant source of CO2 emissions. We will need to take bold steps and change the way we do things in order to meet these challenges and to prevent climate catastrophe.
A third of all trips in Lambeth are made on foot and most people also walk as part of their public transport journey, so we can say that walking is the most important mode of travel in our borough. We need to recognise this and continue to transform our streets to make walking more accessible, safer and attractive. There has been a significant increase in cycling over the last 15 years, but we want to go much further and deliver streets where everyone who wishes to feels comfortable cycling. There is great potential for this and, we think, a real appetite based on what you have told us. Our Healthy Route Network is a key part of this Strategy and includes measures to improve local walking and cycling trips, and an ambitious new cycle network.
This Strategy is accompanied by an Implementation Plan that sets out in more detail the projects and initiatives that will be needed to achieve the objectives we have set.