Why “Wheeling” Matters

One of the first things Will wanted to make clear is why the plan has a new name. Previous iterations were simply called “walking” plans, but the explicit inclusion of “wheeling” is a deliberate and important shift.

“When we’re talking about wheeling, we’re talking about movement at walking pace with wheels,” Will explained. “Someone in a wheelchair, a mobility scooter, someone pushing a pram, a walking frame, a buggy. We were really explicit about that because it’s such an important point to make sure this is inclusive.”

The plan defines wheeling as a mode of movement at walking pace that involves wheels, and it is considered alongside walking throughout. According to TfL’s data, slightly more than one in a hundred Londoners use a wheelchair, and almost three in every hundred trips are made with a pushchair or buggy. These are not marginal numbers. Designing for wheeling means designing for everyone.

The Quiet Revolution

Will has been in post for nearly a decade now, and he reflected on something telling about how far things have come. Early in his tenure, virtually everything TfL did on streets was news. A BBC journalist recently told him, “I haven’t seen you for ages.” Will takes that as a mark of success.

“What’s happened is that so much of the work TfL and the boroughs are delivering on the streets is becoming business as usual,” he said. “Our cycling network is growing, it’s becoming normal. Hundreds of new pedestrian crossings are becoming normal.”

The plan backs this up with hard numbers. Since the first Walking Action Plan in 2018, TfL and the boroughs have delivered new or improved pedestrian crossings, implemented 20mph speed limits on 267km of the TfL Road Network and across 75% of roads in 21 boroughs, supported over 800 School Streets, and helped more than 100,000 people from diverse communities access walking and cycling through the Walking and Cycling Grants London programme.

Three New Targets

The new plan sets three ambitious targets that anchor everything else:

Target 1: Increase the proportion of London residents aged 20 or over walking a minimum of 20 minutes per day from 41% in 2024/25 to 50% by 2035/36.

Target 2: Increase the average hourly flow of pedestrians in central London to 10% above pre-pandemic levels, from 830 people per site per hour in 2019 to 913 in 2035.

Target 3: Increase the proportion of journeys to school walked by 5 to 10-year-olds from 63% to 68% by 2035/36, and by 11 to 16-year-olds from 44% to 48%.

That first target is worth sitting with. Right now, more than half of London residents are not achieving 20 minutes of physical activity a day through active travel. The Chief Medical Officers describe regular physical activity as a “miracle cure” for preventing or managing more than 20 chronic conditions. Walking is free, requires no equipment, and can be built into the journeys people are already making.

Half a Million Trips That Could Be Walked

One of the most striking findings in the plan comes from TfL’s modelling work. Of the roughly 6.5 million car trips made daily in London, around 8% of them, slightly more than half a million, have a high likelihood of being switched to walking based on objective trip characteristics like distance and purpose.

Will put it simply in our conversation: “If we all walked a bit more and switched more of those trips, there are obviously benefits of shifting trips from cars to walking. But actually, the evidence for the benefits of going for a walk is so overwhelming, whether it’s health, mental health, social cohesion, tackling isolation.”

The plan notes that 62% of these switchable trips come from outer London, and the journey purpose most amenable to switching is education, accounting for 26% of trips in the “high likelihood” category. Which brings us to schools.

The School Run: London’s Biggest Opportunity

The original Walking Action Plan set a target of 57% of primary school trips being walked by 2024. They smashed it, reaching 63%. The new plan extends this ambition to secondary schools for the first time.

But the numbers behind the school run tell a bigger story. In the 1970s, 85% of London’s children travelled to school independently. Today it is around 25%. A quarter of a million car journeys every single morning are associated with the school run, and most of them are local.

Will spoke passionately about the need for creativity here, citing the “park and stride” model where a school partnered with a local supermarket as a drop-off point, giving children a safe walking route for the last stretch. “It’s not for me sitting in City Hall to say thou shalt do this,” he said. “It’s the imagination of organisations, teachers, parents, the kids themselves.”

The plan commits to delivering 200 more School Streets by 2030, expanding to secondary schools and bringing the total to 1,000. It also promises a “streets for children” toolkit by the end of 2027, covering safe routes, opportunities for play on the way, and child-led design.

Six Themes, One Vision

The plan organises its actions under six themes, each addressing a different barrier to walking and wheeling:

Theme 1: Transforming places and neighbourhoods. This includes developing a central London movement strategy, pedestrianising Oxford Street West (phase 1 by end of 2026), supporting boroughs to transform eight high streets by 2030, delivering 50 area-wide neighbourhood schemes by 2031, and extending 20mph limits so that by 2035 the default speed in central and all inner London will be 20mph.

Theme 2: Reducing severance and improving connectivity. The headline commitment here is 1,000 new pedestrian crossings by 2031, alongside trials of side road zebras on the TfL Road Network by 2028. Will described the Westminster side road zebra experiment in our conversation: driver compliance with the Highway Code jumped from 40% to 80% where zebra markings were present. The plan also covers wayfinding improvements, the Legible London programme (now over 3,000 signs), and better integration of walking with public transport.

Theme 3: Making walking and wheeling more inclusive. This theme tackles some of the hardest barriers. Around 30% of people over 65 are put off from walking by the state of pavements. Women are more likely to cite concern about safety as a barrier to walking, with half of all women saying they feel unsafe on journeys involving public transport after 9pm. The plan commits to expanding CCTV trials at bus stops, publishing insights from the Women’s Safety Audit pilot, rolling out inclusive design training, and continuing to enforce against pavement obstructions through Operation Clearway.

Theme 4: Getting more children walking. Beyond School Streets, the plan includes behaviour change work through the Travel for Life programme (now with over 1,000 Gold-accredited schools) and providing school catchment data to help boroughs plan whole journeys to school.

Theme 5: Connecting green and blue spaces. Will spoke at length in our conversation about the importance of connecting communities to nature. He cited the New River Walk in Enfield as an example of how relatively small measures can unlock large potential. The plan commits to developing a new river walking route by 2029 and improving connectivity of waterside paths to public transport.

Theme 6: Being ready for the future. This covers climate adaptation (expanding SuDS, maintaining tree cover, growing wildflower verges to 52 hectares), improving walking data, and relaunching the London Walking Forum.

Beyond Utility: Walking as Experience

One of the most interesting threads in our conversation was Will’s pushback against the old division between “leisure walking” and “utility walking.” The new plan merges these previously separate categories, recognising that the distinction is artificial.

“There’s this big bit in the middle which is neither one nor the other,” I suggested during our chat, pointing to the way high street culture has shifted. People don’t go to shop in the old sense; they go for experiences. Will agreed, while quickly adding: “I want to be clear, I don’t want to turn London into Disney World.”

The point is well made, though. The ultimate success of this plan is about designing more walking into everyday life so that it becomes the natural, obvious choice for local trips. Not through coercion, but through making the environment so good that walking is simply the most attractive option.

Will’s own top three walks in London capture this perfectly: the River Lea corridor from Walthamstow Marshes through to the Olympic Park, Epping Forest via the Central line, and simply wandering around town with no particular purpose, looking up at the architecture a few metres above your head that you never notice when you are dodging traffic.

Walking and the Economy

The plan makes a strong economic case. In a survey of London’s Business Improvement Districts, 95% said a good walking environment was important for business. Two thirds of Londoners live within a five-minute walk of a high street. Will confessed in our conversation to buying a lot of coffees and ducking into record shops and bookshops while walking around.

The Oxford Street pedestrianisation, contributing around £25 billion annually to London’s economy, is the flagship project. But the plan’s ambitions extend well beyond the West End. The “Evening Streets” concept, timed safety restrictions in cultural and hospitality districts, is designed to support the night-time economy while reducing risk to people on foot.

Community at the Centre

Both Will and I kept returning to the role of communities in making all of this work. TfL funds £95 million to boroughs through Local Implementation Plans, but Will was candid about the limits of top-down approaches.

“For all the best will in the world, places like TfL will always have some sort of silos,” he said. “But the community don’t have those silos, because that’s where they live. These things are just things happening in their community. That’s the natural space to join things up.”

He cited the Walking and Cycling Grants London programme, which this year received more applicants from walking groups than cycling groups. He had been out with groups of older people, people with dementia, people with disabilities, and a group of Kurdish women using walking to tackle isolation. “It’s amazing the role that walking and a bit of cake play,” he said. “They always seem to involve a little bit of cake.”

At London National Park City, this resonates deeply with our rangers programme, which funds small grassroots projects and then works to connect them with councils and other organisations who can help them grow. The plan’s commitment to continuing and expanding the Walking and Cycling Grants programme, and to relaunching the London Walking Forum with broader representation, feels like the right direction.

Technology and Nature

Will surprised me with his enthusiasm for the Merlin Bird ID app, which identifies birdsong through your phone. On a recent London Walking Festival walk, a 10-mile leg through Epping Forest, the majority of walkers had never heard of it. By the end, everyone was downloading it.

“I don’t want everybody walking around looking at their phone,” he said, “but phones and technology bring such a new way of exploring things that opens things up to people.”

The plan reflects this, with actions around digital wayfinding, data sharing with third-party partners, and improving the TfL Go app. But it also commits to maintaining and updating the more traditional tools: the printed PDF guides maintained by Ramblers volunteers, the Legible London signage, and the Go Jauntly digital walking guides for the Walk London Network’s 403 miles of strategic routes.

What Comes Next

The Walking and Wheeling Action Plan is published today. It sets out actions over the next five to ten years, many of which require partnership with boroughs, the NHS, community organisations, and Londoners themselves.

Will closed our conversation with a thought that stayed with me: “I tend to do a bit of thinking when I’m walking. I often have a bit of paper in my back pocket where I scribble things down.”

London’s walking plan is, in a sense, the city’s version of that scribbled note: an attempt to capture the ideas that come when you slow down, look around, and pay attention to how people actually move through a place. The ambition is to make London the greatest big city in the world for walking. As Will put it, we are pretty blessed with what we’ve got as the foundation. This plan is about delivering on that potential.