The case for cycling infrastructure report: second edition

Cycling UK’s Getting there with Cycling report is a sales pitch for separated cycle infrastructure. 

Following on from the first edition published in 2022, the latest 2026 edition brings together the overwhelmingly strong evidence that building cycling infrastructure has a positive impact on people's lives, is value for money and brings local benefits to communities.

It presents how unlocking more cycling through protected cycle lanes and infrastructure can deliver wide-reaching benefits to all four nations of the UK, and the regions and local communities within.

We show how cycling infrastructure:

• Boosts confidence and safety, helping to reduce the disproportionate burden of road danger felt by people walking, wheeling and cycling.
• Is as an affordable form of everyday transport that more people would use to get to work, to school, or for their everyday needs, with infrastructure in place to support and enable it.
• Is in demand, and when good infrastructure has been built, demand has outpaced expectations, demonstrating how there is untapped potential everywhere.

For the UK’s economy, the returns are significant.

• With growing cities and crowded roads, cycling can be thought of as a space-efficient mass transit system, easing congestion and cutting travel times, boosting productivity in our cities and towns.
• The infrastructure to support cycling is inherently quick to deliver at a lower cost than most interventions available to governments and highway authorities. Treasury ranks average cost-benefit ratios as ‘Very High’ with an average £5.62 returned for every £1 invested.
• The most popular high streets and town-centres are those which prioritise people over traffic and are accessible for people cycling, which can support our ailing high streets.

For a country facing the health costs of obesity and physical inactivity, cycling is a mode of active travel that weaves exercise unnoticeably into everyday life, boosting productivity and longevity while cutting sickness and ill-health, supporting people’s health, independence and wellbeing throughout life.

It does all of the above without contributing to air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions beyond the factories that make them, and the logistics that bring a cycle to market.

Taken together, this shows the case for getting there with cycling is stronger than ever.

Policies to unlock these benefits

To capture the many clear benefits outlined in this report, we recommend Governments at all levels provide:

1. Sufficient funding for walking, wheeling and cycling, reaching £50 per person per year.
2. High quality standards including statutoryguidance so that money is spent on high-quality schemes and capacity and capability is built at a local level.
3. Clear and ambitious targets to provide vision and drive progress, including national indicators for active travel at local authority level in each UK nation.
4. Political leadership for the transformative cultural change required to put cycling on equal footing with other modes of transport.