Walk, Cycle, Vote and take action in Scotland!

We Walk, We Cycle, We Vote is an umbrella campaign supported by over two dozen organisations ranging from walking and cycling groups to community and health bodies. Coordinated by Cycling UK and Pedal on Parliament, the campaign is asking candidates to back the following three asks:

• Investment: provide sustained, long term investment in both cycling and walking, reaching 10% of the transport budget
• Infrastructure: puild and maintain dedicated cycling infrastructure, enabling people aged 8-80 to cycle
• Safety: promote and deliver safer roads for both walking and cycling

As part of our campaign, we are giving all voters in Scotland the chance to see where their candidates stand on our policy asks, and on walking and cycling more generally, with a searchable database of candidates and their responses.

So far, we have contacted 330 of the 530 identified candidates; the remaining 200 are reluctant to advertise their contact details, but we’ve got some super sleuths on the lookout for email addresses and social media accounts so we hope to track the rest down shortly.

Building on the work of the volunteers driving the campaign, this week Cycling UK President and Channel 4 Newscaster Jon Snow, has also written to those candidates who have not responded, urging them to show their support for cycling. 

Most of the 35 candidates who have responded have been positive – although sometimes pinning them down from ‘warm words’ to actual pledges has proved a challenge. Of the ones we’ve managed to decipher, 20 have fully or partially supported us on our investment pledge, 18 on our infrastructure pledge and 13 on road safety – and more responses coming in all the time as individual voters have been getting in touch.

We’re also inviting candidates to come along and meet the electorate at Pedal on Parliament, Scotland’s largest mass cycle campaigning event. We’re pleased that four have committed to coming so far.

You can help transform Scotland into a healthier, happier and wealthier country by:

• Contacting your candidates: just use the postcode finder on the website.
• Email, tweet or send a Facebook message to your candidates if they haven’t responded, or if they haven’t responded in the way that you would like!
• Send a positive message to your candidates if they are backing our campaign - that would help them see how many people are behind the #walkcyclevote message.
• Get your selfie on and send us a picture telling us what you’d vote for.
• Please come along to Pedal on Parliament on 23 April in Edinburgh.

We’re posting up more responses every day so please check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as the website.

We have just a few weeks to convince potential politicians that investment in active travel is the solution to the many issues our country faces - let them know we all #walkcyclevote!

If you don't live in Scotland, and want to see what Cycling UK has been up to elsewhere in the UK, you can see our overall campaign activity at Vote Bike.