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DfT's Sustainable Travel City project cancelled

The DfT has confirmed to us that they've cancelled their £29 million Sustainable Travel City (STC) demonstration project.

Things had gone ominously quiet for a project that was first announced back on May 13 – and surprise, surprise, 10 months later it's bitten the dust.

This will no doubt cause just a tad of frustration in local/regional transport bodies, who put in a lot of effort, at very short notice, to get their bids in last year.

Sadiq Khan has now announced that there will be an Urban Challenge Fund (UCF) instead, from which cities will only be eligible to receive money if they can show their plans will:

• improve journey choice
• tackle congestion
• improve safety
• lower carbon emissions
• and promote healthier lifestyles through better air quality and more walking and cycling.

The DfT press office said that the work put into the STC bids could be used to support bids to the UCF.  How much comfort that will be for transport officers up and down the land is debatable.

No figures and no timescale have been released for the UCF.

So just after the publication of an active travel strategy that claimed to “put walking and cycling at the heart of our transport and health strategies”, a demonstration project that genuinely had some financial welly to try and make that happen (in at least one city) has been dropped.

To give the government the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that applying sustainability criteria to a larger fund and a larger number of cities will have more impact than focusing resource on just one demonstration city.

But our guess is that proponents of sustainable travel in both local government and in the NGOs will be treating this announcement with a mixture of despair, caution … or maybe just world-weary indifference.

(And this on a day when the Committee of Public Accounts published a report saying that “the taxpayer has lost up to £410 million as a result of the Department for Transport’s inadequate management of the risks arising from the Metronet contracts for upgrading the infrastructure of the London Underground.”)