Islington Transport Strategy 2020 to 2041

We have developed the Islington Transport Strategy (ITS) to respond to the social, environmental and economic challenges facing Islington, and to make sure that investment in the borough’s transport environment delivers the council’s wider priorities for the period up to 2041.

The Islington Transport Strategy sets out our transport challenges, vision, objectives, policies, and proposals for the next two decades.

Islington faces social, economic, and environmental challenges. In June 2019 we declared a climate emergency and we are committed to taking bold action to reduce carbon emissions and tackle the climate crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has increased these challenges on many fronts and further highlighted the need to take action to build a more equal, cleaner, greener and healthier borough.

Islington Transport Strategy 2020 - 2041

Islington Transport Strategy objectives

The Islington Transport Strategy also supports our strategic plan to ensure that everyone who lives in the borough has an equal opportunity to thrive, through reducing inequality, tackling climate change and air quality, providing more opportunities, and improving health and wellbeing.

This includes promoting the benefits that cleaner air and daily physical activity, including walking and cycling, can have on improving both physical and mental health and introducing measures to reduce road danger and traffic casualties.

We also want to make sure everyone within the borough, whatever their background, has the same opportunity to access transport and travel around the borough. This means that everyone should be able to travel independently on accessible streets and networks to access jobs, education, services and facilities and travel should be affordable to people on low incomes.

Monitoring

We are committed to monitoring the progress of the Islington Transport Strategy. Monitoring will help us to introduce changes that could make policies more effective in the future and help to identify where further action may be needed to ensure the successful delivery of the strategy.

We will produce an annual monitoring report which details the progress of the strategy and important steps to be taken to continue to achieve its objectives.

Islington Transport Strategy 2021 Monitoring Report

The 2021 monitoring report presents a summary of progress towards delivery of the Islington Transport Strategy policies and commitments for the period 1 January to 31 December 2021.

Islington Transport Strategy 2021 Monitoring Report

We have faced significant challenges in 2021 with the coronavirus pandemic having unprecedented impacts on travel and behaviour in the borough and levels of funding impacting our delivery programmes.

Despite these challenges, the Islington Transport Strategy metrics for 2021 suggests we have continued to make good progress towards meeting our interim and 2041 strategic targets and delivering the Transport Strategy’s policies and commitments.

The key projects introduced across the borough in 2021 have led to increased levels of active and sustainable travel, more people using public transport and we have seen the health benefits for children in the borough through the success of our School Streets and active travel programmes.

The monitoring review has also shown areas where progress has been slower than expected or a reverse trend has been identified and needs further study to understand the trends and focus further actions including:

• Introducing further measures to encourage local residents to do at least 20 minutes of active travel each day.
• Addressing the increasing trend in vehicle kilometres travelled within the borough.
• Focus on speeding up the cycleways programme to increase resident’s access to the strategic cycle network.
• Introducing further measures to increase the levels of public transport use.

It should be noted that the full impact of many of the Islington Transport Strategy actions that have been introduced during 2021 will not be reflected in this annual monitoring report as much of the latest available data used to inform the key monitoring data is from a period prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. 

We expect the full impact of schemes recently introduced through our people-friendly streets programme, including School Streets at most primary schools in the borough, low-traffic neighbourhoods and cycleways will be reflected in future annual monitoring reports.