Forum topic: Reducing car dominance and health improvements

Yet more evidence that getting people out of cars and onto bikes or walking will improve their health as individuals and reduce the burden on the health service.

To allow and encourage more people to walk or ride bikes we need bike lanes along all main roads and we need to make it so that people of all ages can walk or cycle through their local streets.

This latest report is just the latest of hundreds of studies that show the link between active travel and good health, of course, so it's disappointing that some local politicians, instead of supporting bike lanes and quieter neighbourhoods and pushing for more, are actively campaigning to stop moves towards making it easier for people to use healthy ways of travelling. They are reducing the freedom of people - especially kids and older people - to walk and ride around their local streets, because if car drivers are given free rein to cut through - which is what those politicians are campaigning for - those streets become too dangerous for walking or biking.

And where better to make it easier to walk and cycle than around hospitals? Yet local politicians are opposing a very small scale scheme (half a kilometre) that will connect up the borough's cycle lanes to the North Middlesex Hospital.