Evidence base
Track record behind ATFutures: grant-funded development of national transport planning tools.
Evidence base
ATFutures is built on more than a decade of grant-funded research and tool development. This page sets out what that has produced and links to the public tools and sources.
By the numbers
£1,911,050total value of active travel grants
19programmes, 30 awards
£1.47mof that credited to the founding team
12+years of continuous development
Figures are full project value for awards where the recorded role is Principal Investigator or Project Lead, and where the subject is active travel, cycling, walking, traffic, transport or road safety. Multi-phase programmes (PCT, NPTSCOT, Critical Issues, MMLOS) are aggregated.
Funded projects
| Programme | Value | Total |
|---|---|---|
| PCT | £508,381 | |
| NPTSCOT | £467,426 | |
| SATURN | £169,327 | |
| CRUSE | £127,107 | |
| Critical Issues | £78,335 | |
| STARS | £73,140 | |
| Active Travel Tools | £70,000 | |
| Cycling Toolkit | £65,500 | |
| ActDev | £62,316 | |
| LTN Leeds | £61,813 | |
| ACTON | £58,300 | |
| ML Transport | £34,748 | |
| Urban Planning Tool | £26,915 | |
| MMLOS | £23,925 | |
| Shared Streets | £22,747 | |
| Greener Connectivity | £22,340 | |
| AtumEd | £21,300 | |
| Active M'outhshire | £10,500 | |
| PCT Norway | £6,930 |
UK government (direct contract)
UK government (commercial contract)
Local government (commercial contract)
Academic (universities and research councils)
International government
Transnational body
Bar length is the full project value, in the funder's colour. The dark half of each key chip, drawn from the left like the bars, is the portion credited to the founding team.
| Programme | What it produced | Funder | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| PCT | Propensity to Cycle Tool: national cycling potential modelling and planning tool (all phases, including PCT Wales) | Department for Transport; Welsh Government | £508,381 |
| NPTSCOT | Network planning tools for Scottish active travel investment (all phases) | Transport Scotland | £467,426 |
| SATURN | Strategic transport modelling and appraisal research | EPSRC | £169,327 |
| CRUSE | Cycle route uptake and scenario estimation | Transport Infrastructure Ireland | £127,107 |
| Critical Issues | Data science for safety critical issues in walking, wheeling and cycling | Active Travel England | £78,335 |
| STARS | Sustainable transport access to rail stations | Department for Transport | £73,140 |
| Active Travel Tools | Expert guidance for evaluating active travel schemes | Department for Transport | £70,000 |
| Cycling Toolkit | Cycling infrastructure prioritisation toolkit | Department for Transport | £65,500 |
| ActDev | Active travel planning for new developments | UKRI | £62,316 |
| LTN Leeds | Low traffic neighbourhood data and planning | University of Leeds | £61,813 |
| ACTON | Active travel options for new developments | Research England | £58,300 |
| ML Transport | Machine learning for transport data | Department for Transport | £34,748 |
| Urban Planning Tool | Urban planning and transport health assessment tool | World Health Organization | £26,915 |
| MMLOS | Multi-modal level of service for Active Travel England | Active Travel England | £23,925 |
| Shared Streets | Shared street design and evaluation | World Bank | £22,747 |
| Greener Connectivity | Greener connectivity for walking and cycling networks | World Bank | £22,340 |
| AtumEd | Access to urban mobility and education | Sustrans | £21,300 |
| Active M'outhshire | Active Monmouthshire travel planning | Sustrans | £10,500 |
| PCT Norway | Propensity to cycle modelling, Nord-Jaeren, Norway | NORCE Norwegian Research Centre | £6,930 |
| All programmes | 19 programmes across 2010 to date | 6 funder classes | £1,911,050 |
What that investment bought
- Methods and software for estimating walking and cycling potential at national scale
- A network matching engine that is orders of magnitude faster than established alternatives
- Traffic and mode split models validated on held-out counter data
- A published risk framework for casmap, mapped to Active Travel England’s nine criteria
- Open data pipelines for collision records, counters and open sensor networks
Already running on real data
Four English regions are built and deployed today: West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Oxfordshire. The casmap application screens road collision records across Great Britain, netassign estimates multi-region network flows against observed counts, and mapchat.atfutures.ai provides an interactive chat-driven map.
Sources and notes
- Global road safety figures: World Health Organization, Global status report on road safety 2023, which estimates 1.19 million road traffic deaths in 2021 — over half of them among pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and other powered two- and three-wheeler users — and finds that 80% of assessed roads do not meet minimum safety standards for pedestrians or cyclists. The same report puts the global economic cost of road traffic injuries as high as US$1.8 trillion a year.
- England active travel investment: the third Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy, covering 2025/26 to 2029/30, with projected investment of £4,555 million across government, of which £1,107 million is Active Travel England funding. What is actually allocated to local transport authorities is published separately by the Department for Transport and Active Travel England: active travel local transport authority allocations — £601 million over 2026/27 to 2029/30, superseding the Consolidated Active Travel Fund (£168.5 million in 2025/26). Allocations to local transport authorities over 2020/21 to 2024/25, compiled from the same published tables by the ICS research pipeline, total £1.28 billion.
- International comparison: France’s plan vélo et mobilités actives 2023–2027 put €2 billion of state investment into cycling (€250 million a year), over €6 billion once local authority spending is counted — Le Monde, May 2023.
- Grant values: internal grants register, January 2010 to date. Programme values are full award values, not the portion received by any one institution.
- Funder classes: awards are grouped by how the money reached the founding team, which is not always the contracting party recorded on the register. Critical Issues is commissioned by Active Travel England and delivered as a commercial contract through a prime consultant; the Sustrans awards are local authority commissions held under contract; PCT, CyIPT and the other Department for Transport awards were held directly with the funder. Every programme carries its class in data/programmes.json.
- Model validation figures quoted on the product page are held-out statistics from the current Oxfordshire build, September 2026.