Guidance

Walking and cycling statistics, England: Technical notes and definitions

Published 28 August 2024

Applies to England

This document provides details on the definitions and key data sources used to produce the latest Walking and Cycling statistical release.

Further information about these statistics is available, including:

• walking and cycling statistics: data tables
• walking and cycling statistics: statistics report
• walking and cycling statistics: background quality report
• the National Travel Survey statistical release which includes detailed technical and background information

Definitions

NTS Definitions

Term	Definition
Cycling	All cycles, including e-cycles, which take place on the public highway (any public road, street, or path available to the public by a public right of way).
Walking	Walks over 50 yards on the public highway. Walk includes all travel on foot. It is also used when respondents ride in non-motorised wheelchairs, prams, or pushchairs, as well as when they ride on toy pedal cycles, roller-skates, skateboards, non-motorised scooters, or when they jog. For example, children who accompany their parents on a visit to the shops on toy pedal cycles (where the parents are walking) are coded as having walked there.
Disability	In line with the Equalities Act 2010, the definition of disability a person in both sources is considered to have a disability if they report any physical or mental health condition or illness that lasts or is expected to last 12 months or more, and which limits their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.
Rural or Urban	Rural-Urban Classifications and an explanation of how they are defined is available from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Trip	A one-way course of travel with a single main purpose. A “cycling trip” is one where the greatest part was cycled.’ Note that outward and return trips are treated as 2 separate trips. Further, a trip can only have one purpose, and so a journey involving a mid-way change of purpose is split into 2 trips (except for minor secondary purposes, for example, stopping to buy a newspaper).
Stage	Trips consist of one or more stages. A new stage is defined when there is a change in the mode of transport or when there is a change of vehicle requiring a separate ticket.
Main mode of travel	The main mode of a trip is that used for the longest stage of the trip by distance. With stages of equal length, the mode of the latest stage is used.
Distance travelled	This refers to the actual distance covered by a respondent rather than the distance ‘as the crow flies’.
Short walk	Walks longer than 50 yards (around 46 metres or half a football field) but less than one mile. Short walks are recorded on the first day of the travel diary only (to reduce burden) and then multiplied by 7.
Leisure	Visit friends at home and elsewhere, entertainment, sport, holidays and day trips.
Towns and cities	Towns and cities have been defined using the Rural Urban classifications managed by Defra. Towns and cities include, urban conurbations, urban cities and towns and rural towns and fringe.

ALS Definitions

Term	Definition
Cycling	Cycle rides of any length for leisure, or for travel. Includes some recreational types of cycling such as mountain biking, track cycling, and cyclo-cross. Excludes exercise bikes and cycling indoors.
Walking	Any continuous walk of at least 10 minutes. Includes walking for leisure, for travel, rambling and, or Nordic walking. Excludes hiking, mountain and, or hill walking, and walking around shops, and for wheelchair users, wheelchair use.
Disability	In line with the Equalities Act 2010, the definition of disability a person in both sources is considered to have a disability if they report any physical or mental health condition or illness that lasts or is expected to last 12 months or more, and which limits their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.
Area of residence	Activities are grouped according to where respondents live, rather than where the activity took place. Accordingly, activities should be interpreted with caution (especially in large urban areas where local authorities cover a relatively small area) as these places may be different.
Frequency of cycling and walking	The number of days in the past 4 weeks (28 days) that a person performed a walking or cycling activity. Interpreted as follows: at least once per month equates to at least 1 out of 28 days, at least once per week equates to at least 4 out of 28 days, at least 3 times per week equates to at least 12 out of 28 days, and at least 5 times per week equates to at least 20 out of 28 days.
Leisure	Walking or cycling for the purpose of recreation, health, competition, or training.
Travel	Walking or cycling to get to place-to-place, for example, commuting, visiting a friend, or going to the supermarket.
Time usually spent walking and cycling	Time “usually” spent walking or cycling is the total time someone most frequently walks or cycles each day rather than the average time they spent walking or cycling across days.

Data Sources

Further information about the differences between each of the data sources and what they can be used for, can be found in our annual walking and cycling statistical release and background information.

National Travel Survey (NTS)

The NTS is a household survey designed to provide a rich source of data on personal travel. It is part of a continuous survey that began in July 1988, following ad hoc surveys since the mid-1960s. The survey is primarily designed to track the long-term development of trends; therefore, care should be taken when drawing conclusions from short-term changes.

Data collection

In years prior to 2020, NTS data has been collected via 2 main methods. Firstly, face-to-face (F2F) interviews are carried out with all members of the household to collect personal and household characteristics, along with information on all of the vehicles to which they have access. Each household member is then asked to record details of all their trips over a 7-day period in a travel diary, allowing travel patterns to be linked with individual characteristics.

Since March 2020, NTS data collection has been affected by varying restrictions associated with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Following a pause in fieldwork in March and April 2020, the NTS relied upon data collection via ‘push-to-telephone’ with interviews being conducted over the telephone and interviewers completing the travel diary on behalf of respondents. The lower response rate associated with this methodology ultimately impacted the statistical and analytical power of the data for the 2020 survey.

During 2021, data collection was switched to mixed-mode, combining ‘push-to-telephone’ with ‘knock-to-nudge’. This approach improved both the response rate and the impact of non-response bias in 2021, compared to 2020, however, the response rate remained below pre-pandemic levels. More details on the changes made to fieldwork operations in 2020 and 2021, and their impact on the data, can be found in the National Travel Survey technical report.

For 2022, a mixed mode approach was used, with knock to nudge and push to telephone being used until April 2023. After April, the survey returned to F2F with a phone back-up for interviewers to make use of in selected households where COVID-19 was a concern.

For 2023, NTS data collection was conducted fully face-to-face for the first time since 2019.

Sample size

In 2022, 3,646 households in England participated fully in the survey by providing information via interview and completing a 7-day travel diary. An additional 723 households participated in the interviews but did not all complete a diary. Although these cases cannot be used for trip-level analysis, their data is included in all analyses at household, individual, and vehicle levels.

In 2023, 6,314 households in England participated fully in the survey by providing information via interview and completing a 7-day travel diary. An additional 1,279 households participated in the interviews but did not all complete a diary. Although these cases cannot be used for trip-level analysis, their data is included in all analyses at household, individual, and vehicle levels.

Due to changes in the methodology of data collection, changes in travel behaviour and a reduction of data collected during 2020, 2021 and 2022, as a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, care should be taken when interpreting this data and comparing to other years, due to the small sample sizes. For further details, please see the NTS background documentation.

Diary sample

Analysis of travel data for walking and cycling is primarily based on the travel diary sample. This comprises all ‘fully cooperating households’, defined as households for which the following information is available:

• a household interview (or telephone interview)
• an individual interview for each household member
• a seven-day travel diary for each individual
• where applicable, at least one completed vehicle section

Weights were produced to adjust for non-response and for drop off in recording observed during the 7-day travel week.

Active Lives Survey

The Active Lives Survey (ALS) is an annual household push-to-web survey administered by Sport England, an agency of the Department of Digital, Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). The first ALS was conducted between November 2015 and November 2016, and data is published biannually. The survey follows the Active People Survey (APS), which has been discontinued.

Data collection

The ALS is a mixed-mode (push-to-web) survey involving online (desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone) and paper methods for those households that either do not have internet access or prefer to complete the survey this way. Data collection is carried out by Ipsos MORI.

The survey:

• includes people aged 16 and over (14- and 15-year-olds do sometimes take part but are excluded from the analysis)
• runs from mid-November to mid-November
• interviews in each local authority are spread over the 12-month period to avoid seasonal bias

A letter is sent to a household – selected from the Royal Mail’s Postal Address File inviting up to 2 people per household to take part in the survey.

The overall sample size is around 175,000 people for each survey. For the majority of the local authorities, the target number of completed questionnaires is 500 returns, though some key areas will involve surveying a bigger number of people. For the 2 smallest local authorities (the City of London and the Isles of Scilly) the target was reduced to 250.

More detailed information about the data collection methodology can be found in the ALS methodology note.

Data weighting

Weighting is required to reduce the bias in survey estimates. Data have been weighted to Office for National Statistics (ONS) population measures for geography and key demographics. The sample sizes quoted in table CW0306 are weighted sample sizes.

Weights are produced to make the weighted achieved sample match the population as closely as possible. For the Active Lives Survey, the weights correct for the disproportionate selection of addresses across local authorities and for the selection of adults within households. They also adjust the achieved sample by month to control for seasonality.

Confidence intervals

The active travel statistics team previously published confidence intervals using SPSS and this process has now transitioned to another statistical analysis software, R. Both methodologies aim to account for complex survey features such as weighting and stratification and there are slight variances in how these are calculated.

All estimates involve a measure of uncertainty as the ALS is conducted on samples and not on entire populations. A confidence interval is a way of expressing the accuracy of an estimate. Tables CW0301 to CW0303 and CW0307 present 95% confidence interval half-widths for each of the walking and cycling estimates produced as part of the ALS data published in this statistical release. The 95% confidence level implies that if we were to repeat the sampling process multiple times, we would expect the true population parameter (in this case, the proportion of people walking for different frequencies and purposes) to be within the calculated confidence interval in 95 out of 100 samples. These intervals are produced using the survey package in R and allows for the incorporation of survey design features such as sample stratification and weighting in our calculations. These provide a more reliable assessment of the uncertainty associated with our estimates. Data in this table also aligns with the existing methodology applied to other statistics as part of this release where data is suppressed for unweighted sample sizes below 30 respondents.

For this publication, we publish the margin of error estimates, which are metrics designed to assess the reliability of survey results. These margins can vary for each local authority and can be higher in areas that have a lower sample size. This variation in estimates highlights the importance of considering this margin of error when interpreting data from different geographies.

The ONS provides comprehensive explanations of key methodological and statistical concepts, including standard errors, confidence intervals, and statistical significance. Detailed information on how these measures of uncertainty impact surveys and how they can be calculated and interpreted is published.

Significance levels

From 2023, the team has reintroduced significance level data in table CW0308.

Statistical significance indicates that the reported values for walking and cycling activity are unlikely to have occurred by random chance and instead represent a true difference in our estimates. To assess the significance of changes in our estimates of walking and cycling for any purpose at least once per week, sample design effects and effective sample sizes were calculated to account for the survey’s complex design features and differences between the prevalence estimates for the 2 latest consecutive years were computed, as well as calculations to account for changes since year one of the survey (November 2015 to November 2016). A z-test was used to calculate probability values, and these determined the significance level of observed changes, categorising these as a significant increase, decrease, or no statistically significant change. This process produces insights for understanding the statistical significance of trends in walking and cycling behaviour over the analysed time frames and will provide local authorities with a greater understanding of differences over time.

Data considerations

National Travel Survey

Cycling estimates

Due to the low prevalence of cycling, the number of people in the NTS sample that cycle is small. The figures provided on cycling should be interpreted with caution, especially when examining trends.

Walking estimates

Historically, in the NTS, short walks (walks of more than 50 yards and less than 1 mile) were only recorded on the seventh day of the travel diary and weighted to account for underreporting. Since 2017, a methodological improvement was made to record short walks on day one of the diary for the whole sample. Figures for 2002 to 2015 have also been re-weighted based on the new methodology.

More information on the weighting of short walks is available in the NTS technical report.

Active Lives Survey

The Isles of Scilly and the City of London

The target sample sizes for the Isles and Scilly and the City of London are around 250. These are smaller than for other areas and therefore results for these areas may not be statistically robust. The unusually small populations of the Isles of Scilly and the City of London also mean that they are not directly comparable with other authorities. Therefore, caution is needed when interpreting the results for these 2 areas.

Instructions for printing and saving

Depending on which browser you use and the type of device you use (such as a mobile or laptop) these instructions may vary.

You will find your print and save options in your browser’s menu. You may also have other options available on your device. Tablets and mobile device instructions will be specific to the make and model of the device.

How to search

Select Ctrl and F on a Windows laptop or Command and F on a Mac.

This will open a search box in the top right-hand corner of the page. Type the word you are looking for in the search bar and press enter.

Your browser will highlight the word, usually in yellow, wherever it appears on the page. Press enter to move to the next place it appears.

Contact details

Walking and cycling statistics

Email [email protected]

Media enquiries 0300 7777 878

To hear more about DfT statistical publications as they are released, follow us on X at DfTstats.