The active travel innovation fund has arrived to help Britain discover new ways to walk, wheel and cycle. Humans have managed these activities since becoming inconveniently mobile. The Department for Transport and Active Travel England announced a £1 million competition on 6 October 2025. Successful projects can receive grants of up to £100,000.
The active travel innovation fund will support projects that help more people walk, wheel or cycle. Each project will run for 12 months. First, applicants must surround movement with forms, evaluation frameworks and a steering group.
The active travel innovation fund meets the paperwork
Officials now have the chance to innovate in a field with mature technology. Walking requires one foot after the other. Cycling adds wheels. Wheeling adds a practical reminder that public infrastructure should serve more than one kind of body.
Meanwhile, the competition invites applicants to make active travel more accessible through fresh ideas. This is excellent news for anyone who has studied a pavement, cycle route or crossing and thought: “What this needs is a 12 month demonstration project.”
At the fictional Office for Novel Ways to Reach the Shops, programme director Mabel Trundle praised the fund’s “transformational mobility solutions”. She clarified that this did not necessarily mean a safe pavement. “We are encouraging applicants to think beyond the obvious,” she said. “The obvious has already been allocated to procurement.”
The process will select projects, fund them for a year and evaluate the results. As a result, innovation gets a carefully managed route from exciting idea to final report. There, officials can assess its scalability before placing it in a cupboard marked “lessons learned”.
The announcement presents the fund as a way to take active travel innovation to the next level. Nobody has explained what happens at the current level. It appears to involve asking people to cross roads while hoping the traffic has joined a different pilot.
By the end, Britain may possess a bold new model for walking, wheeling and cycling. It will have a logo, a stakeholder map and 12 months of evaluation data. The only remaining challenge will be persuading the pavement to complete an application before it becomes a case study.
