Now more than ever before we have a an opportunity to change the way our streets are designed and the way we move around our towns and cities.

Our priorities need to shift. Our places should no longer be designed around the car, the priority needs to be about active travel, people walking and cycling.

Today’s challenge was to share with us examples of urban infrastructure exemplars and epic fails! Over the course of lockdown many towns and cities have been adapting their streets to cope with social distancing and increasing numbers of people walking and cycling. In some places, to enable businesses to spill out onto the streets, parking bays have been replaced with parklets and there have been scenes of people enjoying socially distanced socialising. With people actively encouraged not to use public transport, we have seen key routes in and out of some cities adapted to incorporate temporary cycle lanes. It isn’t all positive however, you don’t have to go far to find examples of poorly designed infrastructure that is confusing for people, ugly or makes them feel unsafe.

What’s crucial is now how we look to lock in all this positive behaviour change we have seen and create world class urban infrastructure for our towns and cities. We believe in engineering to enable people to lead happier and healthier lives and we’re proud to work on a number of projects that seek to achieve this; from our public realm work, alongside Planit-ie, in the now Great British High Street town of Altrincham, through to the transformational Glasgow Avenues project that will see the city centre streets redesigned to focus on people, connectivity and climate resilience .

We hope over the coming months and years, it won’t be pictures of epic fails we will be sharing, it will be more examples of healthy, streets based on active travel.