ATE backs Love to Ride to expand active travel impact beyond biking

For over a decade, Love to Ride has helped hundreds of thousands of people get on a bike. We’ve built the programmes, the platform, the data tools and the evidence base. Biking behaviour change is what we do. But this May, we did something new.

We launched Roll & Stroll – our first-ever multimodal challenge, combining biking and walking/wheeling in a single workplace campaign. It was Love to Ride’s first formal step into active travel beyond biking, and it taught us a lot.

Why now, and why this way

The case for expanding into walking has been building for a while. Local authorities and employers kept asking us the same question: can you do for walking what you do for biking? The demand was clear. What we needed was the right moment.

Selected by Active Travel England as one of just 12 Innovation Fund recipients, and supported by customers who believed in the direction, we had everything we needed to move.

Roll & Stroll

A month-long workplace challenge running throughout May, Roll & Stroll invited participants to record biking and walking/wheeling trips, earn points for daily movement, and help their workplaces climb the leaderboards. It was built on everything we know works in behaviour change – gamification, social norming, peer encouragement, low barriers to entry – and applied it to all three modes together for the first time.

Roll & Stroll ran nationally, with participants across more than 20 areas, including Aberdeen, Essex, Gloucestershire, Jersey, Shetland and beyond – as well as our four dedicated ATE trial partners: Lancashire, Milton Keynes, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough and the City of London.

What we found

Here’s the headline: half of Roll & Stroll participants logged walks.

This is striking for a simple reason. Love to Ride has been running biking challenges for over a decade. Our platform, our audience, our reputation – all of it has been built around biking. And yet, in our very first multimodal campaign, walking matched biking in terms of participant engagement.

That tells us something important. The appetite is there. The people are there. They just needed to be invited.

It also tells us something about who we’re reaching – and what we’re learning about them. Everyday walkers/wheelers are one of active travel’s great unknowns. Unlike cyclists, for whom at least some trip data and tracking infrastructure exist, people who walk/wheel for everyday journeys have largely been invisible to the systems designed to support them. There’s very little data on where they go, how often, or how comfortable and safe they feel along the way.

Love to Ride is beginning to change that. Our auto-tracking app is capturing everyday walking trips at scale for the first time. And Rate My Routes – proven for biking – is now being extended to walking/wheeling, generating the kind of crowdsourced comfort and safety data that’s never existed for pedestrians and wheelchair users before.

That’s the missing majority: not just the people who don’t yet cycle, but the people the system has never properly seen. The numbers back it up. 96% of survey respondents said they’d take part again. But the response that stayed with us came from someone who’d never been able to take part in a Love to Ride challenge before:

“Although I cannot ride, so I walk, I have really enjoyed it and found that because I was recording it I tried to walk a bit further each time. I also took my grandson out walking with me on the weekends, which we both loved. So please continue to include us walkers in your ‘love to ride’.”

Visible, counted, and motivated to go further. That’s what reaching the missing majority looks like.

What comes next

Roll & Stroll was a first chapter, not a finished story. The ATE Innovation Fund isn’t just helping us add walking to our platform – it’s giving us the resource and the runway to do something more ambitious: test and refine entirely new ways of reaching people.

Across the rest of 2026 and into 2027, we’ll be working with our four trial authority partners to scale our walking/wheeling offer and trial innovative marketing techniques designed to reach the people that traditional active travel campaigns miss. That means more targeted, place-specific engagement – through workplaces, community groups, Business Improvement Districts and local partners – with the goal of turning one-off participants into long-term active travellers.

Alongside that, we’ll be extending Rate My Routes to walking/wheeling, so that the comfort and safety data we’ve long generated for cyclists starts to work equally hard for pedestrians and wheelchair users. That data can feed directly into the planning decisions local authorities make – helping councils across the UK build infrastructure that reflects how people actually move, not just how planners assume they do.

The ambition is straightforward: take everything that makes Love to Ride’s biking programmes efficient and impactful for councils, and make it work just as well for walking. Lower costs, stronger evidence, wider reach.

We’re still the biking platform at heart. But we’re challenging ourselves to go further – reaching more people, capturing better data, and playing a bigger role in shaping the built environments that make active travel possible for everyone.

If you’d like to talk about what multimodal behaviour change could look like in your area, fill the form below or get in touch via hello@lovetoride.net.