Warwickshire Case Study

How Warwickshire is closing the loop between behaviour change and better infrastructure

Warwickshire County Council is taking a joined-up approach to active travel – connecting community engagement with real-world planning insights.

By using the Love to Ride platform, the Council links the human side of cycling (encouraging residents to ride) with the technical needs of transport planning, such as trip data and rider comfort feedback.

The result? A clearer pathway from community participation → actionable data → better infrastructure.

Together, Warwickshire County Council and Love to Ride are helping turn strategic priorities in the Council Plan into practical delivery. The platform captures valuable community voices and lived experience reports that support infrastructure proposals, help measure impact, and identify where investment may best support future transport needs.

Powering a Virtuous Cycle

Warwickshire’s approach reflects the Love to Ride flywheel: a virtuous cycle where engagement and data continuously reinforce each other.

1. Acquisition & Activation – The Council combines local outreach with Love to Ride’s easy-to-use platform to engage their community and encourage short trips by bike.

2. Trip and Route Data – The platform makes it easy to log trips, including the option for people to automatically log their movement with the Love to Ride app. Users can also ‘Rate their Routes’, providing useful comfort ratings of the road network.

3. Real-World Insights – The crowdsourced feedback creates a map of how people experience riding on the road across Warwickshire, helping planners identify, validate, and strengthen infrastructure proposals.

4. Infrastructure Improvements – These insights support better investment decisions, help optimise limited infrastructure budgets, and ultimately make cycling safer and more attractive for the next wave of riders.

5. Live Measurement of Impact – Once improvements are delivered, riders update their route ratings, providing real-world evidence that infrastructure investments and funding have had a positive and measurable impact.

Stories from the Community – Alongside the data, riders share photos, comments, and personal stories about their experiences. These human perspectives bring colour to the evidence, helping Warwickshire understand and connect with the everyday lives of residents.

The result is a continuous improvement loop: more riders generate better insight, which leads to better infrastructure, which attracts more riders.

Activating Riders Through Local Engagement

A key driver of Warwickshire’s success is their team’s proactive outreach in the community, coupled with Love to Ride’s Community Engagement Manager for the area.

Their proactivity and promotion encourage more people to get active and join the platform – increasing participation and strengthening the output data that’s then available for planning.

By meeting residents face-to-face, Love to Ride and the Council help new riders take their first steps.

A key part of this outreach is Warwickshire’s Workplace Active Travel Programme, which incorporates the Love to Ride platform as a central tool for encouraging, celebrating and measuring active travel. The Council actively coordinates workplace engagement activities to coincide with Love to Ride’s challenge calendar, maximising participation at key moments throughout the year. Love to Ride’s team also provides on-site representation at major employers across the county – with Ursula at JLR (Gaydon), Laura at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Livy at JLR (DC7) – helping workers get started, log their first trips, and stay motivated in a familiar, supported setting.

“Alex and I do a lot of boots on the ground work. We speak to people and encourage them to sign up there and then – we sometimes offer incentives such as providing a free set of lights. We’re really pushing the Love to Ride on the ground, and we see big increases when we go to businesses.”

– Sam, Active Travel Lead

“It’s wonderful when we speak to people who are very deep into cycling, they love being able to rate their routes. It’s not overly athletic; often we’ll speak to people at the events that aren’t into smashing their PBs. We always try to encourage people to put up photos of their family rides, their own everyday rides – the platform isn’t plastered in MAMILs (Middle-Aged Men In Lycra), it’s not what the app is loved for.”

– Alex, Active Travel Lead

“Warwickshire’s success is built on conversation, not just clicks. By meeting residents and workplaces in person and encouraging them to log their everyday journeys, including weekend rides with their children, we’re growing a diverse platform where the data reflects real lives. This community-first outreach approach turns a digital platform into a catalyst for real-world change.”

– Ursula, Community Engagement Manager (including at JLR, Gaydon)

Alex’s note reflects the spirit behind the platform – that Love to Ride celebrates the joy of cycling over performance metrics (something we call smiles over the miles).

Using Rider Feedback to Measure Infrastructure Impact

One example of the flywheel in action is the A429 Coventry Road cycling scheme in Warwick.

As part of the southern section of this route, parallel crossings were installed on each arm of the Guys Cross Park Road junction with Coventry Road (each road entry and exit point where cyclists cross), with both arms reduced to single lane width – a significant piece of infrastructure designed to make biking safer and more comfortable.

Using the Rate My Routes feature, planners could compare rider comfort levels before and after the improvement.

“We could see a definitive shift. That section of the network moved from a high-stress ‘orange’ to a comfortable ‘green’ post-delivery. It provides the signal we need to show that our investments are delivering the safety and comfort levels we intended.”

– Sam, Active Travel Lead

This type of feedback helps demonstrate that infrastructure investments are delivering real improvements in rider experience.

Evidence for Future Development

The Council also uses Love to Ride insights when reviewing new development proposals.

Rider feedback provides an additional layer of real-world insight to support planning recommendations.

“When a developer proposes a large project, I look at the Love to Ride data adjacent to the site. If I can show the existing cycle experience is poor, I have the evidence to substantiate why that developer needs to fund specific improvements. It turns rider feedback into a substantive part of our planning evidence.”

– Peter, Urban Planner

This helps bring rider experience into conversations shaping future development.

Warwickshire’s comfort data now covers ~1,000 miles of rated network, with ~80% of the rated network being marked as comfortable or enjoyable. Warwick and Leamington Spa return the strongest comfort profiles, while South Warwickshire’s more rural network flags elevated stress levels that will help prioritise future investment.

The team is candid that the tool’s planning value will continue to grow as the rater community expands. Love to Ride already applies minimum rider thresholds before segments are included in reporting, helping protect rider privacy while ensuring comfort signals reflect multiple independent rider experiences rather than isolated feedback. As more riders contribute over time, more corridors meet those thresholds, coverage expands, and the resulting insights will become increasingly valuable for understanding where targeted infrastructure investment could have the greatest impact.

A Platform for Evidence-Based Impact

Warwickshire’s approach shows what’s possible when community engagement and transport planning work hand-in-hand.

By encouraging residents to log their rides, share their experiences, and rate the routes, the Council is capturing valuable real-world insights while building a stronger cycling culture.

It’s a simple idea with powerful results: Making every ride count.

Every time someone rides a bike, logs a trip, or rates a route, they’re doing more than travelling – they’re helping improve the network for everyone.

Want to achieve results like this in your community?

Love to Ride helps cities and regions:

• Encourage more people to ride bikes for transportation
• Engage businesses and communities in active travel
• Collect real-world citizen feedback and trip data
• Strengthen the evidence base for infrastructure investment
• Measure the real impact of active travel improvements

Together, we can help more people discover the joy of active travel – while giving planners the insights they need to build safer, better transport networks for everyone.

👉 Learn more:
👀 Explore our planning tools: planners
📅 Book a short call with our team:

Published on: 1, Oct 2024