Why not ask people to walk or cycle?

Here at Bike Worcester we've been labelled a few things over the years, but the one that fits best for us is that of Active Travel Advocates. We exist with the raison d'être of enabling and encouraging more people to make more journeys by bike. This also involves enabling and encouraging other stakeholders to do the same; the City and County Councils (officers and councillors) to make decisions to make this happen, with support from communities, schools, businesses, and the police.Sounds like a tough gig, right? Well this is where it gets a little perplexing. The benefits of people switching from making (some) journeys by car to walking or cycling are numerous, and the ripples benefit us all. The health benefits are well documented, both physical and mental. Less cars on the road means less congestion, but also less air and noise pollution. All of this reduces our carbon emissions, even if you use an electric vehicle (I do, and driving to work uses about 60x more energy than cycling, regardless of the source of the electricity). Walking and cycling is more social than being isolated in a car, and you're also more connected to the outside world, no bad thing at all.Added to this is that any central or local government document that touches on transport will mention the desire to increase active travel rates. Our central government Decarbonising Transport strategy talks extensively about the role walking and cycling has to play, with the target of 50% of journeys to be by active travel means by 2030. Worcestershire County Council's Local Transport Plan 4 (LTP4), which runs from 2018 to 2030, references 'active travel' 59 times, with extensive corridors planned (unfortunately with little progress), and Worcester City Council approved an Active Travel Plan in 2023.I'm yet to have a conversation with a local councillor who doesn't acknowledge the benefits of an increase in active travel locally, even some of those who really seem to have a downer on those of us who choose to travel by bicycle.So given all of this, why does it still feel like nothing is really changing? Well, in the time Bike Worcester has existed (about 5 years) very little has changed in the city. Despite the rhetoric, when it comes to making practical changes to our urban environment to make it easier for those of us on bikes to get around (enable) there appears to be a disconnect from what is needed, and the people making decisions. Small changes can make a big difference, not least as a means to communicate to residents that change is happening. The counter to this is that change takes time, particularly in local government, and costs money, at. time when councils budgets are stretched to breaking point.What I find really interesting is almost a complete absence of the City or County Councils using their existing communication tools to simply encourage people to choose active travel, particularly via their social media channels, or in the local press, both of which are of negligible cost. This appears to be a choice, whether that's direction from councillors, officers, or written policy documents. At present it doesn't appear to be on anyone's radar, to provide the encouragement, whether that's people commuting to work, (61.8% of city employees work in Worcester), taking children to school, shopping, or for leisure. Why is this? We collectively would like to see more people choosing to travel on foot or by bike, so why not just ask them to do it? Certainly in other areas the councils do openly request change; a good example is Worcester City Council's campaign around the reuse of food, and recycling of food waste; so why not a similar communication strategy around active travel?In this regard Worcester appears to be falling behind other cities, and I'd encourage the councils to up their respective games. There are plenty of examples from other authorities that appear to have adopted a more proactive approach, examples below. At the end of the day, if we want change we need to sue every tool available to make it happen, right?LeicestershireDurhamStirlingSouth Lanarkshire