The High Street Cannot Be Revived by Designing Out Its Customers

Britain has spent the better part of two decades trying to revive the high street. The language has changed from regeneration to levelling up, pride in place and now “bringing back hope”, but the diagnosis is familiar: too many empty units, too many fragile independent businesses, too much competition from online retail and out-of-town shopping, and too little reason for people to spend time in traditional town centres.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has now put the high street near the centre of his early domestic agenda. In July 2026 the Government announced a 20 per cent cut in business-rate bills for pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England from April 2027, expected to benefit nearly 32,000 premises and save a typical pub about £1,100 in the following financial year.[1] In August, Burnham went further, announcing plans to give councils greater powers to refuse new betting shops and adult gaming centres and to require planning permission for new vape shops, alongside a wider attempt to improve the appearance and mix of uses on high streets.[2]

These measures address genuine problems. Yet they also raise a broader question. If government is serious about reviving town centres, it has to examine not only what happens inside shops but how customers reach them. That means confronting an area of policy that has often been treated as settled: the redistribution of road space away from cars and towards cycling.

Cycle lanes can make streets safer and more attractive. In dense urban areas with strong public transport and large numbers of short trips, they can support successful high streets. But the proposition that removing road space or kerbside parking is automatically good for town-centre retail is much harder to sustain. In some places, particularly smaller towns, district centres and suburban high streets, poorly designed cycling schemes can reduce the practical accessibility on which independent businesses depend.

The high street is competing with convenience

The modern high street is not competing only with another high street. It competes with a phone screen and with the retail park on the edge of town.

The online challenge is obvious. Office for National Statistics data show that internet sales accounted for 27.4 per cent of total retail sales in 2025, compared with 19.2 per cent in 2019.[3] For a shopper who already knows what they want, ordering from home can be easier than travelling into town, finding somewhere to park, carrying purchases back to the car and paying for the privilege.

The retail park offers a different proposition. It recreates physical shopping while removing much of the friction. The customer can normally arrive by car, park close to the shop, place children in a trolley, load bulky goods directly into the boot and leave without navigating a town-centre parking system. The weather matters less. Distance between vehicle and shop matters less. For people making a large household shop, buying furniture, carrying several bags or combining several family errands, these are not trivial conveniences.

The traditional high street therefore begins with a structural disadvantage. Its strength is experience, variety, social life, independent businesses, civic character and proximity to existing communities. But if policy deliberately makes it harder to arrive, stop, load or leave, it can erode precisely the convenience that competitors have built their business model around.

That does not mean every high street needs more cars. It means access is part of the product. A town centre that is attractive once you arrive but difficult to reach is only solving half of the problem.

The car is still part of how Britain shops

Transport policy sometimes proceeds as if private-car use is mainly a habit that can be engineered away. National travel data suggest a more complicated reality. Shopping was the most common journey purpose in England in 2024, accounting for 167 trips per person.[4] Among all car journeys, shopping was the second most common purpose after leisure, accounting for 19 per cent of car trips.[5]

For many households, the car is not simply a preference for avoiding a short walk. It allows journeys to be chained together. A parent may take a child to school, visit a supermarket, collect a prescription and then stop at the high street before returning home. Someone caring for an older relative may combine shopping with a medical appointment. A tradesperson may call at a bank or hardware shop between jobs. Department for Transport analysis of trip chains found that 71 per cent of multi-modal trip chains in 2024 involved a car at some stage.[6]

These journeys are particularly important because high streets increasingly depend on discretionary visits. If getting into town adds a search for parking, a longer walk, an awkward loading arrangement or uncertainty about whether a road is accessible, the customer has alternatives. They can shop online. They can go to a retail park. They can visit a supermarket with a pharmacy, café and free parking on one site.

In other words, transport inconvenience does not necessarily convert a driver into a cyclist. Sometimes it converts a high-street customer into an out-of-town customer.

A high street does not need to be designed around the car. But it cannot be designed as though the car has ceased to exist.

Accessibility is not the same as mobility

The strongest case for reconsidering the relationship between cycling infrastructure and high streets is not made on behalf of motorists generally. It is made on behalf of people whose ability to choose another mode is constrained.

Government statistics show that disabled adults make substantially fewer trips than non-disabled adults. In 2023, more than 60 per cent of trips by both disabled and non-disabled adults were made by car, but disabled adults were more likely to travel as car passengers. Shopping was also the most common trip purpose among disabled adults, accounting for 28 per cent of their journeys. Disabled adults with access to a car and who were the main driver made far more journeys than disabled adults living in households without a car.[7]

This makes proximity important. A Blue Badge bay three minutes from a shop is not necessarily equivalent to one ten minutes away. A technically walkable distance may be inaccessible to someone with chronic pain, limited stamina or a mobility impairment. A cycle lane that removes a kerbside set-down point may be a small inconvenience for one person and the difference between visiting and not visiting for another.

Manchester City Council has encountered exactly this problem in its own active-travel consultations. Respondents reported that it was becoming harder for disabled people to park or be dropped off close to city-centre destinations. Businesses also raised concerns about customers being unable to park nearby, as well as deliveries and loading. The council responded by considering additional Blue Badge spaces and adjusting loading arrangements, while maintaining its long-term objective of reducing general car access.[8]

That is the right sort of conversation. It recognises that a street can become safer for one group while becoming less usable for another unless the design is carefully resolved.

The same point applies to parents with young children, people collecting heavy or bulky goods, older shoppers, carers and anyone for whom a cold, wet walk from a peripheral car park is a meaningful deterrent. British weather is not an argument against cycling. It is simply part of the behavioural context in which retail decisions are made.

The evidence for cycling is real, but it is often over-generalised

A credible case against poorly designed cycle schemes has to begin by acknowledging the evidence on the other side.

The Department for Transport has found substantial economic and health benefits from investment in walking and cycling. Its evidence review reported high benefit-cost ratios for active-travel schemes, while a separate rapid evidence review noted that cycle-friendly neighbourhoods can achieve stronger retail spending and that cycle parking can generate considerably more retail spend per square metre than car parking.[9] Transport for London points to research showing that improved high streets and town-centre streets can reduce retail vacancies, and that many London business improvement districts regard walking and cycling as important to commercial performance.[10]

This evidence should not be dismissed. Safer cycling can bring more people into a centre. Better pavements, planting, crossings and reduced traffic can make streets more pleasant and encourage people to linger. A person arriving on foot or bicycle may visit more frequently than someone making a weekly car trip.

But three cautions are needed.

First, much of the strongest British evidence concerns London or other dense urban environments. London has a level of public-transport provision, population density and passing footfall that many provincial town centres do not. A policy that works on a London high street cannot simply be assumed to have the same retail effect in a market town where the catchment is dispersed and public transport is limited.

Second, studies often measure packages of improvements rather than the isolated effect of a cycle lane. Transport for London’s own “Street Appeal” evidence concerns improvements to the wider street environment. A cleaner pavement, safer crossing, better lighting, reduced traffic, planting and a cycle track may all be delivered together. It is difficult to infer from the overall result that removing a particular set of parking spaces would itself improve retail performance.

Third, the Department for Transport’s economic case for walking and cycling explicitly noted that the evidence base for the direct economic effect on local high streets was still developing.[11] That is an important distinction. The health, congestion and environmental benefits of cycling may be strong even where the retail effect of a particular highway scheme is neutral or negative.

The sensible conclusion is therefore not that cycle lanes damage shops, nor that cycle lanes save them. It is that outcomes depend on location, design, existing travel patterns, the type of businesses present and the alternative forms of access that remain.

Parking is not a silver bullet either

The same caution applies to arguments for parking. There is no convincing evidence that simply providing more spaces will revive a failing high street.

Research led by University College London examining London high streets described the empirical relationship between parking and retail vitality as weak and contradictory. It noted that free parking can be occupied by staff rather than shoppers, that retailers often overestimate the proportion of customers arriving by car, and that more parking does not automatically translate into greater economic success.[12] Centre for Cities has gone further, describing free parking and business rates as recurring distractions from deeper problems such as weak local economies, insufficient city-centre employment and too little spending power.[13]

That criticism is useful because it prevents the debate becoming simplistic. A dying high street will not be rescued by painting another twenty parking bays. If local incomes are weak, the retail offer is poor, buildings are badly managed, rents are unrealistic or the centre has too many shops for the size of its market, free parking cannot solve those structural problems.

Yet this does not make parking irrelevant. Research cited by the British Retail Consortium found that 38 per cent of the public said more accessible or cheaper parking would most encourage them to visit businesses on their local high street. The High Streets Task Force has also treated parking availability as one of the highly influential factors affecting vitality and viability.[14]

Both propositions can be true. Parking is rarely the fundamental cause of high-street decline, but poor parking and access policy can still make a weak centre weaker. In a competitive retail environment, marginal frictions matter.

The mistake is to treat road-space reallocation as a moral question

The debate around cycle lanes has become unnecessarily ideological. Too often, road space is discussed as though there are virtuous modes and undesirable modes, rather than different users making different journeys.

A highway authority may begin with the objective of increasing cycling and then assess how to fit parking, loading, buses and general traffic around that objective. A high-street strategy should begin somewhere else: what mix of access will maximise the social and economic health of this place while meeting safety and environmental requirements?

Those questions can produce different answers on different streets. On a dense inner-city corridor, a protected cycle lane may move more people in less space and strengthen the commercial environment. On a narrow suburban high street dominated by convenience retail, pharmacies, specialist food shops and short visits, removing most kerbside stopping may be damaging. In a market town serving villages across a wide rural catchment, car parking may be central to the centre’s role. Around a railway station, the balance may be entirely different.

Planning already accepts this principle in other contexts. We do not apply the same parking standard to a city-centre apartment and a rural industrial estate. We do not apply the same retail catchment assumptions to Oxford Street and a neighbourhood parade. Transport policy should show the same spatial judgement.

The problem is not cycling infrastructure. It is standardisation: importing a preferred street design without first understanding the economic geography of the place.

Retail parks reveal what town centres are getting wrong

The continuing strength of many out-of-town retail parks should make planners uncomfortable. Their success is not primarily architectural. Few people travel to a retail park for its civic beauty. They go because it is easy.

Retail parks usually offer large units, simple servicing, visible stores and abundant surface parking. They suit national retailers, but increasingly they also host cafés, food outlets, gyms and other uses that once depended more heavily on town centres. Their accessibility gives them resilience.

A high street should not try to imitate a retail park. Its competitive advantage lies elsewhere. But it does need to remove unnecessary disadvantages. If a family can park for free outside a supermarket but must pay several pounds, walk through rain and carry shopping several hundred metres to use a high street, government should not be surprised when the family makes the rational choice.

This is especially relevant for independent businesses. A national chain can absorb weaker performance at one branch or shift investment elsewhere. A butcher, florist, bookshop, café or specialist retailer may depend on a small number of additional transactions each day. Policies that marginally reduce convenient access can therefore have effects that aggregate statistics do not immediately reveal.

Burnham’s high-street agenda needs a transport test

Burnham’s current programme is right to look beyond cosmetic regeneration. Cutting business rates for pubs and music venues recognises that physical businesses carry costs that online competitors do not. Giving councils greater control over gambling and vape premises recognises that the composition of a high street affects how people perceive and use it.

The same logic should be extended to transport. If government wants to support the businesses people say they value, every significant high-street transport scheme should be tested against commercial accessibility as well as traffic, carbon and safety objectives.

That test should be practical rather than ideological. How many customers currently arrive by each mode? Which businesses depend on short-stay visits? Where will Blue Badge users park? Can a person be dropped directly outside a pharmacy or clinic? Where will taxis stop? Can deliveries take place without blocking a cycle track? How far must a customer carry bulky shopping? What happens to footfall after the scheme opens? Are empty units increasing or falling?

Critically, authorities should collect these data before and after changes. If a scheme produces safer cycling, more walking and stronger trading, it should be retained and copied. If it creates a measurable decline in accessibility or business activity that cannot be explained by wider trends, it should be altered. Transport schemes should be public policy, not articles of faith.

A better model: multimodal high streets

Reviving the high street does not require a return to streets dominated by parked cars. It requires a more intelligent settlement between competing forms of access.

The first principle should be to protect essential kerbside functions. Blue Badge bays, short-stay spaces, loading, taxi set-down points and access to health or mobility-related services should be treated as infrastructure, not spare highway capacity waiting to be reassigned.

Second, councils should distinguish long-stay commuter parking from short-stay customer access. A worker occupying a prime high-street space for eight hours and a shopper stopping for twenty minutes create very different economic effects. Parking policy should reflect that distinction through duration limits, pricing and location.

Third, active-travel schemes should be designed around the commercial function of the street. In some places a segregated lane on the main high street will be the best option. Elsewhere a parallel route may provide an equally useful connection while preserving loading and short-stay access. The choice should follow evidence about movement patterns, safety and retail activity rather than a presumption that one street layout is universally correct.

Fourth, town-centre parking should be easy to find and easy to understand. Capacity is less useful if drivers do not know where spaces are, fear complex restrictions or encounter payment systems that exclude people without smartphones. Good signage, real-time availability information, simple tariffs and safe pedestrian routes from car parks can make existing capacity work harder.

Fifth, walking, cycling, buses and cars should be planned as a single access system. Better bus services can reduce the need for parking. Secure cycle parking can increase repeat local visits. Wider pavements can support cafés and street life. Convenient car access can extend the high street’s catchment beyond those who live close enough to walk. These are complements, not enemies.

Finally, regeneration funding should be conditional on monitoring. Councils receiving high-street money should report changes in footfall, vacancy, business turnover where available, accessibility for disabled users, mode share and public perceptions. A scheme that is environmentally fashionable but commercially damaging should not be protected from scrutiny.

A high street must be accessible to ordinary life

The strongest argument for high streets has never been that they are the most efficient way to buy goods. Online retail and out-of-town stores often win that contest. The high street matters because it combines commerce with public life. It is where people shop, eat, meet, work, use services and encounter their town as a shared place.

That makes inclusion central to its revival. An accessible high street is not simply one with a dropped kerb and a cycle stand. It is one that can be reached by a teenager on a bicycle, an older person on a bus, a wheelchair user arriving by car, a parent with two children, a worker collecting something on the way home and a family buying enough goods that carrying them half a mile is unrealistic.

There is no contradiction between building good cycle infrastructure and retaining sensible car access. The contradiction arises when policy treats the reduction of car access as a measure of success regardless of what happens to the place itself.

Britain’s high streets need lower costs, better buildings, stronger local economies, more residents, cleaner public spaces and a better mix of uses. Burnham is right to address several of those issues. But accessibility belongs on the same list.

The task is not to bring every car back onto the high street. It is to stop assuming that every car removed represents progress. If the consequence is that a shopper who might have used an independent town-centre business instead drives to an out-of-town superstore, the policy has displaced the journey and weakened the high street at the same time.

A successful town centre gives people reasons to come and makes it reasonably easy for them to do so. That is not a concession to motorists. It is basic retail geography.

→ All Topics

Sources and notes:

1. HM Government, “Burnham means business: PM slashes business rates bills for pubs, clubs and live music venues”, 23 July 2026. The announcement states that pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England will receive a 20% business-rate cut from April 2027, benefiting nearly 32,000 venues and saving a typical pub an estimated £1,100. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/burnham-means-business-pm-slashes-business-rates-bills-for-pubs-clubs-and-live-music-venues

2. The Guardian, “Burnham to give councils more powers to block vape and betting shops”, 10 August 2026. The proposals include planning control over new vape shops and greater local powers over betting shops and adult gaming centres. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/10/burnham-to-give-councils-more-powers-to-block-vape-and-betting-shops

3. Office for National Statistics, Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales, series J4MC. Annual online share: 19.2% in 2019 and 27.4% in 2025. Release updated 24 July 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/timeseries/j4mc/drsi

4. Department for Transport, National Travel Survey 2024: trips by purpose, age, mode and sex. Shopping was the most common trip purpose, with 167 trips per person. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2024/nts-2024-trips-by-purpose-age-mode-and-sex

5. Department for Transport, National Travel Survey 2024: household car availability and trends in car trips. Shopping accounted for 19% of car trips in 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2024/nts-2024-household-car-availability-and-trends-in-car-trips

6. Department for Transport, Trip chaining: 2024, published 5 February 2026. Seventy-one per cent of multi-modal trip chains involved a car. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/nts-factsheets/trip-chaining-2024

7. Department for Transport, Disability, accessibility and Blue Badge statistics, England, 2023 to 2024. More than 60% of trips by disabled and non-disabled adults were made by car; shopping accounted for 28% of disabled adults’ trips. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/disability-accessibility-and-blue-badge-scheme-statistics-2023-to-2024/disability-accessibility-and-blue-badge-statistics-england-2023-to-2024

8. Manchester City Council, City Centre Active Travel Scheme consultation responses. The council records concerns about disabled parking and drop-off, customer parking, deliveries and loading, and explains proposed mitigation. https://www.manchester.gov.uk/consultations-and-surveys/city-centre-active-travel-scheme-consultation-second-stage/ccatf-and-water-street-consultations-responses

9. Department for Transport, The value of cycling: rapid evidence review of the economic benefits of cycling. The review reports substantial economic benefits and cites higher retail spend associated with cycle-friendly environments. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-value-of-cycling-rapid-evidence-review-of-the-economic-benefits-of-cycling

10. Transport for London, Economic benefits of walking and cycling. TfL reports that its Street Appeal research found a 17% decline in retail vacancy rates between improved and unimproved streets and sets out wider evidence on active travel and business. https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/economic-benefits-of-walking-and-cycling

11. Department for Transport, Investing in cycling and walking: the economic case for action. The paper states that the evidence base for the direct economic impact of cycling on the local high street was still developing. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5e84d69e86650c743f1a9466/cycling-and-walking-business-case-summary.pdf

12. Xin Zhao and Peter Jones, University College London, “Does parking provision affect the vitality of high streets in London?” The study describes the evidence linking parking and vitality as weak and contradictory and finds no simple relationship between more parking and stronger high streets. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1503197/3/Jones_TPM%20Paper_2015_Xin%20%26%20Jones%20FINAL.pdf

13. Centre for Cities, Checking Out: Recent national policy approaches to the high street, 10 July 2025. The report argues that parking and business-rate debates can distract from underlying economic weakness in struggling centres. https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/checking-out/recent-national-policy-approaches-to-the-high-street/

14. British Retail Consortium, “The Importance of Sufficient Car Parking for Retail Success”, 13 November 2024. It cites Federation of Small Businesses/Public First research finding that 38% of the public said more accessible or cheaper parking would most encourage high-street visits. https://brc.org.uk/news-and-events/news/property/2024/the-importance-of-sufficient-car-parking-for-retail-success/