About Us

We campaign to make walking, cycling and other active travel modes the natural choice for journeys across Greater Manchester. We do this by:

  • Campaigning and putting pressure on our political leaders to deliver what they have set out in their strategies
  • Supporting the actively engaged in our local communities; encouraging and empowering them to act

To find out about our activities and the latest active travel news from Greater Manchester, you can find our blog here.

Our Past, Present and Future Successes

Established in 2018 following the launch of the Bee Network in Greater Manchester through visioning and proposal publications, the group’s first aim was to find a name and then set out key campaign goals for the coming year. People assembled for a public meeting at Friends’ Meeting House in Manchester, and Walk Ride GM was selected from the shortlist.

The four campaign goals for 2019 were set as:

View of the audience and speakers at a Walk Ride GM general meeting

Since then, WRGM has gone from strength to strength and achieved a lot through a range of collaborations with stakeholders from local authorities to businesses to residents to schools, as both volunteer-led community outreach and funded commissions.

We are now part of the GM Walking and Cycling Advisory Group. This means we are in regular dialogue with our leaders at a GM and district level to lobby for increased pace of delivery and improved governance and accountability, as well as the need for a road traffic reduction strategy. This has also seen the creation of new Active Travel sub committee at GMCA, where we’ve been able to feed into its workplan.

Having won the bikes on trams commitment from the Mayor at 2021 mayoral elections, we lobbied hard for bikes (and dogs) on trams trial. There is now a commitment to trialling bikes on trams as part of Dame Sarah Storey’s Bee Network refresh as the Active Travel Commissioner and we expect to see TfGM deliver the trial in 2023.

Walk Ride GM’s achievements have all been thanks to volunteer time. We have some operating costs to continue our activities – including staging events from hustings to live conversations with key public figures, holding meetings, providing training and technical support, and generally campaigning for better, more liveable places. Our Community Interest Company (Walk Ride GM CIC) has also successfully collaborated on a Lottery-funded programme to improve neighbourhoods in southwest Manchester. Our ambitions to take this to the next level include employing permanent staff to increase our capacity to enable positive change. If you are able to support Walk Ride GM via a donation, please use this link.

Local Groups

Walk Ride Greater Manchester supports local groups across the region, all campaigning to make their areas better for people living, working or moving around. Information on our local groups can found here.

We now have 22+ local subgroups who to work with their local councils and engage with their communities to promote Active Travel across GM through:

  • Supporting and promote consultations on active and low traffic neighbourhoods and other traffic calming measures
  • Supporting schools to set up and run school streets, from delivering training to volunteers, webinars to council officers to generally being on the ground to make sure everything runs smoothly 
  • Providing technical or accessibility evaluation of local schemes and filling in consultations
  • Campaigning for barrier removal

The above is just a snapshot of our activities – if you’re interested to find out more or get involved with an existing or new local subgroup, then contact the steering group via hello@walkridegm.org.uk.