Creating a travel plan

Use the results from the data collection and focus on activities the data suggests will have the greatest impact and will be the most cost-effective. For instance, if your travel survey data indicates only 15% of employees live within 10km of the site, it may not be a good use of resources to invest in walking or cycling trip end facilities to accommodate less than 15% of employees. 

It is more effective to implement a few activities well that suit your organisation rather than to try to accomplish a wide range of actions.

Good Travel Plans use a combination of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ actions: gently pushing people away from one way of travel through a pricing mechanism or some other restraint. At the same time, it is important to make the alternatives more attractive, pulling in the direction of more sustainable travel. 

This could include introducing subsidised public transport tickets coupled with a newly introduced price on car parking.
 

Good Travel Plans are well supported by all stakeholders. 

More controversial incentives such as parking charges (‘sticks’) will have a greater likelihood of success if they are introduced after some incentives (‘carrots’) such as better facilities for ride sharers have been implemented.

Hard activities are generally either infrastructure-based measures or financial instruments.

Examples of 'hard' measures include:

• End of trip facilities for cyclists and walkers (showers, lockers, changing rooms, towels, hair driers, drying rooms).
• Allocation system for car parking spaces – encouraging multiple occupancy vehicles and maintaining sufficient spaces for those with mobility impairments.
• Subsidy or financial benefit for travelling by non-car modes of transport (eg. provide Opal cards to staff).
• Designated priority car share spaces on site with monitored compliance (ie. for GoGet cars or people who carpool).
• Revenue from charging for parking spaces used to fund Travel Plan measures.

This provides practical, face-to-face advice to interested individuals, which is a valuable way to support desired behaviours.

Soft activities encourage and support voluntary behaviour change, and are based on changing policies and practices, and communicating the benefits of travelling more sustainably. 

Examples of 'soft' measures include:

• Design user-friendly maps of cycle and walk access to the site.
• Offer free umbrellas for people leaving the precinct on foot on rainy days.
• Review staff vehicle / parking incentives and offer to replace with public transport alternatives of similar value.
• Offer incentives to re-time staff commuting.
• Promote sustainable access options to the site in the recruitment of new employees.

Alternatively, it is worthwhile exploring digital methods such as internal messaging and E-newsletters to reach a large audience at low cost and result in two-way discussion.

It is widely acknowledged that the only way to achieve significant reduction in people driving is to introduce some form of parking management to discourage non-essential single occupancy vehicle trips. The most effective parking management includes some form of pricing.

Charging for parking can be made more acceptable if the revenue raised is allocated to the Travel Plan and channelled into improving facilities for travelling by sustainable modes.

Other ideas include:

• Charge for on-site car parking spaces from post-tax salary.
• Occasional staff parking permits that are limited to a reduced number of days per year (eg. 90 days/year).

Reduced parking spaces available for single occupancy vehicles.

Specific campaigns should accompany many of the Travel Plan measures. You want to encourage people to ‘give it a go’, to try out a new way of travelling. If this experience is positive, they are much more likely to want to try it again.

Engagement can involve a range of different levels of participation and techniques. These include:

• Printed materials (fact sheets, newsletters, brochures, posters, maps, reports).
• Displays (signage, banners, noticeboards).
• Digital methods (e-newsletters, website, internal messaging).

Events (travel clinics, employee events, launches. open days, field trips).

The strength of a Travel Plan is in the packaging of activities, the collective value, the interaction between individual activities and how they complement and reinforce each other. The sum of the whole is far greater than that of the individual component parts. It is important to review every activity for how it works with the others.

This is especially important across a precinct where individual organisations’ activities need to complement each other and work to collectively shift travel behaviour across the whole site.

Good Travel Plans become embedded in an organisation's ‘business as usual’ practices. Promotion and support of active and sustainable travel becomes mainstream.

Gamification is another approach for changing behaviour. As the name suggests, it’s about involving people in ‘games’, as individuals or as teams, with incentives and prizes for travelling in a certain way or at a certain time. Consider some small scale, quick wins and think quirky. Examples can be:

• Offer people who retime their journey to work outside of the peak with a free coffee.
• Provide umbrellas for people to use when walking to the station or bus stop.
• Run Walking Clinics for employees to find out what the issues are with their walk to the workplace and try and work out a solution.

Promote walking meetings. 

Some points to remember are:

• Not everyone in the target audience will be ready to change their behaviour at the same time.
• Information alone is unlikely to be sufficient enough to deliver a change in travel behaviour. Emotions and interest must be activated to generate change.
• Try to address the ‘What’s in it for me’ question to convince people to make changes to the way they travel.

Change will not necessarily be lasting, it can revert back, so ongoing reinforcement is needed.