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West Swindon PTP

During the summer months in 2013 residents in West Swindon were invited to take part in the Swindon Travel Choices ‘Personalised Travel Planning’ project.

Locally recruited and specially trained Travel Advisers visited householders to offer them information, free incentives and support to try out new travel options that might benefit them – such as saving time and money, getting a little more active or just enjoying less stressful ways of getting around Swindon.

The primary focus was to encourage those people who work in the town centre and currently drive to work, to walk, cycle or use the bus to make their journey. Around 50% of workers in the town centre live within 5km of their workplace and the average distance travelled is 3.5km – this is within comfortable cycling distance for most people.

The Travel Advisers followed up these engagements with information packs tailored to the individual’s needs – such as bus and cycle maps.  Residents could also take part in a personal ‘challenge’ to try out a new form of sustainable transport.

The results of the project have been encouraging.  22% of the residents participating in West Swindon reported they were driving less, with 36% walking more.  Read the headline results of the West Swindon work.

East Swindon PTP

During the summer months in 2014 residents in East Swindon (Liden, Dorcan, Eldene, Covingham and Nythe) were invited to take part in the Swindon Travel Choices ‘Personalised Travel Planning’ project.

Locally recruited and specially trained Travel Advisers visited householders to offer them information, free incentives and support to try out new travel options that might benefit them – such as saving time and money, getting a little more active or just enjoying less stressful ways of getting around Swindon.

In East Swindon, 3299 residents were engaged in the project and nearly 21,000 resources (maps, timetables, guides and leaflets) distributed.  11% of respondents stated they had increased the time spent cycling by 15 minutes per week and 93 % of those people said they would continue to cycle more.

Read the headline results of the East Swindon work.

Community Moves Project

Over the one year of this programme in 2015, we worked across the Council’s priority neighbourhoods (Penhill, Park North/South, Walcot East, Central, Moredon, Gorse Hill, Pinehurst, Meadowcroft and Toothill), containing some 20,000 households in total. We delivered a programme which combined a traditional door-to-door PTP approach (building on the lessons learnt from our successful recent project in West Swindon) with the ‘active listening’ approach currently used by our Health & Wellbeing team’s Health Ambassadors.

This meant that, depending on the issues faced by each specific household, we were able to offer information, guidance and support to those who wished to improve their health & wellbeing. This was through increasing physical exercise, weight management or taking steps to improve emotional and mental wellbeing.

Through our Learning Ambassadors we offered free learning & training opportunities on a wide variety of subjects including DIY, Jamie’s home cooking skills, money management, IT & gardening.

We also had lots of free information and incentives for bus travel, cycling and walking including free cycle helmets and accessories as part of our cycle loan scheme.  Our resources are detailed more in the right hand column.

Over the summer holidays the Community Moves Roadshows popped up at places around the neighbourhoods where residents could talk to advisers, pick up goodies, sign up to schemes and gather information.

Read the results of the Community Moves project

PTP with Employers

In a large portion of this project, we were working with employers in Swindon town centre, including eight of the largest, to promote sustainable modes of travel to work through personalised travel planning.  This engagement took place between July 2011 and March 2015.

We undertook a baseline survey in autumn 2011 with 7500 employees from Nationwide, Swindon College, National Trust, Swindon Borough Council, First Great Western, BT, Network Rail and the Research Councils.  The survey established how people currently travelled to their workplace, what they thought stopped them from using non car modes and sought their views on what improvements were needed both at the workplace and off site in order to make it easier to travel without a car.

We offered employer grants to address some of the improvements needed, such as upgrading cycle parking, buying pool bikes, improving the changing areas and at the same time addressed some of the off site issues, suich as upgrading the lighting in a subway close to town.

As the weather grew warmer, we then took a team of travel advisors into the workplaces for themed events, such as “bike doctor” days, “try a bike” events, car share coffee mornings and scheduled conversations.  The advisors are trained in motivational interviewing techniques, so a conversation aims to explore the individuals’ feelings towards types of travel and allows them to draw conclusions for themselves about changes they want to make to their lives.

The conversations were supported by a number of tools, including:

  • The Swindon Travel Choices website, online journey planner and mapping
  • Travel guides showing how to get to each of the main employment sites.  You can download these from the Resources page.
  • Improvements to facilities such as cycle stands and showers – as part of a grant scheme.
  • Roadshows and displays
  • Cycle training and bike maintenance courses
  • A cycle loan scheme where people can borrow a bike to try for a 6 week period
  • An ‘active travel’ challenge, in which employers and individuals can compete against each other to win prizes
  • Bus ticket promotions
  • Car clubs

These tools were also used for each of the main projects taking place, with many being available for residents across the town.

We also developed free online travel plan training, so any individual within any organisation can learn more about travel plan elements.  The training is split into short bitesize modules, with the aim they can be dipped into at a time to suit the employee.

Full details and results can be found in the LSTF end of project report

 

Wichelstowe PTP

As part of the Travel Plan for Wichelstowe, we delivered light touch Personalised Travel Planning (PTP) with the first tranche of occupants (which we completed in 2011) and the LSTF extension funded project was an opportunity to enhance and expand that work.  The project ran from April 2015 to March 2016.

We began with a baseline survey, and then revisited those households previously involved in PTP as part of the Travel Plan.  We offered additional advice, utilising the resources, incentives and knowledge developed from our 2013 and 2014 PTP projects in which we successfully engaged over 6,000 households in West and East Swindon.

In addition, we undertook PTP with any new residents taking occupation since 2011, targeting them during their period of transition into their new neighbourhood. As part of this work we developed an area travel guide and bespoke marketing materials, using existing templates.

This approach can be adopted for future growth areas, such as New Eastern Villages.

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