Personalised travel plans

Summary

Personalised Travel Planning (PTP) provides a range of individualised, tailored information and incentives to encourage travel behaviour change within a concentrated population area.

Implementing sustainable mobility

Personalised Travel Planning (PTP) provides a range of individualised, tailored information and incentives to encourage travel behaviour change within a concentrated population area.

Brighton & Hove expanded its existing PTP project of 10,000 households per year to 15,000 households in 2009 and 20,000 in 2010, 5,000 of which were part of the CIVITAS measure in each year (i.e. 33% in 2009 and 25% in 2010).

PTP was delivered to a further 5,000 households in 2011, all (100%) of which were part of the CIVITAS measure. In total, 35,000 households were targeted, 43% of which were financed by CIVITAS.

Progress

Participation in the CIVITAS ARCHIMEDES project allowed the inclusion of innovative measures involving social media and community engagement. The aim of these interventions was to reach new audiences who are not picked up through the door knocking campaign which has in turn become known as ‘traditional’ PTP.

Outcomes

The evaluation for this measure focussed predominantly on pre and post intervention acceptance and behavioural surveys in each PTP area together with snapshot surveys of those who participated with the evaluation focussing on the full PTP intervention for each year. The headline statistics comparing the before and after interventions require careful interpretation; however, the key results are as follows:

• Area surveys suggest an overall 0.7% decline in the overall number of trips by car in each of the 2010 and 2011 PTP areas.
• The same indicator shows a 6% increase in 2009; however, this is contradicted by the number of respondents who said they had made a shift towards sustainable modes of transport in the year following the intervention. In this case, 22% said they were now driving less, with 30% walking more and 23.5% making more trips by bus. A similar trend is evident for the 2010 and 2011 interventions and also by the snapshot surveys which were undertaken with active participants immediately after the intervention.

This evaluation concludes that PTP can be used as part of a wider package of measures to help increase the uptake of sustainable modes by active participants. It also supports the use of social networking approaches (both online through social media and offline through community participation) in extending the reach of a doorstep-focused PTP intervention; however, for benefits to be fully harnessed both the traditional and innovative elements need to be integrated as closely as possible. Finally the need for a robust monitoring plan is emphasised to ensure an accurate assessment of modal shift on a geographic basis.