Personal Travel Planning and models of delivery

One year on from the start of LSTF funding, local authorities have drawn on our expertise to design, deliver and evaluate personal travel planning (PTP) programmes.

This past year has seen nearly half of local authorities which were successfully awarded with Tranche 1 funding start implementing some element of PTP as part of their bids. Here, we highlight the different ways we have supported our clients' delivery programmes for PTP.

Thurrock Council has commissioned Steer Davies Gleave to deliver PTP and work place travel planning throughout the borough. Over the four year funding period, nearly every household in the borough of  150,000 residents will have the opportunity to participate in PTP. Steer Davies Gleave is leading on every aspect of the PTP delivery, from selecting the target audiences, defining the approach, recruiting, training, and managing the team, and undertaking detailed before and after monitoring to measure behaviour change.  In the first year we’ve successfully engaged nearly 3,000 residents; in a follow up survey 60% said they had already made or intended to make a behaviour change.  We are now scheduling our second year of activity where we will be targeting a further 30,000 residents.

For the West of England Partnership, we are managing a delivery team, but with a different management structure. Our team work all year round and focus on workplace roadshows to deliver PTP (sourced by the four unitary authorities), rather than the residential approach taken in Thurrock.  Our ‘Travel West’ team provide a flexible, skilled resource in motivating members of the public to make behaviour change.  During the first 6 months, the Travel West team attended nearly 200 events, spoke with 2,500 people about their travel and delivered more than 700 key offers, including loan bikes and weekly bus or rail taster tickets.

Some of our other clients have chosen to manage their PTP travel advisor teams themselves. We have brought in our expertise to train the teams and work on the quality of their conversation skills, for example for Devon County Council and Swindon Borough Council. Elsewhere, we help officers programme PTP through selecting target audiences, piloting a PTP intervention, and showcasing the approach to gain public acceptability, different elements of which we have undertaken in Southampton and Swindon.

So, there are many different models for delivering PTP and we have longstanding experience in successfully tailoring our expertise to suit our clients' needs. We are keen to support capacity building and facilitate knowledge transfer within the industry and often host PTP seminars and workshops for local authority officers. Please contact us if you would be interested in attending.