Talking the language of the LEPs

At this month's Mainstreaming Smarter Travel conference Graham Pendlebury,the Department for Transport’s recently appointed Director of Local Transport, declared monitoring and evaluation to be the “flavour of the month”.

One of the challenges this poses is providing the evidence for the value of smarter travel measures in a language which a wider, non-transport audience, can relate to. This will hopefully reduce the stop-start nature of funding for these initiatives that we have come to expect. This means talking in the language of the Local Economic Partnerships (or LEPs) which will administer the funding for monitoring and evaluation. In this context, key outputs will be measures of economic growth and job creation, alongside benefit:cost ratio statistics to demonstrate value for money.

Steer Davies Gleave is now looking to develop a standardised approach to converting transport outputs such as mode shift and carbon reduction to wider economic outputs (our WebTag experience is proving invaluable for this).

In the mean-time, the starting point is still to obtain reliable data on the transport impacts of LSTF funded projects. Indeed, this was the topic of my paper presented at the Mainstreaming Smarter Travel conference.

TOP TEN TIPS for cost-effective monitoring

1. Have clear objectives
2. Think about the logic chain
3. Collect the basics
4. Design a programme that is proportionate, but still useful
5. Make use of existing data
6. Learn from others
7. Utilise known relationships between variables (such as active travel and health)
8. Don’t just collect numbers, also examine what’s behind them
9. Don’t impose an undue burden on respondents or surveyors
10. When reporting findings try to tell a coherent story

Feedback from the conference showed clearly the desire to learn from shared experiences and to this end, Steer Davies Gleave will be looking over the next few months to identify generally applicable lessons from our current smarter travel projects and to seek permission from clients to share these. This will, at the same time, boost the evidence base for the impact of such projects.     

We are also looking at the best way of sharing the information we collect, and are in dialogue with DfT. One likely avenue of communication is ACT TravelWise which is ideally placed to be a repository of knowledge and resources.

If you have any comments on this topic (including your view on the “top tips” or would like to register your interest in receiving information on the results and lessons from our LSTF funded projects, please email us at: [email protected]