Delivering Personalised Travel Planning in Cambridgeshire

The A428 and A10 are two key corridors into Cambridge. Steer delivered Personal Travel Planning (PTP) to two communities on these corridors to encourage use of alternatives to single occupancy vehicle use, aiming to support economic growth by managing congestion. 

Cambridgeshire County Council commissioned Steer to identify suitable settlements on these corridors where behaviour change could be encouraged and target 5,000 homes in a PTP project.

Steer used a range of GIS techniques to identify suitable settlements for PTP intervention.  Considerations included to what extent alternatives to private car use were realistic, existing travel to work patterns, available infrastructure, and location of those fitting a demographic profile expected to respond well to PTP. 

Once identified, we developed tailored local travel information for the selected communities and a team of local travel advisors were recruited and trained to deliver the PTP intervention. A small number of workplaces were also engaged in PTP in the two communities.  Baseline and follow-up monitoring were also undertaken.

Successes and outcomes 

The project exceeded its targets in terms of encouraging behaviour change:

• 10% of those in work identified a change to their travel behaviour;
• there was a 7% reduction in commuter driver-only car travel;
• 93% of monitoring survey respondents rated the Travel Advisors as good or very good;
• 63% of respondents said the PTP conversation had made them think about their travel habits;
• 37% of respondents stated that the PTP conversation had made them more likely to use bus, walk, cycle or car share; and
• 25% of respondents stated that PTP conversation had encouraged them to try a new way of travelling.

A PTP toolkit was developed to support small scale PTP activity in Cambridgeshire in the future.