This is a guest post from Adam W
There is a very effective important tool for getting people out of their cars and onto public transport, on a bike or walking which just does not seem to get a mention here in New Zealand; and that is Organisational Travel Plans.
In essence, a Travel Plan provides a strategy to reduce the impact of private based transportation, by beginning to influence the behaviour of stakeholders. A Travel Plan details the use of incentives and disincentives in areas ranging from public transport, cycling, car sharing, car parking management and video conferencing.
Having a large organisation located near a major transport hub does not guarantee many of the staff will use public transport, and this is where a Travel Plan comes in. A main major transport hub does not have to be just the CBD, but can easily include places like Onehunga, Panmure or Manukau. Anywhere there are buses and/or trains coming in from multiple directions.
Some common key components of a TP are:
- Providing subsidies for staff to buy bus / train fares
- Senior management providing obvious and clear support.
- Charging staff to park onsite.
- Encourage the local authority to place restrictions on nearby street parking.
- Good cycle racks under cover
- Showers & changing facilities.
- Promotional events such as cycle breakfasts.
- Monitoring levels of usage, counting bikes, cars etcs.
- Provide onsite bus terminals.
What I find interesting is that in the UK Travel Plans are quite common in large organisations and even gets Government support. Examples I have seen include a number of hospitals have full time Travel Planners; this is a full time staff member who’s entire job is to get people out of their cars and into public transport / cycling or walking – both staff, patients and visitors. Actually the National Health Service (NHS) Sustainability Unit has identified 5 key action points for reducing CO2, and point number one is: ‘All Trusts should have a Board approved Travel Plan as part of their sustainable development management plan’.
Also some Universities have full time travel planners; in fact the University of Hertfordshire where I did my Masters and is located in a semi-rural area and not in a city could easily have gone down the ‘lets provide more car parks’ route as there were limited buses servicing the area, instead decided the best solution was to start their own bus company (Uno)! This is now are the largest bus company in the area of Hatfield and provides a lot of council services as well and of course each bus goes through the campus bus terminal. This is the only University that owns and runs a bus company in the UK. The idea of starting your bus company may seem extreme but has proved very effective.
The UK Government decided to test the idea of ‘Travel Plans’ in the real world, and a ‘Sustainable Travel Town’ project was run from 2004 to 2009 in Darlington, Peterborough and Worcester for the cost of 10 million pounds. This project used ‘softer options’ to encourage public transport and cycling using by using tools such as workplace Travel Plans. The ‘Sustainable Travel Town’ project successfully achieved travel behavioural change and reduced car usage. (http://sca21.wikia.com/wiki/Sustainable_travel_demonstration_town)
Also a number of local authorities in the UK have staff whose role it is to provide support towards organisations who want help in creating a Travel Plan.
In addition there are a number non-profit organisations which can offer free and sometimes very relevant advice and support. An example is Sustrains – which is all about cycling and can provide assistance in a range of areas such as advice on promotional events to contacts for cycle repair maintenance.
One important influence on a successful Travel Plan is having adequate public transport services in the first place. No point encouraging people to use public transport if it is unreliable, expensive or is not near your place of work. So as the upcoming improvements coming online like the HOP card on buses, electrification of the train network, new bus network and of course hopefully the CRL there should be even more demand for full time travel planners in Auckland’s large organisations.
My question is why is NZ behind the eight ball when it comes to Travel Plan’s? There appears to be little understanding of its potential impact, only gets mentioned in passing as a throw away comment and has no central or local government support.
Why don’t large organisations, such as Auckland’s Universities / Polytech’s, Auckland Hospital, Auckland Council and companies like Fonterra and the bank have full time travel planning roles? Maybe I am wrong and have just not stumbled across these people? Also the Auckland Council plan only makes very vague reference to Travel Plans – and the further importance of Travel Plans was one of the key recommendations in my submission.
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Thanks Adam – I am aware that AT has done a few travel plans for some organisations, and particularly schools however you are right, it doesn’t seem that widespread. I guess for most organisations they don’t currently see a need for them as how their staff get to work generally isn’t their issue. Not sure how you change that however.
At work we’ve joined AT’s TravelWise programme, the results of the initial survey were quite interesting:
http://matipo.school.nz/2012/11/travelwise-survey-report/
I’m interested to see how the future plans progress.
Look at the number of kids who want to cycle but have no safe facilities to do so – other than the footpath which is illegal.
In fact my son has never been dropped off at that very school by car but when it was requested of AT to make a intersection narrower they flat out refused. Worse, the number of parents dropping their kids off by car makes it more dangerous for us to cycle / walk. Renata Cres vehicle numbers between 8:15 and 9:00 would be approx. 80+. We have to wait in the rain to cross while cars turn in or out.
We even had a parent complain the other day about a staff member telling her off, after she wilfully parked on dotted yellow lines (blocking the view of the crossing guards) to drop her kid off. Her excuse was (even though she admitted knowing the rules) that “it was raining and my child doesn’t need to get drenched”. Well, other parents are happier for their kids to get wet, as long as they aren’t getting run over.
According to the Auckland Transport website 220,000 Aucklanders have signed up to travel plans through the AT commute programme. That number doesn’t appear to include all the schools on their travel wise programme.
Perhaps a little more research is in order before posting?
That’s less than 15% of the population. I think it’s a fair suggestion to say we need to put more effort into travel plans.
The post is implying that there is little to no travel plans in NZ. That’s not true.
So under the new hop card system Middlemore can no longer provide its staff with discounted train travel because the hop cards cant do it. Under the old system staff could buy discounted travel from the hospital. So this is clearly a weakness of the HOP system.
Surely AT must sort the system so they can do discount deals with big employers for their staff; companies then will not need to build carparking etc….
The Hop card can support it, it’s not a weakness of the system. Expect to see things like that once the system is fully rolled out, but not before. Remember it is still in a sort of pilot/testing phase, so they are intentionally keeping the number of fare products and special things to a minimum until that phase is complete.
Dang, I thought we getting another wanted a NovaPay style rollout 🙂
Good post, Adam. How interesting, as I woke up yesterday wondering about this myself. From the perspective of my former city of Seattle, travel planning– what they call “commute trip reduction”– works. In the case of Washington state, a state law was passed in 1991 to require all employers greater than 100 employees to do some kind of travel planning and reducing employee drive-alone trips. Subsequent legislation (2006) has required urban-area local governments to develop programs that reduce drive-alone trips and vehicle miles traveled (probably better known as VKT) per capita. Over 1000 worksites participate, reducing VKT by 247 million km since 2007. And as you all know, there are also other excellent ancillary benefits.
Urban areas that plan together (they call these “growth and transportation efficiency centers” in Washington state), not surprisingly, achieve even better results. Of course, there are other states/cities in the US that do this (Cambridge, Marin County, SF Bay area, Oregon, etc.). More here: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Transit/CTR/default.htm
I suspect that the reason why NZ hasn’t seen much travel planning is because of the lack of a simultaneous or comprehensive push (or, um, regulation)– which, along with needing to provide businesses a good business case, makes it hard for employers to jump in. There are probably many more reasons which I’m just starting to learn about. One caveat, as well– travel plans work well, but it’s my belief that the synergistic benefit of doing travel plans AND using all sorts of other TDM and smart transportation planning tools is far greater than simply implementing travel planning. But, well, duh.
The first government policy statement included funded travel demand management. In 2009 the new government changed focus of the work category to being just road safety promotion. AT still undertake travel planning from operatio s and maintenance work category as network user information but these funds compete with other maintenance activities. It is not a current investment focus for nzta.
yay, more cost and burden for businesses to carry. Just what we/they need. If all PT options suck, then no amount of wasted time and money on travel plans will help.
Travel plans aren’t just about PT. They should cover driving, parking, carpooling, walking, cycling, telecomuting, not travelling at all, internal staff movement, pool cars and the lot.
Travel Plans are not just about PT (through PT has to good for a TP to work) but about reducing SOV (single occupation vehicle) by creating a benefits for non-SOV use (bus, walking, cycling, car pooling etc.) and negatives for driving.
So new shower facilities are just as important as discounts for bus / train tickets.
It’s called corporate responsibility my friend.
Also, if it reduces the dost of providing on site carparks etc, it may well be a cost saving measure.
I was being a little facetious, but my point is that forcing businesses to do travel plans will just get you an unused. dust gathering document that was made just to tick a box somewhere. businesses have to see the benefit and do it of their own choice. these things would really only work for large organizations, not the 90% of nz businesses which are small.
Agreed you can’t force a business to use travel plans.
It is the lack of support and awareness on how successful a travel plan can be by government agencies for companies that take sustainability seriously and do want to get less staff using SOV mode of travel.
An example is the new Fonterra building on the water front, I think I read that they want 300 plus car parks. Maybe they could have far less car parks and promoting other options instead for staff.
I went on a tour of new buildings in the centre of London and there was a new 20 plus story high being built that only had 10 car parks and they were all for disabled users. Now London with the Tube may be extreme, but all people moving into this new building will not be driving into work – even senior managers; to me this is the dream we need to aspire to and Travel Plans are an important tool to get there for firms that want to get involved. .
The Shard, the tallest building in Europe has 12 parking spaces! Then it is built on top of a train station.
Which just goes to show how it is all linked together; the total dedication of our transport budget to motorways means there is little left to invest in alternative systems so that we all have use the motorways [and all that land wasting and expensive parking] and therefore face calls to, you guessed it, spend more on more motorways.
Rinse and repeat.
New Plymouth, as part of their Model Communities funding, implemented a Travel Plan program. This was presented at last years Walk2Cycle conference held in Hastings (another Model Community funding recipient – but I’m not sure if Hastings undertook travel planning as well).
We had ARTA come to our office about 5 years ago to do a travel plan for our business and a number of others in Newmarket.
Although interesting it didn’t prove to be all the effective. We did get a few people trying to car poop but that tended to fail.
In Melbourne my company subsidised annual PT passes, this didn’t really do anything to increase PT usage but probably did save money for those already using PT.
“We did get a few people trying to car poop but that tended to fail.”
That has to be the best line you have ever written, not sure I want to know what it is but it sounds painful.
I tried that once on a very long car trip, but quickly worked out it was a bad idea and waited till we could pull over to a public toilet 😉
A Close Encounter of the “Turd” kind is best avoided at all costs!!
We actually have two girls at the office who do it each day so it seems some people rather enjoy it. Can’t say I’ve seen them doing it but they often talk about it at their desks.
Oh one good thing that did come out of our PT plan was that we got a larger area to lockup people’s bikes.
Post says travel planning “has no central or local government support.” That is not true either.
Author is clearly not well informed and needs to do more research on what the actual situation is.
I think you will find that i clearly state that ‘I may be wrong’ as I am recently returned to NZ.
All the evidence I have seen to date does not show any local or government support like I have seen in the UK. This mainly comes from the Auckland Council Plan etc.
Maybe Auckland Council is just doing TP stuff but it is not included in it’s high level documents.
If you have any examples that prove me wrong I would love to hear them.
AT do fund travel planning for both work places and schools. Check out the regional land transport programme. The school stuff under the guise of safety and Tdm including for workplaces and tertiary institutions
I’d prefer hospitals to spend any spare cash on employing health professionals such as doctors and nurses. Not on employing travel planners to run “cycle breakfasts”, whatever they are. I’m also quite happy to let those health professionals park at the hospital for free, rather than charge them. Also, all the health professionals I know are really dedicated people and if they want to drive to work because they prefer to do so for even frivolous reasons, then I say they should go for it.
Yep, because they are saints, and not people like the rest of us.
Seriously, how come they get exemptions (and us ratepayers paying for huge parkign buildings – a large hospital employs thousands of “health professionals”) when the rest of us don’t?
I am not trying to bash doctors or nurses, in fact you’d be surprised that lots of them would LIKE to walk, cycle or PT to work.
The above sentence should have read:
“Seriously, how come you feel they should get exemptions & extra car parking, obi”
They do save lives, which is something that most of us don’t do. That excuses a degree of un-saintlike behaviour and earns them some brownie points in my book. But the same argument applies to many other organisations. I’d prefer schools to spend their money on teachers, rather than on travel planners whose job description appears to include punishing teachers who want to drive to work.
Doctors and nurses who want to cycle to work are free to continue to do so. I have no problem with organisations laying on bike sheds and showers at work… although that hardly requires a professional travel planner and a plan. I’m opposed to punishing employees who want to drive, such as by charging them to park at work and encouraging “the local authority to place restrictions on nearby street parking”. Can you honestly imagine ANY large employer getting their staff together for an all hands meeting, then telling them that you think more of them should be taking the bus to work and therefore you’ve convinced the council to install parking meters on all the nearby streets?
“Can you honestly imagine ANY large employer getting their staff together for an all hands meeting, then telling them that you think more of them should be taking the bus to work and therefore you’ve convinced the council to install parking meters on all the nearby streets?”
Can you honestly think… of no better straw man argument? Can you name ONE case where this has happened?
Next you will join the brigade of old crusties who is wailing about the “abnormal PT spending in Auckland” that is “forcing people to use PT”. We have one of those in our engineering association. Even the old crusties think he’s an old crusty. You are sounding a bit like him.
I stand to be corrected but from my observation, schools do their “travel plans” with the aid of teachers and parents, perhaps with the aid of the police and council reps (who I doubt charge for this – but again stand to be corrected).
“Can you name ONE case where this has happened? ”
No. But that is the point. I was quoting the poster Adam W who seemed to think it should be happening. Refer to his fourth bullet point, above. The fact that you and I both agree it’s never going to happen is a good reason to not advocate in favour of doing it.
Next you will join the brigade of angry old men who shout at dogs on their lawn. I have an uncle like that. Even angry old men think he is an angry old man. You are sounding a bit like him. None of which adds anything to the argument, but one strange association of someone who holds views with someone else who holds different views deserves another.
Some hospitals have pretty much no choice – space is often at a premium. Middlemore and Auckland City are pretty stuffed for space – you don’t want to know how much it will cost to provide parking at the former as it redevelops it’s constrained site. Simply keeping the hospital ticking relies on smarter thinking than just throwing car park spaces at staff.
Locating staff resources to encourage people to walk, cycle, car pool and catch pt is about saving lives. One one level pt is the safest mode and on another the health benefits if walking. Cycling and pt are pretty well known. A recent Auckland study by Graeme Lindsey identified that a five percent increase in people cycling would result in an additional five cycling deaths through.crashes but an Additional 121 lives would be prolonged due to improved health and less vkt. Stopping people from getting sick in the first place is a very significant and positive use if health dollars. At the same time if you reduce the number if cars on the roads and emissions aren’t we all a whe lot egged off?
A lot better off that is supposed to say
As a transport consultant, I know that AT requires travel plans for every last little corner dairy (I am joking, but they are an extremely common resource consent requirement).
The typical standard actual RESULT from that travel plan condition is that 2 cheap bike racks get put somewhere, and the employees get handed a few PT schedules. Then the travel plan condition is fulfilled.
Many employers simply don’t care, and simply want to tick the box. And Council, while writing travel plan requirements left and right, has not, to my knowledge, the staff or inclination to follow up. Except in schools, where the program is better resourced and followed-up.
That said, on travel plans overall, I still would prefer the money to go into actual PT services, and walking & cycling and PT infrastructure, rather than travel planning “soft” measures. Ari may have pissed some people off with his “If all PT options suck, then no amount of wasted time and money on travel plans will help.”, but he has a core thing right: Don’t put the cart before the horse. We still lack a good horse in Auckland, though at least we aren’t quite using the “dying nag” type of animal anymore.
I agree that you need to get the core PT right first, you have to have the cart before the horse for sure, but I disagree with most of Obi’s other comments.
But as PT improves over the next couple of years with HOP and electic trains I think some thought needs to go into Travel Plans, as there is no such thing as a free parking space.
There is a cost to maintain that space including security – you might find paying someone’s HOP card at $40 a month for example will cost less than the car space does. That space can instead generate income for the hospital for other services or to support the people taking public transport or for an expansion of the hospital / school etc.
It sounds like Auckland Council has no support for TP’s outside schools and has just created a box ticking excerise instead – which comes back to my point of TP’s not being supported in NZ.
As to Obi’s last comment, in the UK there are lots of places that have restrictions on streets around Hospitals for examples so just residents can park there and staff have to pay to park or get to work using other means. It is all about stakeholder engagement, that is where a travel planner comes in. The fact it is common in the UK and not here shows how behind we are – in my view anyway.
Most employers in the UK have interest free ticket loans which are pretty good.
The Cycle to Work scheme is also reasonable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_to_Work_scheme
http://www.cyclescheme.co.uk/calculator
We instead have fringe benefit tax on free PT tickets, but our political masters have quickly abandoned the idea to make work car parks taxable as fringe benefits.
But hey, as obi says, most of those work car parks are full of saintly men and women, so they’re really excusable.
The big problem I see for hospitals in particular is not that they are saints that “deserve” parking but that they tend to work irregular, PT unfriendly hours so a car is pretty much the only viable form of transport ( unless they live close)
Agreed the unfriendly hours is a challenge, but in response all I can say is that a lot of hospitals in the UK do have full time travel planners (I applied for 2 such positions myself last year) and this challenge can be meet.
Getting into a fully successful travel plan; some hospitals actually arrange shit-work around PT transport schedules – it may sound like a lot of work, but is not really and is all part of engaging with stakeholders and supporting their needs and not just telling them what they need to do. A TP is all about making it easy for people not to use there car.
“As to Obi’s last comment, in the UK there are lots of places that have restrictions on streets around Hospitals for examples so just residents can park there and staff have to pay to park or get to work using other means.”
I have no trouble for that. Hospitals are often located in busy parts of town. What I am opposed to is that hospitals (or other organisations) should encourage “the local authority to place restrictions on nearby street parking”. That doesn’t offer extra options for staff travel. It attempts to take them away. I can’t see any reason to do that unless the organisation wanted to try to social engineer staff travel behavioural changes, and I don’t believe that this should be an objective for any health provider. Or education provider, etc.
Charging staff to park at work is about the same as charging them to eat their sandwiches in the staff room. You can make a similar argument that the provision of the staff room ties up real estate capital that could be used for an office, and that there are costs to heat and clean the room. But this sort of raw economic efficiency is FAR outweighed by the need to maintain staff morale, and the huge cost of high staff turnover as they all realise their employer is a bad place to work and quit to work somewhere else. I’m not saying you need to build new car parks. Just don’t charge staff for using existing car parks. And don’t make it harder or more expensive for them to park nearby if they can do so.
Sinmple answer, you need a government that is not so short sighted they are promoting roads above all else.
I conducted a short research on this subject a couple of years ago, “A study of Workplace Travel Planning awareness in Auckland”.
The results from interviewing six companies in Auckland CBD were;
1. Environmentally friendly companies will focus on reducing energy use and waste, and are more receptive to sustainability keywords and phrases.
2. Companies will become ‘greener’ because of environmental/sustainability management.
3. Green companies are expected to be more efficient and will engage their stakeholders.
4. Other companies seldom practice environmental management if it is not a priority
5. Constraints from rising cost and sustainability policies will make locations for new offices and their amenities a very important consideration factor.
6. Workplace transport planning and sustainability management use different sets of languages and drivers.
7. Companies need more marketing, communication and engagement from Travelwise to raise awareness.
Some concluding thoughts from my research;
1. Although Auckland companies are unaware of workplace travel planning, the uptake will come through their CSR programme because the activities are compatible.
2. Although the companies have low awareness of Travelwise, there is a strong demand for its specialist service.
3. Although workplace travel planning and environmental management have different objectives and language sets, they are both after the same desired outcome. To capitalise on this, workplace travel planning need to adopt more sustainability key words, phrases and objectives to draw attention from senior management of companies to its programme.
My recommendations were;
1. Engage with senior managers: Travelwise need to engage senior managers from Auckland companies because the leadership barrier is a critical factor to success. A strategy to break through the leadership barrier is to first identify the senior managers who are strong stakeholders of the company’s CSR programme and highlight the compatibility of the two programme outcomes, which is reducing energy use by reducing road congestions. A case study by the former Chief Operations Officer of Auckland Transport, Fergus Gammie noted that without management support, it is difficult to implement policies, and obtain financial resources and staff time. In another research by Rye, he discovered that changes to existing organisation’s practices will only happen when there is support from a very senior staff who command many resources in the organisation. All these insights can be summed up by one of the interview response, “If one executive is fired up about it and the CEO gave him the license, it will turn things around.”
2.Engage with department managers and employees: Travelwise should also engage with the departmental managers and employees of the companies using sustainability languages so that they have a better awareness of the specialist service available to them. An integrated marketing model suggested by Bartlett points toward combining ‘new online’ marketing (such as social media, banner advertisements, etc) with ‘old school’ marketing (such as events, public relations, media advertising and field sales representatives etc). The key thing that this researcher picked up is, despite living in an world saturated with online marketing, sometimes what is needed are some physically knocking on doors to sell the service or products.
3. Create separate teams for Travel Awareness and Travel Planning services: The skill sets required between the Travel Awareness and Travel Planning functions are vastly different. The skills required for Travel Awareness are mostly marketing and communications whilst organisational and planning skills are required for Travel Planning. It is therefore recommended that these two services be provided by two separate teams with the appropriate skill sets. Processes should be developed for the Travel Awareness team to refer any customers responding to their marketing and communication activities to the Travel Planning team.
Important: This was a research conducted for an academic assignment. The companies interviewed are all CBD based with Auckland-wide stores/branches and are all considered large companies. The results might be different if I had gone for a CBD vs Non-CBD and large vs small businesses.
I visited New Zealand last November with my wife and sister .We struggled at first(we aren’t locals), to plan our trip, it was especially difficult to figure out accommodation for one (although we eventually got some good deals using http://www.trivago.co.nz) and also how to get around. We’re from Europe and it is incredibly easy to move from one place to the next regardless of the location.Although we had a delightful time, I was a little disappointed with the public travel system.
There is a very effective important tool for getting people out of their cars and onto public transport, on a bike or walking which just does not seem to get a mention here in New Zealand; and that is Organisational Travel Plans.