Encouraging lower carbon and active travel for those journeys, can contribute to improving local air quality, reducing congestion and tackling climate change. At the same time, it can help you support a happier, healthier workforce and contribute to the health and wellbeing of everyone in Devon.
Smarter travel can help you:
- improve access to your site for staff and visitors;
- reduce the need for employee parking;
- boost productivity of your staff;
- aid staff recruitment and retention;
- encourage more transport investment in your local area;
- reduce travel expenses;
- boost your business’ image of corporate social responsibility and contribution to environmental targets;
Travel plans are an effective tool to increase the accessibility of a site by low carbon modes and have a positive impact on the surrounding road network and communities as well as your staff’s health and wellbeing.
What is a travel plan?
A travel plan lays out the strategy for managing travel to and from your site. It sets out existing and planned measures to support your staff to travel smarter.
A travel plan should be:
- site specific and relevant to both staff and visitors; and
- a ‘living document’ and should be reviewed and updated regularly.
Travel planning is a dynamic process, and your travel plan will grow and develop over time.
To ensure its effectiveness, it should be adapted to suit changes in your circumstances and needs as an employer and the needs of your staff.
What should a travel plan include?
The exact contents of your travel plan will vary depending on a number of factors, including the nature of your business’ operation, location, size of your workforce, and your reasons for writing a travel plan.
Travel plans are there to help you achieve your sustainable travel goals and should be tailored to your specific needs. In turn, your sustainable travel goals might be linked to or part of broader sustainability goals for your business.
Broadly speaking, your travel plan should:
- Introduce the site and its general characteristics such as location, staff numbers and how any shift patterns impact on travel to your site etc.
- Set out all the current travel options to the site and how the design, location of the site, existing facilities and initiatives are encouraging a mix of travel modes. This should include a description of your car parking management plan.
If you don’t have a car parking management plan yet, please see our Car park management plan toolkit.
- Identify how your staff are currently traveling to work. Include information on how your staff currently travel to your site. You can use our Travel survey template to collect this information. If you have conducted travel surveys in the past, your travel plan should also provide historic survey results to show any changes in how your staff have travelled to work.
- Set targets for a shift towards more sustainable and active travel modes and dates for achievement. This will give you the opportunity to monitor your progress and evaluate which targets have or have not been met and why.
- Include an action plan that clearly states what measures (both “carrots” and “sticks”) will be implemented to achieve your targets, including timescales (start, end, frequencies) and who is responsible for implementation. To be as effective as possible, the plan should include measures which address the travel of employees, business travel, deliveries, visitors and customers.
- Establish monitoring arrangements to track progress in delivery of the travel plan.
Travel Planning process
Get started on your travel plan by following the steps below:
- Use our free Travel audit and find out how your organisation scores on smarter travel best practices and identify where you could improve.
Please see our Using the travel audit toolkit for further guidance.
- Use our free Travel survey template to find out how your staff are currently traveling to work, what barriers are preventing them from making smarter choices and what would help them make changes in the future. Please see our Using the travel survey toolkit for further guidance.
- Use the information you have gathered to identify measures to improve sustainable travel options to your site. These measures can be low cost, quick and easy to implement, so you can get started on them today.
Browse our toolkits for measures to support and encourage sustainable travel behaviour.
- Write and publish your travel plan.
Please see our Travel plan guide and template for further guidance.
5. Start implementing the measures you have proposed in your travel plan. Bring your travel plan to life and engage your staff by providing information and organising campaigns and events about the various travel options for your site.