4a Monitoring a Travel Plan

Why should you monitor?

Monitoring can seem quite daunting. However, much of the information required should already be collected as part of an existing financial management system. Monitoring is important because it:

• indicates the effectiveness of the Plan in meeting its objectives
  
• justifies the commitment of staff time and other resources
  
• will be a requirement if a Plan is being developed as part of Planning Approval
  
• maintains support for the Plan by reporting successes
  
• allows resources to be concentrated on measures which support Plan objectives
  
• provides evidence to support a bid for additional resources
  
• may help to unlock Government funding for implementation of the LTP
  
• identifies any measures that are not working, or problems with your approach
  
• can be shared with other organisations to refine the development of Travel Plans

Monitoring should be continuous and used to check whether the Plan is progressing towards meeting its agreed targets.

What should you monitor?

You will need to measure the overall effect of the Travel Plan, to see if it is having any effect on the way that people are travelling to your site.

In addition to this, you may wish to measure the effectiveness of specific measures or initiatives, to ensure that they are contributing to meeting your targets.


How should you monitor?
When measuring the overall effect of the Plan, it will be appropriate to conduct a follow-up survey. You may not need to ask all of the questions that you did on your initial staff Travel survey. For example, you might only wish to know:

• How do employees currently travel?
  
• Has this changed since the last staff travel survey?
  
• Has travel behaviour changed as a result of the Travel Plan?

If you do ask questions that were on your original survey, it is important to use the same wording, so that comparisons can be drawn with the earlier data.

When conducting the survey, you need to choose the right technique.

Either a postal survey, or face-to-face interviews will be most effective, depending on the length of the survey. You might also want to choose a smaller sample group than for your initial survey. If you are conducting the monitoring annually, try to always use the same time of year as the initial survey, or the same date.

Once you have collected the data, it needs to be analysed and compared to previous survey results to show how much progress has been made, and how close you are to achieving your targets. You may reconsider your targets in light of the new data, but remember that Travel Plans tend to take three years to start to have a major impact on travel behaviour.

When measuring the progress of specific schemes within the Travel Plan, you would typically ask the following questions:

• Which areas offer the greatest potential for change?
  
• was the initiative implemented by the target date?
  
• how well used is each scheme/initiative?
  
• what change in travel behaviour has occurred as a result of the initiative?
  
• how much did it cost to introduce?
  
• What do users and non-users think of the scheme?

It is advisable that some basic monitoring is conducted before implementation, to provide a baseline to measure progress against. You can also monitor levels of satisfaction and user opinions as soon as an initiative is introduced so that any problems can be identified and adjustments made. Information can be collected through a brief discussion with staff or by consulting with user groups to identify changes that may be required.

Best Practice Example: Monitoring Of An Initiative

The following is an example of how an initiative can be monitored. It is based on an organisation with 200 staff and 50 car park spaces on site. Car parking on site is a problem and the organisation has decided to introduce a Travel Plan to manage this.
A Travel Plan is to be introduced by April 2002. Following a staff travel survey, a target of doubling of the number of staff travelling by bus by April 2007 has been set. The Plan also considers a range of initiatives to promote cycling, walking, car sharing and teleworking. Its initiatives can be divided into short, medium and long-term and the definitions are as follows:

• Short-term measures may already exist or will be implemented during the 1st year of the Plan
  
• Medium-term measures will be implemented within years 1-3 of the Plan
  
• Long-term measures will be implemented after 3 years or more
  Description of initiative How output will be measured Output Overall desired outcome
  

Monitoring a Travel Plan
Case Study Manchester Airport