Essex Green Transport Conference
Would you like to find out what Essex County Council is doing to support Sustainable Travel and Electric Vehicles in Essex?
Would you like to learn how your community and business can work with the county council to reduce transport carbon emissions?
Would you like to test drive an electric vehicle and see the latest charging technology?
Then you are invited to the Essex Green Transport Conference on 20 May at the Essex Records Office from 09:30
Here are the full details of the day and how to register to attend.
Are you a bus user?
We have just launched a bus users survey for members of the Travel Plan Club.
We want to hear back from bus users about your journey to work or to where you study. The survey covers all aspects of your bus experience including your satisfaction with:
- Reliability
- Bus drivers and quality of driving
- Bus stops
- The vehicle
Why are we doing the survey? Well in 2013 we want to do more to encourage members to use the bus particularly for their journey to work and studies. However before we do this, we feel we need a better understanding of how existing bus users find local services.
The survey will give us some insight into what is good and not so good about local services and facilities for bus users. We can then use this data for a number of purposes to:
- Work more closely with the bus operators and high way authority to help improve services
- Tell others what is good about travelling by bus and to break down some of the barriers that may stop more people from using the bus
The survey is open until the 13 May and takes 5 – 15 minutes to complete depending on whether you regularly use one or more bus operators.
So if you are a bus user we would really welcome your feedback. Thanks for your help.
Weather alert! Business as usual?
See snow as an opportunity! Many of us will struggle on, in our attempts to carry on our working day with business as usual. And we salute those who have made great efforts to arrive at their workplace, to maintain a service to customers during challenging weather. But for some of us, maybe this is the great opportunity to try new working methods? Do we need to travel to do our job? Can we work from home, at least some of the time? There’s never a better chance to give it try, when some of the roads are closed from snowfall or ice.
Maybe winter’s nearly over, but the kipper nailed to my door frame tells me there will be more snow before summer’s here. So lay ahead, and think how you can best plan working from home when nature decides that it’s out turn again to have lots of snow.
And many thanks to those who still have to forge a way to their usual workplace. Hopefully your passage is eased by lower volumes of traffic on the roads.
Health, Work and Wellbeing – event 8 Feb 2012
A healthy workforce is good for your employees, for the wider community, and for your business. There’s a Health, Work and Wellbeing event at Eight Ash Green, run by the “Business in the Community” organisation, and “NHS northeast Essex”. It will be in the morning of 8 February, and will include lunch. Please follow the link for details, and book your FREE place. There will be a series of interesting presentations, some market stalls, and opportunities to network. See you there…..
Meet our NQE Business Awards Finalists
This year the Travel Plan Club, along with ECC and Inntel, have sponsored the Active and Sustainable Travel category in the prestigious NQE business awards
Having choosen nine finalists we followed this up with a visit to each. It’s been great finding out all the different things they are doing to promote sustainable and active travel. Here is a snippet of some of the best bits!
Open Road a charity providing drug and alcohol treatment makes great use of Skype to deliver training between its centres and to hold meetings. This has greatly reduced its business travel costs and overtime payments.
The whole ethos of Green Path Ventures is to give new experiences to, and build confidence of, people with mental health problems, through being outside, physical activity, social interaction and teaching bush craft skills.
To complement what they already do to encourage their staff to be more active Click4Quote are considering installing a Wii in their staff kitchen to promote lunchtime activity over the winter months!
DSG have been monitoring their business travel related CO2 emissions and can show a big drop since they introduced video conferencing and other new working practices across all their sites.
An innovative bike maintenance workshop and mobile maintenance trailer which is going to offer bike repairs to local schools, attracted a recent ministerial visit at The Gilberd School
Discounted D locks, pumps, cycle maintenance equipment, disounts in local bike schops and the Cycle to Work scheme are offered at Colchester VI Form College to help encourage cycling.
The University of Essex has doubled the number of students cycling to campus over the past couple of years through their termly cycle promotions including cycle training, Dr Bike, cycle watch scheme and the sale of second hand bikes.
Income from charging staff to park at Colchester Borough Council is used to offer staff choosing to regularly travel to work sustainably, 50% off bus season/carnet tickets and 35% off train travel.
Colchester United Football Club are really listening to their fans and tailoring services to suit, there are now shuttle buses from Greenstead, St Johns, Highwoods and Butt Road plus a coach coming from Braintree. As many as 24% of fans now travel to a game by bus
So that’s it, our finalists in a nutshell. It has been incredibly difficult to decide three winners as everyone is doing such good work. All will be revealed at the awards ceremony on Friday 25th November. So good luck to you all and have a great evening!
Inntel – cutting your travel and hotel costs
The Travel Plan Club asks “Is your company still using travel warrants? Do your staff just turn up at the station and get a roll-up price ticket on the company plastic?”
Andrew Budd says of his own experience when booking train trips for hiking in Scotland “You could be paying well over the odds for your journey, with some standard journey tickets up to five times the discount price”.
“Do your employees sometimes stay in hotels? Again, there are some excellent deals out there – are you taking advantage of the best prices, or are the hotels taking advantage of the busy-ness of your business?”
“And how much of your staff time is being taken up searching on the internet for best deals for travel and accommodation, and dealing with travel related paperwork?”
We are all asking questions like these at our businesses, as we seek to make cost savings. Essex County Council had staff in various departments carrying out these tasks, and took a look around at alternative ways of purchasing travel tickets and booking hotels. They chose local company INNTEL who are based near Kelvedon.
Inntel’s Marion Carter and Simon New came to the recent Travel Plan Club Event, and set out what they can offer. Follow the link above to their website, and give if you would like to know more give Marion a call on 07711 939026 or email her at marion.carter@inntel.co.uk.
Cutting Carbon at Sixth Form College
The Sixth Form College has been hosting meetings since 1912. Here’s a gathering of the Colchester Flat Cap and Bicycle Clips Society in 1921.
Carbon emissions are a global problem. But what’s happening locally? Club Members were shown round Sixth Form College by Keith Ellis. He’s the guy that’s busy putting in place environmental projects at the College, making sure new developments follow good environmental principles, and also greening the older parts of the College and grounds.
And what about Travel Planning? The College is in an ideal location for “anything but the (solo) car”. With its central location there are frequent buses to most of Colchester, cycle routes and parking, walking distance to main line and branch line railway stations – and limited car parking space. So, well done Keith and colleagues, for all the good work you have delivered at the College.
“Cutting Carbon Emissions From Travel” was the theme for the TPC Event at VIth Form College. Rachel Brody from Essex County Council shared infromation about their “Business Travel Decision Tree”, which clearly sets out the organisation’s policies on what form of transport must be used for different trips. Check on this link for an introduction to ECC’s “Helping You Create a Business Travel Plan” publication.
“Inntel” shared with us, the services their company can offer. They currently provide a travel and accommodation booking service for Essex CC. They could save your company money through the good deals that they have negotiated, and reducing the time spent by your staff on such matters.
“Smarter Driving” included a local car-sharing campaign which we expect to run in 2012. We will be using part of an award from DEFRA, won by the TPC in partnership with Colchester Borough Council, in connection with improving air quality. Nigel Campling of V102 ran through his ideas for a video clip which we plan will become viral, especially for the target group – the 18-30s who have the best potential for car sharing. It will be tested with that group in December, and launched in January.
On the buses, Emily described new deals with local bus operators, the new timetables and routes, and the soon-to-be-released TPC bus map. The Travel Plan Club is the only source of a detailed bus map for Colchester, showing the frequent routes operated locally. Maybe, at some stage in the future, the bus operators or the highway authority will be able to produce such a map for their customers, but at present it’s only your TPC who are prepared to run with this bus-baton. When it’s completed we will share a link with you. In the meantime here’s the best travel planner we know of.
TPC members gave updates on car sharing schemes and pool bikes, before the final item, the “Legs Eleven” walking promotion for North Colchester Business Parks. Justin Lewis of Vacuumatic outlined the project so far. We have now secured enough funding to be confident we can make it happen, so look out for it in the New Year.
And finally, the tour of the College. Thanks again Keith for hosting. Our next Meeting is on 25 January 2012, where we will be planning our work and targets for the year – can you host? Our next Event is pencilled in for April – do you have a theme you would like us to explore?
Legs Eleven gets green light
“I’ve got an idea for you.” Justin Lewis from Vacuumatic, at Severalls Business Park, got in touch with us recently. He’s keen on playing his part in reducing traffic congestion in the area where he works, and he’s also interested in people getting a bit of fresh air at lunchtime. He’s a leader of the business community in the area, although, with Justin’s modest nature, he would probably shrug his shoulders and say “well I’m just interested in what’s going on“.
“A few of us are keen on going for a walk at lunchtime, and we enjoy it so much, we thought others might like to try it – so maybe the Travel Plan Club would like to take on a walking project?” Yes indeed, the TPC is very interested, especially as we want to work with more businesses in North Colchester Business Parks (NCBP), and it ticks our “traffic congestion/ public health/ low-cost” boxes.
And so, the Legs Eleven project was born. Justin and colleagues have come up with nine routes round the business parks, and Emily and I have come up with two more walking routes taking us just off-site. Justin suggested a series of cards, to show people the route and places along the way – landmarks for wayfinding, places to eat, and snippets of interesting information. As it’s a community project we want to work with local businesses to prepare the cards, and promote the walks, so watch out for our appearance at your local networking events. (And give us an invitation to your event!)
What’s more, we’ll be there with you, stepping out. Look out for our led walks “Highwoods Ramble” and “Tesco Grab”, in spring 2012. With a media campaign, we expect Legs Eleven will capture the imagination, promoting the businesses at NCBP. We will soon be in touch with you so that your business can be part of this great local initiative. Says Andrew Budd “with Legs Eleven on its way, lunchtimes have never been such fun“.