Free parking for car sharers at Colchester Station
Do you travel by train for business meetings?
Why not travel with colleagues and make the most of the work time you have on the train that you would lose if you travelled by car?
Plus if you car share to the station you can ENJOY UP TO 8 HOURS FREE PARKING at Colchester Station.
The LoveurcarColchester car share bays are located on the south side of the station and anybody car sharing to the station for business or personal use can use them free of charge. You need a Loveurcar car share permit which you can also get for free by applying online.
The Loveurcar car share permit can also be used in a number of car parks in town including St Mary’s, Vineyard Street, Britannia and St Johns where the car share bays are located in preferential locations. (Please note normal car park charges still apply in the town centre car parks)
Car sharers can save money on fuel and car park charges by taking it in turns to give lifts or by reimbursing their car share drivers with a contribution towards fuel and parking costs.
There are added community benefits if more people car share. Car sharing contributes to reducing the number of cars on the roads, improvements in air quality through fewer cars, with the knock on effect of reducing traffic congestion.
If you workplace doesn’t already have a car share matching scheme, then suggest they set one up. You may be surprised to find how many colleagues live close to each other and could potentially car share some of the days of the week. You can find out more about car sharing including local online car share matching schemes below.
Find out more about car sharing here.
Apply for a FREE LUCC permit here
Planned engineering work over Xmas
As the festive season approaches, Abellio Greater Anglia have shared a summary of the planned engineering works across the Abellio Greater Anglia network over the Christmas and New Year period.
The details are in the poster below which you can either send to colleagues or download and put up in your communal areas.
7726-AGA Xmas New year Services DR Poster
Train fares often go up in January, so this is a good opportunity to remind your colleagues that if they were thinking about trying the train, now is the time to buy a ticket!
They can get 10% off a season ticket of one month or more as part of their CTPC membership, and if you are accredited to ECC’s Business Travel Plan scheme then they can get 15% off an annual season ticket.
They can apply to join the CTPC Abellio Greater Anglia scheme by logging into the CTPC member area HERE
If you can’t remember the log in details, please contact Emily.harrup@colchester.gov.uk or Pam.nelson@colchester.gov.uk
Rail Strike Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 May
Advice from Abellio regarding the possible rail strike on Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 May…
Industrial action has been called by members of the RMT and TSSA trades unions
working for the national rail infrastructure operator Network Rail, across the entire
UK rail network, for Monday/Tuesday 25/26 May. If the strike goes ahead the impact
on train services will be extremely severe. For Abellio Greater Anglia routes it will be
as follows :
On Monday 25 May, there will be no services at all after mid-day.
On Tuesday 26 May, there will be no services at all, except for an extremely limited,
skeleton service between London and Norwich, London and Colchester, London and
Shenfield and London and Stansted Airport in the middle of the day (plans for which
are currently being developed). These services will run infrequently with limited
capacity and only serve selected stations.
On Wednesday 27 May, services will start operating on all routes only from 06.00
onwards, but there will be service disruption and alterations as we work to restore
the full normal service.
Our advice to customers is do not travel by train on Monday/Tuesday 25/26
May.
We advise you to make other travel arrangements. Please also note that the
action will affect the entire national rail network and therefore affect plans for
journeys on other routes.
We apologise for the major inconvenience caused to your travel plans.
More information is available at www.abelliogreateranglia.co.uk and
www.nationalrail.co.uk/industrial action
Follow @greateranglia for up-to-date details of our services and @nationalrailenq for
details of services across the wider UK rail network
Campaign for Better Transport initiative
Campaign for Better Transport are looking for train users who would like to help them campaign against rising rail fares. You don’t have to go out protesting in the street- it’s just a matter of having a couple of photos taken near Chelmsford Train Station and answering some questions about how rising fares affect you.
The event will take place on Saturday 25th January around 10:30am. If this sounds like something you would like to get involved with, please get in contact with Jess Fitch: jess.fitch@bettertransport.org.uk
Full set of spanners at CTPC workshop!
Not many schools can boast that cycling is an integral part of their curriculum. The Gilberd School teaches mountain biking and Bikeability within timetabled lessons, holds bike races as part of sports day, and has a weekly bike club. And the headliner is an impressive bike maintenance workshop which is run as a small business and where students can learn bike maintenance as part of a qualification. With bikes that don’t work, being one of the main reasons kids don’t cycle to school, The Gilberd’s bike maintenance workshop is about to go mobile and help out at other schools. Thanks to Roger Springett for hosting January’s CTPC event, and for the tour afterwards which included the bike workshop and facilities plus the impressive shiny new trailer which will soon be transformed into a mobile workshop.
So back to club news:
CTPC Governance: With the winding-down of Colchester2020, Jeremy Lucas (ECC) and Paul Wilkinson (CBC) talked about future governance of the club and member involvement in determining the direction the club goes in and priorities. Emily and Andrew have always responded and evolved to the needs of the TPC members and are happy to continue doing this. Paul will be organising a workshop for members to discuss governance issues/priorities etc. All agreed that any opportunity to bid for funding should be taken advantage of to help ongoing funding of the CTPC and new projects.
Summer Cycling Promotions: Get your costed ideas for promotions within your workplace into Andrew and Emily by the beginning of February. Funding may be available from ECC for training, events, Dr Bike etc and any new ideas you have. We all liked the Cycle Challenge as a cross CTPC promotion but the cost is an issue, could we develop our own online logging system? One for Andrew and Emily to explore…..
STEPS – Active Travel: Legs Eleven walking project is still happening, and is expected to be launched in the spring. A decision on ERDF funding is imminent, which will put more funding into this and other NCBP projects.
2012 Events: We are happy to support you in any events where you are promoting sustainable transport. One highlight in this year’s calender is the ACTTravelwise’s spring conference which is being hosted by Charlotte at UofE and has an exciting line up showcasing Transport in the 21st Century. There is a pre-conference event on the 29th March with the main conference on the 30th. Use the link above to see the full programme and to book your place.
Drive Colchester: £5000 is available to CTPC members to promote car sharing and smarter driving in 2012! A second grant from DEFR has given us this great opportunity for some more bespoke promotions over and above the central project we are currently working on. So please let us have your ideas…. whether it be advanced driving lessons, an on site mechanic, car share matching events, Love Your Car promotions, bespoke publicity material, dedicated car share bays or something else…
The central campaign will run over a couple of months starting around mid February, with a short funky film on carsharing and another on smarter driving. Radio (Heart, Dream, Uni, Garrison, Hospital?- are there others we can approach??) and billboard campaigns will promote the films and Drive Colchester website, plus publicity in TPC member organisations… watch this space for more info…
Travel Plan Accreditation scheme: Many of our members have achieved a silver and want to go for gold. Survey response rates are the main barrier and Rachel gave us ideas for maximising response rates by offering attractive inventives, offering a paper version, timing the survey to coincide with a change in parking arrangements etc.
Survey time is here again: We do a full survey across all members every two years, usually in May to measure our progress. Survey results have been good with a year on year 3% decrease in people driving to work and big increases in people mixing their modes. The challenge this year is to get the high response rate to help our members hit gold, as well as get some robust stats to measure our progress by. So we will be talking to members over the next few months on how best to tackle this for their organisation and noted that if we can put the month long survey back or forward a week it will help out the Uni as May clashes with exam time.
Abellio and public transport: Good news that Abellio want to focus on customer service in their 2 year franchise, with their eye keenly set on achieving the franchise in the longer term. This means new dedicated customer service desks at key stations (including Colchester) interest in integrated transport, more user-friendly timetables, marketing of under capacity trains (apparently there are very few that are overcrowded) We have had positive sounds about continuing our discount and hopefully they will be keen to work on some joint marketing of train travel with us. (Conversation today with our current contact at NXEA, Tanya, indicates business as usual from 5th Feb when Abellio take over – she is 99% certain existing discounts will continue.
CTPC public transport promotional material is all set to go, but ticket stock is still awaited from Network Colchester. Tony Mears has gone (Emily met new Regional General Manager Martin Evans after our meeting, hopefully the ticket stock will be appearing very soon so we can get on with our promotions).
ACTTravelwise: The CTPC pays for membership of ACTTravelwise , who represent and lobbies for sustainable travel and travel planning nationally. Full CTPC members have access via their own log in. It is a good resource for case studies, events, jobs and includes a forum for posting questions. Emily will sort out current log ins and passwords. Another good free resource to sign up to is Ways2Work funded by DfT and focused more on the private sector, with lots of good case studies, advice and best practice.
Helena encouraged us all to sign up for a Free Business in the Community & ACE conference masterclass promoting health in the workplace, 8th February 09:30 – 13:30, lunch included, at the Holiday Inn in Eight Ash Green.
Thanks, and if you want to know more please get in touch.
Three month offer – 25% discount on Plusbus
If you use the train and then a bus for onward travel once you reach Colchester, then take advantage of a three month deal offering 25% off a Plus Bus ticket.
Plusbus offers an add on bus ticket to your rail ticket allowing unlimited travel on any Network Colchester, First or Hedingham bus within the Colchester Urban area (equates to Colchester Inner Zone and includes University, CHUFT and Colchester Zoo).
The discounted Plusbus monthly ticket is avilable from Colchester station ticket office for £48 between6 November 2011 and 31 January 2012. . The discount, offers a saving of over 70p per day compared to a typical day return bus ticket.
The Plusbus discount, plus all the other station improvements are part of the Station Travel Plan project, a partnership including CBC, ECC, NEEA and the bus operators, working together to encourage more sustainable travel to the station.
Improvements for train users also using the bus, include changes to bus timetables and facilities for passengers waiting for buses at the station. Buses are now better coordinated with trains, and new stops and bus timetable information is now installed on the station forecourt.
Find out more about getting the bus to or from the station Getting the bus to the station leaflet
Watch out for our own public transport discounts promotion for TPC members! It is imminent…..!
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.