Archived decisions

Contact: Jon Foley, ext 7559 email: [email protected]

1. Summary

1.1 This report provides a progress update on the workplace, school and personalised travel planning programmes for the Winchester area. It also includes an update on the Safer Routes to School programme for schemes within the Winchester area.

2. Workplace Travel Plan Programme

2.1 There are currently 27 organisations developing a travel plan, compared to 19 reported at the last meeting of this Panel in October 2004. Individual organisations are not identified for reasons of confidentiality - for example some travel plans are related to planning applications or a change in location that is not yet public knowledge.

2.2 The current status of travel plans in the Winchester area is shown in the table below. An indication of the number of employees covered by the plans has also been given.

* this is an approximation. Not all employee data is complete yet.

Travel Plan Partnership Fund

2.3 The organisations which have been awarded Partnership funding together with a summary of their progress are listed below. Monitoring will be undertaken to establish the success of the projects over the coming months:

(i) Royal Hampshire County Hospital: £5,000 for additional cycle parking. There was been a delay in securing the match funding at the Trust. This has now been secured and work will commence shortly.

(ii) University College, Winchester: £3,700 for additional cycle parking. Facilities are being developed.

(iii) Peter Symonds College: £5,000 for cycle parking and shower facilities. Cycle parking is complete. Renovation of existing facilities awaited.

2.4 The Travel Plan Adviser is currently working to update records by liaising more closely with officers in the district to provide a more complete picture of travel plan activity.

3. School Travel Plan Programme

3.1 The School Travel Planning Team continues to work with schools to develop School Travel Plans. To date over 330 schools throughout Hampshire have developed or are in the process of developing plans compared with just over 200 as at October 2004.

3.2 Schools with travel plans approved by the School Travel Planning Team are eligible for funding through the Safer Routes to School programme, as well as a one-off capital grant from the Department for Education and Skills. The latter is only available to state schools.

3.3 The School Travel Planning Team distributed an information leaflet to all schools within Hampshire in November 2004. This leaflet was intended to raise awareness of School Travel Plans and has resulted in a number of new contacts from schools interested in developing a travel plan.

3.4 The team works closely with an officer at the City Council and is now engaged with 29 of the 47 schools in the Winchester area compared with 20 schools as at October 2004. A summary of the current status of all School Travel Plans in the Winchester area is shown as a table below. More detail is shown in the appendix.

4. Safer Routes to School Programme

4.1 The Safer Routes to School programme links very closely with the development of the School Travel Plan programme. One of the objectives of a School Travel Plan is to encourage as many children as possible to be active and independent by walking, cycling or using public transport to get to and from school on a regular basis. This could be through a combination of physical and other measures. If physical works are identified within the approved School Travel Plan then the school can bid for funding from the Safer Routes to Schools programme.

4.2 On 21 January 2005 the Executive Member for Environment agreed an indicative allocation of £1.5 million for a county-wide programme of Safer Routes to School schemes from the 2005/06 Capital Programme.

4.3 When a proposal for highway improvements is received from a school with a completed School Travel Plan the feasibility is assessed to determine the scale, implications, costs and benefits. As more proposals come forward, this allows the priorities to be determined for inclusion in the programme. The current status of potential and actual schemes is shown in the appendix.

5. Personalised Travel Planning

5.1 One of the County Council's Public Service Agreement targets is to increase bus passenger numbers. A key part of the County Council's plan to meet this target is a personalised travel planning project called `InfoMotion'. Personalised travel planning is a process whereby individuals are provided with tailored public transport timetable information and free trial travel vouchers for use on local public transport.

5.2 The initiative started in September 2003 and has recently ended. The project was divided into four waves covering Hampshire's busiest bus routes. The second wave, which took place between May and July 2004, included the marketing of local buses to households in the Winchester area.

5.3 A total of 10,000 households in the Winchester area were contacted and asked if they wished to participate in the project. A total of approximately 3,500 households responded of which 1,800 were interested in receiving the marketing materials available through the project. The impact of the provision of this information on local bus patronage is currently being assessed and will be reported to the next meeting of the Panel. For information, the results from the first wave of this project (in the Gosport-Fareham area) show that a 6% increase in patronage was secured as a result of the InfoMotion project.

Recommendation

That Members note the progress made with the delivery of the workplace, school and personalised travel planning and safer routes to school programmes in the Winchester area.

9186/JF