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Action Plan on Energy for Dublin – Consultation Draft

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Workplace Travel Plans

A Travel Plan is a Transportation Demand Management tool which reduces car trips, improves access, provides and promotes sustainable travel alternatives, and makes more efficient use of existing transport resources and infrastructure. This is usually delivered through a strategic combination of “push and pull” measures, ie. policies and incentives.

Codema worked with Vipre Ltd in developing a travel plan for Dublin City Council's Civic Offices, in order to encourage employees to choose sustainable modes of transport for travelling to and from work, such as walking, cycling and car-pooling.

How Travel Plans Work

Travel Plans work by focussing on the user at the centre of trip generation and by inducing travel behaviour change within the existing transport context. The aim is to enable users to make considered choices in advance of choosing ‘mode to travel’ by removing the barriers to using sustainable modes and by filling any transport ‘gaps’ as applicable.

Travel plans will often redress an existing imbalance where the barriers (physical, informational, perceptual) to using sustainable transport are greater than those to using cars.

Travel Plans – Progressive Approach

Travel Plans are increasingly receiving international recognition as a more effective and sustainable approach to transportation planning, in contrast with the traditional “build-new and widen-existing” (or “predict-and-provide”) methodology – which is gradually becoming an idea of the past. 

This shift is now towards “less concrete and more intelligence” and the ‘soft’ measures of transport demand management are central to this.

Travel Plans for Workplaces

As workplaces constitute the main drivers of “rush hour” traffic congestion, Workplace Travel Plans can contribute to congestion-reduction and sustainable city development. The greatest strain on transportation infrastructure, on-site and in the city, occurs during the typical morning and evening “rush hour” periods, when everyone tries to travel at the same time – usually to and from the workplace or classroom.

Workplaces can act as magnets for unnecessary car trips through ill-considered policies and facilities especially in the area of parking and inadequate information provision on alternatives. Such practices constitute a significant hidden overhead for business and are usually unsustainable both for the business and the city.

Travel plans are low-cost transport interventions that have proven effectiveness, at local and wider-area levels, and their costs are generally written off by the parking overhead saved, parking revenue generated and the benefits accrued (e.g. an underground parking space can be valued at upwards of €50,000 in parts of central Dublin).

 

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