Packaging the Travel Choices: COMMUNITIES
Evolution of household travel behaviour change programs
The term 'travel awareness' began to be used in the UK in the early 1990s to describe campaigns designed to encourage people to reduce car use. These campaigns aimed to make people aware of the need to reduce car use and the ways in which this could be achieved.
A key component of these early initiatives was usually an advertising campaign assisted by a set of brochures, posters, bumper stickers and logos to highlight the problems of congestion and pollution and to point out the alternatives (e.g. car sharing or pooling, use of public transport, trip chaining, and so on). As these campaigns developed, they often included more targeted efforts such as 'walk to school' weeks or 'ride to work' campaigns and facilitated discussions with community groups to get them to understand the issues more thoroughly than can be done with an advertising campaign. The two main examples initiated by local authorities in the UK are TravelWise, begun in Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire County Council, 1993), and HeadStart, (Hampshire County Council, 1993).
The current day travel behaviour change programs differ from these initial travel awareness campaigns because of a desire to obtain greater engagement with the participants. This greater engagement or interaction is believed to provide a stronger motivation for travel behaviour change. The term now being used in the UK for these enhanced programs is 'Personalised Journey Planning Techniques'.
Separate efforts in Australia and Germany lead to the development of two distinct travel behaviour change tools: Travel Blending® and Individualised Marketing, known as IndiMark®. These two programs now form the basis for most of the operational travel behaviour change programs in Australia.
Travelwise
The major thrust of TravelWise has tended to be publicity with an emphasis on advertising on the outside of buses, leaflets and radio advertising. TravelWise is however, more than a publicity campaign because it has also been promoted through 'branding' transport strategies and public transport timetables with a TravelWise logo. In addition to the publicity campaign and branding of documents, particular events such as 'walk to school weeks', 'bike to work days' etc. have been organised under the banner of TravelWise.
HeadStart
HeadStart was launched by the Hampshire County Council shortly after Hertfordshire introduced TravelWise. However, Hampshire describes its approach as being a 'bottom up' approach in contrast to the TravelWise 'top down' approach. The distinction is that TravelWise is aimed at everyone; tying to influence them to a greater or lesser extent by recognition of a name, logo and concept via a mass media campaign. In contrast, HeadStart focuses on taking the message to community groups and trying to significantly affect the ways these groups think about transport (Steer Davies Gleave, 1996).
The main thrust of the HeadStart campaign is the conduct of workshops with community groups. Target groups include parish councils, parent and toddler groups, fitness groups etc. In addition business conferences have been held with the aim of getting commitments to the development of commuter plans and on another front a 'Safe Routes to Schools' campaign was developed.
Personalised Journey Planning Techniques
Personalised journey planning techniques have been defined in the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR, 2002) as:
'a set of techniques or approaches that provide individualised analysis or advice to people based on their journey making characteristics. It therefore does not include marketing campaigns such as awareness raising, general exhortations to use particular modes of travel, or the general provision of information about particular forms of transport.'
Development of Travel Blending®
A key Australian project provided an opportunity to develop a new generation of travel behaviour change tool which relied on greater engagement with the program participants. The Travel Blending Program was initially developed for the NRMA, Australia's largest motoring membership organisation, by Monash University and Steer Davies Gleave (Rose and Ampt, 1997).
The NRMA funded a major public initiative called 'Clean Air 2000' which aimed to reduce pollution caused by car travel in Sydney prior to the year 2000 Olympics. Clean Air 2000 was a twofold initiative (Gollner, 1996). It focused on encouraging behavioural change in the way people used their cars, and progressing solutions to vehicle induced air pollution and increasing traffic congestion. The Travel Blending Program was developed to primarily focus on the first of those aims, specifically by reducing car use.
The Travel Blending® approach was designed to incorporate two important components that most of the earlier travel awareness initiatives lacked. First an objective and a method to ensure that there are behaviour changes as well as awareness and attitude changes (i.e. people actually use the car less); and second an in-built monitoring system, to measure whether and what type of changes are actually occurring.
After the pilot study had been completed in Sydney, the Department of Transport in South Australia (TransportSA) engaged Steer Davies Gleave (SDG) to undertake a trial in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. As the program delivery methods were further refined, other applications of Travel Blending® were undertaken in Leeds, New Jersey (USA) and Chile. In South Australia, Travel Blending® was also central to a community development program known as Living Neighbourhoods®. Travel Blending® continues to play a key role in TravelSmart programs in South Australia and Victoria.
Development of Individualised Marketing
In parallel with the work being undertaken in Australia to develop Travel Blending®, SocialData (a German consultancy firm) was pioneering the direct marketing of public transport. That work has seen the development of a program for direct marketing of travel behaviour change known as IndiMark® (short for Individualised Marketing). While IndiMark® originally focused on marketing of public transport it has now evolved to encourage use of walking and cycling. IndiMark® has seen application in a number of cities in Europe and is the cornerstone of a major travel behaviour change program run in Perth, Western Australia under the banner of TravelSmart.