Why monitor Travel Plans?
Travel Plans are implemented to maximise accessibility to a site by wide range of different methods of travel, and in particular to manage the proportion of travellers to a development who choose to travel by car. Experience has shown that a high quality Travel Plan can reduce single occupancy car use to a development by a significant amount, depending on the site characteristics and measures used. Findings of Department for Transport’s report ‘Smarter Choices – Changing the Way We Travel’ encourages the uptake of Travel Plans as an effective method of managing demand for travel. To find out more about Travel Plans visit the Department for Transport (DfT) Travel Plan website.

Association for Commuter Transport (ACT) is a non-profit organisation, working closely with the DfT. ACT provides support to organisations seeking to reduce the number of employees and visitors driving their cars onto site, through the introduction of a Travel Plan. ACT has established this standard approach to monitoring Travel Plans in partnership with the national development database provider – TRICS®. It has been developed in response to demand from ACT members, developers and government.

The UK planning system requires Travel Plans to be produced and monitored for new developments. There is a need for more consistently-collected, comparable data about the effects of Travel Plans in order to be able to estimate with confidence the trip-reduction and/or modal redistribution impact resulting from the implementation of a Travel Plan.

This approach has been developed to set out clear and consistent guidance on a standard method for monitoring the impacts of Travel Plans across the UK. The DfT supports the development of monitoring systems and recognise their benefits. The method has been approved by the Highways Agency and endorsed by many Local Authorities as an important component of the new approach to Transport Assessments identified in the DfT’s Guidance on Transport Assessment.

Over time the use of this UK standard will ensure that more Travel Plan data becomes available. This will provide greater certainty about the effects of Travel Plans and help reduce the costs currently incurred when attempting to approve appropriate trip rates. This standard method has been designed to complement the trip generation data collection methodology already used for the trip generation database which has been the UK standard for trip rate data since 1989. More detailed advice and guidance about TRICS® and details of the research undertaken to develop this approach is available here.