Benefits of a Work Place Travel Plan
Benefits of a Work Place Travel Plan
Experience shows that the benefits accruing from a travel plan can be extensive. Which benefits are most important to your company will depend on local circumstances and will partly determine the emphasis of your travel plan. Your organisation, its staff, its customers and your wider local community all stand to gain. For your company a travel plan can:- solve problems caused by demand for parking
- help meet shareholder demand for corporate social responsibility improvements including environmental targets such as the ISO14001 standard or global warming emissions targets
- enable a planning application for a new site or for new accommodation on the current site
- save money on the cost of providing and maintaining parking spaces
- release land under car parks for more productive use
- enable higher occupancy of existing buildings
- cut mileage claims and other business travel costs
- reduce staff downtime spent travelling on business
- reduce the costs of running a fleet
- solve problems caused by traffic congestion on and around your site;
- enable more customers to access your site
- provide a better experience for customers travelling to your site
- improve your image to both customers and neighbours
- ease delays to deliveries and movements of goods off-site
- improve staff health and absenteeism
- assist with recruitment and retention by making staff journeys to work easier and cheaper
- improve staff punctuality by reducing congestion delays and supporting more reliable means of transport.
Ending parking chaos
As Mark Taylor arrived at Bentley's site in Crewe on his first day as travel plan coordinator he was immediately confronted with the problems he had to solve: cars parked all over the place, some illegally, obstructing the essential movements of lorries carrying goods to and from the factory, and spilling over into surrounding residential streets. Eighteen months on, the workforce has grown from 3200 to 4500 but the travel plan has relieved the pressure. "There are 100 empty spaces in the car park today,” says Mark, “and we've done it without any expansion in car park capacity."
For your staff a travel plan can:
- improve equal opportunities by shifting from travel perks based on seniority to incentives for sustainable travel available to all staff, including those without access to a car
- assure parking for those with most need to access a vehicle
- help provide less stressful options for travel to work
- give opportunities to build healthy exercise into daily life
- reduce journey-times to work
- reduce the cost of travel to work, or avert the need to buy a car.
- make local streets less dangerous, less noisy and less polluted
- enhance public transport
- improve the environment and the routes available for cycling and walking
- help create a place which is better to live in, work in and visit and which attracts investment
