By Car Is Not The Only Way - Work Travel Plans

A couple of years ago I went to a conference on sustainable transport. As I arrived I saw a guy who had come by train and bike asking a conference site manager where he could put his bike, and then having a bit of a dispute over the fact that there were no bike storage facilities. Slightly ironic I think.

Anyway, that incident did inspire me when I was writing our own location details on how to find us on our website recently.

Why assume that everyone is going to come by car? They are more likely to come by car if you assume that they will come by car. If you give them directions on how to reach you by walking, bus, bike or train or any other ways, then they are more likely to use those ways, because they might not have thought of using those ways until you suggested it.

So, for our location directions we give info on how to get to us by bus, train, bike and train, and finally, at the bottom, how to reach us by car with a mention of car-sharing if you can.

Nowadays many organisations (like us) have a work travel plan which gives ideas of how to reduce the amount of car travel by employees and visitors. There are lots of things that organisations can do to reduce car travel, and it doesn’t even have to cost them anything. Having directions on an organisation’s website which don’t make the assumption that everyone will come by car is a really good way to increase our culture of sustainable travel and even help the organisation financially by reducing demand for car parking spaces.

Some people might say what is the point in putting information about where our bike storage facilities are or how to get from the local station to our offices by bike or whether the local train line will accept bikes on its route. They might think
no one cycles anywa so the info is pointless, but you have to look at it the other way. If people see the information, they might think, oh yes, I'll cycle instead, so then more people start to cycle or walk or take the train instead of all turning up in their droves to fill up the car park.

Down on the Beach

Had a weekend at Hunstanton with the kids. It was brilliant. We had really gorgeous weather and we all had a really great time. The kids all wore their fluorescent high-viz sun hats and when they were down on the beach, and we were sitting and watching them, we could see just how effective the fluorescent orange in particular was in showing up against the blue sea. Everyone assumes that yellow is the most conspicuous and visible colour but really it depends on the background. If you think about it, anyone who works on the lifeboats tends to wear a fluorescent orange life jacket. Well, why is that? The sea is blue, unless it is really bad weather, and orange is a contrasting colour to blue. So, a sunny day on the beach, the best colour to make the children more conspicuous in the crowd is fluorescent orange.

Back To Blogging:

I’ve had to have a bit of a break from blogging as we’ve been so busy, things have just got really crazy here. We’ve moved offices twice in the last three months, so we are just finally settling down. Just as we get more space, we realise that we need even more! But hopefully that’s it for moves for the rest of this year anyway. I’ve also been working pretty flat out on our new catalogue which is a major task, but at last it is almost done and we are ready to be printing at the end of August, just in time for the new school year.

This year, we’ve decided to put a lot more educational information, facts and figures/ science bits into the catalogue to help people understand better about fluorescent and reflective clothing because we realise that it’s not simple, as a lot of people don’t understand what reflective and fluorescent mean, and when they work, so we are trying to get across the fluorescent-for-day, reflective-for-night message and helping people to understand what that means and what those things look like. Hopefully we have succeeded.