Improving School Travel Plan effectiveness through enhanced diagnostic tools

Issues around the journey to school are often in the news, and so are never far removed from the public and political consciousness. School Travel Plans (STPs) have been proven to reduce car use and their impacts around the world but are not aswidespread as they might be because of a perceived lack of knowledge about the potential outcomes of less common packages of measures and the associated lack of skills in delivering those solutions in specific contexts.

Accordingly, this study develops and then applies a low-cost and risk-reducing approach which first determines existing travel behaviour within a school context, and then measures the responses of parents to a range of potential solutions (a proxy for their likely effectiveness) before they are adopted. It draws on results from an on-site traffic survey, an online survey of 746 parents and employees and an online stated preference survey of 101 parents from four independent schools in Loughborough, England.

The study finds that parents are more influenced by the price of alternatives than the price of car (though this is still important), whilst measures that are relatively low-cost, uncontroversial and easy to implement (i.e. bus app, supervised walking and lockers) can also potentially be effective and should therefore be important components of any future STP package. It is also clear that the approach used could be transferable to other similar pre-project evaluation exercises, subject to minor tweaks to enable context-specific issues to be incorporated.