Every morning in term time, Stan Ryan pulls on a bright yellow jacket and sets out with his child to join the ‘walking bus’ to St Sebastian’s school in Liverpool. He is part of a growing body of parents who are fed up with all the traffic generated by the school run and who have decided to do something about it. St Sebastian’s has cut the number of children being driven to school by a third. Stan Ryan says “Hail, rain or snow, we’ve not once abandoned the walking bus. The children get to meet their friends and a lot of the parents are really up for it. It’s really having an impact on the cars - they are backing off.” A walking bus is a fixed walking route to school, with special ‘walking bus stops’ to pick up children along the way. Each walking bus has a volunteer parent to act as ‘driver’ and another to be the ‘conductor’. At St Sebastian’s there are now three walking bus routes, converging on the school from North, West and East. This Merseyside TravelWise initiative is strongly supported by Merseytravel and the local council, who have just agreed funding for a 20mph zone and speed bumps around the school.

St Sebastian’s is just one small success story, but it is a pointer to the way so-called ‘soft’ travel behaviour measures can help cut traffic. There is no magic solution to traffic growth, but part of the answer lies in getting people to think about their transport choices, rather than reaching for the car keys out of habit. Away from the limelight, quiet experiments in the UK and abroad have been doing just this for the last five years and have had some startling results.

These quiet experiments involve both ‘soft’ and ‘small-scale’ transport solutions. ‘Soft’ solutions change people’s travel patterns and behaviours - it’s all about access, variety and choice. ‘Smallscale’ solutions include cycle paths, door-to-door taxi-buses, car clubs and bus improvements. Unlike new roads or railways which involve massive engineering and construction sites, small scale projects can be diffused across an entire region.

This article looks at how different soft and small-scale transport solutions can help cut traffic. Workplace and school travel plans, public transport marketing, flexible taxi-buses, car clubs and cycle promotion all have a part to play. These measures are more about the carrot than the stick. They do not replace the need for some ‘stick’ measures like parking control, congestion charging and other road pricing schemes. In the transport jargon, they make people’s reaction to higher charges more ‘elastic’. For politicians, this is great news, because it means more gain for less pain.

There is no magic solution to traffic growth, but part of the answer lies in getting people to think about their transport choices, rather than reaching for the car keys out of habit There is more good news. Soft and small-scale transport solutions are excellent value for money. Workplace travel plans, for example, typically cost £2 - £4 per employee and car clubs can become self-financing. The government recognises the value of these cost-effective measures and wants to work with regional and local politicians to scale up their delivery. But the key to the success of both soft and small-scale travel solutions is effective marketing and communication.

Cutting car trips to work

Sitting in bumper to bumper traffic is hardly a great way to start the day. Millions of people do it because there does not seem to be any alternative, but few could claim to enjoy the morning commute or the stressful return home in the evening. There are alternatives for some of those journeys and, with the right facilities in place many car commuters can switch to public transport, or even to walk or cycle if they live close to work.

Some surprising things are beginning to happen. In Manchester, the Highways Agency has cut the number of employees driving to work on their own from 70 in 1998 to about 30 this year. Pete Evans, the Highways Agency’s national travel co-ordinator, says their success is the result of a mix of carrots and sticks. People who travel to work by train or bus get a 10% discount on their season ticket and an interest-free loan. To help cyclists, the Agency has installed showers and lockers. Some staff work from home.More