Sustainable travel demonstration town

The UK government's Department for Transport set up the sustainable travel demonstration towns project in 2004 to enable three towns the chance to look at what a sustained programme of smarter choices measures can achieve.

The three demonstration towns are sharing £10million of Department for Transport funding over the five years of the project 2004/05-2008/9.

Interim achievements
Research from the first three years of the sustainable travel towns project

Darlington
has seen a 14% increase in public transport trips, a 29% increase in walking trips, and a 79% increase in cycling trips. Car trips were down 11%

Peterborough
increased public transport trips by 13%, walking trips by 21%, and cycling trips by 25%. Car trips were down 13%

Worcester
Worcester's public transport trips were up 22%, walking trips were up 17% and cycling trips were up 36%. Car trips were down 12%

Quotes
"These results show that simple things like giving people information about public transport, starting car share schemes and encouraging people to walk and cycle more can have startling results.

"People in these areas are already starting to swap their cars for walking, cycling and public transport. This can only be a good thing for reducing local congestion and pollution, improving people's health and helping to tackle climate change. I hope that this trend will continue, and that more and more local authorities will learn from these towns example." Transport Minister Gillian Merron at the Sustainable Travel Towns Conference in Worcester Cathedral at 2pm, Wednesday 23 May 2007.

The towns used a variety of measures to achieve the results, including a technique called 'Individualised Travel Marketing'. This involved a team of travel advisors visiting households offering travel information tailored to that household, and collecting comments from residents about how their experience of local travel could be improved.

Related topics

 * Reduced dependence on cars UK
 * Sustainable travel