Surface transport is the largest contributor to UK greenhouse gas emissions and is growing.
Creating robust strategies for reversing this trend is critical and whilst the transfer to electrified vehicles is an important element, interventions leading to a reduction in private vehicle trips and vehicle miles driven are essential.
Mobilityways is a leader in accelerating place-based advancements in sustainable travel and realising benefits that far exceed tackling only climate change and net zero targets.
Through tech-enabled tools, Mobilityways helps organisations define current staff travel habits, surface potential for how staff might travel, personalise options for encouraging adoption of more sustainable modes and ongoing support with targeted interventions and evidencing resulting behaviour change.
Employee commuting is a defined Scope 3 carbon category. A local authority with carbon reduction ambitions must consider the impact of their employee’s travel to / from their place of work. Getting data-driven is essential to making informed decisions and delivering impact.
Across all places there is an imperative to deliver economic growth and the case for sustainable transport raising productivity and delivering prosperity is clear.
With targeted business engagement being prioritised as a means for shaping better places, and as part of this narrative advancing sustainable travel, so councils must take steps to effect change within their own organisations.
Councils better understanding their own travel habits and identifying opportunities to get more people to use their own car less will have greater standing when seeking to influence others to follow suit.
As an employer the case for acting extends to helping its workforce with cost of living, supporting physical / mental health and wellbeing, futureproofing resourcing strategy alongside advancing carbon reporting, and delivering more robust carbon reduction plans.
Advancing shared transport must be a key element of Regional and Local Transport Plans and needn’t be anti-car. It’s about education, encouragement and most likely targeted use of incentives to get more people to rethink and right-size their car use, to consider ways in which they might use their own car less.
Even where the private car remains the only realistic option there is likely to be sharing opportunities for some trips, particularly regular trips such as the commute.
Under a narrative of creating sustainable commuting legacies Mobilityways is currently delivering a major programme of works for a combined authority in England to surface and personalise sustainable commuting choices with the scope encompassing all public sector i.e. councils, universities, and the NHS.
Additionally, Mobilityways partners with several local authorities in encouraging carpooling through Liftshare, the UK’s largest carpooling platform which Mobilityways has operated for 25 years.
Carpooling saves carbon and cash. There is financial incentive to change one’s travel habits as on average a commuter might save £1,000 annually from reduced fuel bills, from reduced wear and tear e.g. tyres and consumables, and less costly servicing, maintenance and repair.
Services from our ‘measure, reduce, report’ framework are available to procure individually or in combination and since no two local authorities are the same in size and shape so neither is our pricing a one-size fits all.
Services needn’t be procured for all parts of an organisation – it is possible to procure for specific locations based on need.
