Following the Government's requirement for all Government Departments and Agencies to set up workplace travel plans (known then as Green Travel Plans) we were contacted by The Highways Agency (HA) to advise and help them to create a nationwide HA travel plan.

The HA had a total of eleven offices around the country, some of which were city based (such as London, Manchester and Birmingham) and some in medium sized towns (such as Dorking and Bedford). Our brief was to design a staff travel plan that could be used, and would be effective, at any HA office across the country.

After carefully reviewing the data which HA had already collected we decided to create a menu driven travel plan (using the wartime slogan 'Is Your Journey Really Necessary?' that could be used by any HA co-ordinator – regardless of the location of the actual office in question.

This new menu driven approach – dubbed 'The Green Commuter Toolkit' – was the first such system to be developed in the UK and resulted in the HA receiving a letter of congratulation from the Department of Transport and the Regions (DETR) jointly signed by Lord Whitty and Glenda Jackson, the then Minister of Transport.

Features of the plan included:

• Improving meeting management to avoid unnecessary journeys and set more rigorous objectives
• Widening the use of video and audio conferencing
• Staff home/teleworking initiatives and the development of 'drop in' telecentres
• Revised out of peak time staff travel arrangements and working time flexibility
• Introducing car sharing, priority based on-site parking, shuttle buses and personalised travel advice
• Better linking to existing public transport, multi-modal and cheaper ticketing
• Encouragement of walking and cycling initiatives

Results:
With the roll out of the 'Green Commuter Toolkit' the HA became the flagship workplace travel plan within the public sector. The concept has now been copied and is being widely utilised by a number of employers and is also currently being used as the basis for EU wide, pan-employer, collaborative traffic congestion reduction activities as part of the Optimum2 project - for more information visit www.optimum2.org.