Making Car Sharing and Car Clubs Work - Case ... - The Civil Service

MAKING CAR SHARING AND CAR CLUBS WORKCASE STUDY SUMMARIES5 HEATHROW AIRPORTGeneral Background5.1 By 2000, travel planning initiatives were already underway at Heathrow Airport, mainlyconcentrated on improving and increasing bus services, with some success in attractingmore passengers on board. In September 2000, it was decided to spend more effort on carsharing. The main motivation was to reduce the number of staff travelling to work by car,driver alone, in order to manage predicted car parking pressure. But the catalyst was the fuelshortage that Autumn; a car share matching database received 20,000 visits during thecrisis. At the peak, car use declined by one third, but absenteeism was reported as no higherthan usual. Focus Groups carried out with staff in October 2002 indicated 47% acceptanceof the principle of car sharing. Airport Carshare was formally launched on 23 April 2001.5.2 In order to get permission to build the new Heathrow terminal (T5),a planning condition wasaccepted that placed a cap on the amount of car parking, set at 42,000 parking spacesalthough the forecast demand was for 45,000 spaces. In order to meet passengerrequirements and to comply with the ‘spirit’ of the cap which proposed a reduction inemployee car parking as opposed to passenger car parking, it is expected the 3,000difference will have to be dealt with by reducing the number of cars driven to the airport bypeople who work there. BAA Heathrow is acutely aware of the sensitivity of this issue andthe necessity to keep Heathrow as an attractive centre of employment.5.3 The travel plan has recently been updated and refocused (see Changing Direction:Heathrow’s Travel Plan 2004 – 07). It is strongly oriented towards encouraging airportbusinesses to adopt the travel plan. BAA Heathrow can only do so much in isolation. Toachieve the level of modal shift required by the airport all businesses at Heathrow will haveto take some degree of responsibility for influencing the travel patterns of their employees.Consequently, the new travel plan focuses on the business case for the travel plan andurges all companies and employers at Heathrow to work together “for sustained businessgrowth”.Operating Structure5.4 Airport Carshare is currently delivered on a closed internet-based system, using Intrinsicasoftware, which is available to all 70,000 employees working at Heathrow. An administratoris required to complete the matches. Although the original software was ‘off the shelf’, it hassubsequently been tailored to meet BAA’s requirements. There has been further investmentin the Intrinsica software package: GIS mapping was introduced in the first half of 2004. Itwas felt by the team that the process of creating a match is quite labour intensive. It wasestimated that the process takes, on average, about an hour from meeting someone toregistering them and finding a match on the database.5.5 Delivery of the Travel Plan, and other transport planning services, is undertaken by theChanging Direction Team. This is lead by Heather McInroy, Head of Research and TravelManagement, whose Marketing and Communications Manager, Freda Jesudason, managesthe work of the Airport Commuter team. The latter consists of one Airport CommuterFinal V1.1, Dec. 2004 - 30 -