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

MAKING CAR SHARING AND CAR CLUBS WORKCASE STUDY SUMMARIESOperation of the MEHT group is done by the Travel Plan Co-ordinator and Travelshare-Essex’s co-ordinator. MEHT’s membership of Travelshare-Essex costs £1,000 per year.6.10 Provision of minimal personal information was an important factor in designing theTravelshare-Essex scheme. Names, postcodes and some personal preferences were theonly things saved on the system. Teresa Prosser will show interested staff about how to usethe system in practise, and staff are often surprised about how little personal information isrequired, though staff can input their journey pattern into the Travelshare-Essex website.6.11 Car-share permits are needed for the individual passenger, so a car-share car parked in acar-share parking bay will display a minimum of two permits. All staff pay for car parking, butthis is currently a nominal fee, and less than what visitors pay.6.12 Car sharing across functional and departmental boundaries / barriers does occur to a certainextent. In administrative and medical areas, and where shift patterns allow, people do crossover these boundaries. Outside these areas (e.g. domestics and porters) people tend not toshare across boundaries. However, this will also be due to shift patterns and to the fact thatthese people generally have less interest in looking at the scheme on the internet. They findout about the scheme by word of mouth, and then, with their car-share partner, they tend toapproach the Travel Plan Co-ordinator and get permits.6.13 Broomfield has, in general, no reason to open the scheme up to non-employees but it doesallow visiting social workers employed by Essex County Council, which is also a member ofTravelshare-Essex, to apply for a permit if they car-share.Impact and Effectiveness6.14 Of the 130 registered members of the Broomfield scheme, 115 members have ‘found’matches and have been issued with permits. MEHT believes that around 50% of these havestarted to car share since the introduction of the scheme. About 85 of these members usethe scheme regularly. The current breakdown of the Broomfield car-sharing membership is77:23 Female to Male, but a breakdown by age is not available.6.15 The ‘before’ travel survey found that over 78% of trips to and from work were made by car,(71% being single-occupancy and 7% car-sharing), whilst cycling accounted for 1.7%,walking for 3.3% and bus a little over 10%. The remaining 6.23% consisted of staffmembers being dropped off by partners or friends, and those coming by motorcycle. Thecurrent mode split of trips is as yet unknown. MEHT have not looked into how much moneypeople save through car-sharing, but they do know that the majority of their sharers aregroups of three rather than of just two. However, because of shift patterns these groups ofthree may only ever travel in groups of two at a time. There is at least one group of four.Successes / Failures6.16 MEHT had to appoint a Travel Plan Co-ordinator as part of the Planning Agreement for theexpansion of Broomfield Hospital, but although they were not required to appoint one untillater, they decided to do this early, from summer 2003. The person appointed to the TravelPlan Co-ordinator post, Teresa Prosser, is a highly visible and proactive advocate of theFinal V1.1, Dec. 2004 - 41 -