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

MAKING CAR SHARING AND CAR CLUBS WORKCASE STUDY SUMMARIESFinancial Performance / Targets6.28 £750,000 over 5 years is committed to the Travel Plan. Car sharing is just a part of this,though a significant part, and a large part of this money is for supporting additional busservices. It is not envisaged that any of this will be spent on consultancy.6.29 The Travel Plan Co-ordinator wants to see somewhere between 3% and 5% of staff carsharing.Although this may not seem high it is a realistic target and amounts to a largenumber of people: there are 2,500 staff now and this number will double under the new PFIscheme.Research and Development6.30 The earlier Transport Impact Study was done by consultants, and it is thought that they willcome back to do an updated one. Consultants are also used for the technical aspects of allthe MEHT planning applications. However, in terms of advising what to do on theBroomfield sites site, consultants are not used, since in her previous job, elsewhere, theTravel Planning Co-ordinator had already benefited from free government-fundedconsultancy advice, so was fully aware of all the issues surrounding travel planning whenshe joined MEHT.6.31 There is an application for a large staff car park of 700 spaces, and there is a concern thatwhen this is built it will slow down the impetus for car-sharing. Therefore it is important tocontinue to make car-sharing highly visible now, so that the best parking spaces in the newcar park can be allocated for car-sharing at the beginning. In the long-term the schemecould be improved by having barrier car parking areas, although this is very expensive(around £10,000, compared to about £100 per car-share sign and £35 for painting the carsharesymbol on the parking space), and removes flexibility. MEHT has not wanted to dothis to date because of the incremental increase in the number of car parking spaces, but itcould be possible in the long-term. Making sure that people know about the car-sharingscheme, making sure the spaces go in the right places and making sure that they areenforced correctly are all important. In the early days enforcement was rather lacking,because of a lack of staff to do this. Formerly they fined people: now they don’t do this, butinstead phone people up and make them come out of whatever they are doing to move thecar.Support/Consultation6.32 There was a large and time-consuming consultation with the union, though they weren’tparticularly opposed to it. There were also long discussions about where to put car-sharespaces: MEHT could not move them to the public pay and display car parks because of acontract with a car park management company. However, in fact this was the right choice inpublic relations terms because otherwise staff car-share parking would have displacedpublic parking near the hospital entrance.6.33 It was felt that the Travel Plan Co-ordinator had handled the delicate public relations andnegotiation issues very well, and there has been steady progress at MEHT of listening toconcerns and taking them seriously.Final V1.1, Dec. 2004 - 44 -