At the recent Mobility Camp, I had the pleasure of leading the ‘Offload’ Stream, where transport professionals got the chance to share their woes. Here are some of the notes from that Stream and of the other streams. These can also be found on the Mobility Camp website.
Offloading
During the Offload stream (led by James Gleave, Omar Ajaz and Catriona Swanson) participants got the chance to share the challenges that most frustrate them when it comes to back sustainable transport, before identifying quick ‘15% solutions’ that they could put into action now to overcome this challenge. They worked together in groups to identify 3 common challenges:
How do we redefine measures of success to better support sustainable transport?
How can we make sustainable travel the natural first choice? and 3) How can we reduce mobility poverty in rural areas sustainably and progressively?
The ideas that the group came up with ranged from small things to things that were more ambitious. These ideas included:
Walking or cycling to work with a colleague, and encouraging them to do so
Implement a Workplace Parking Levy in cities to fund new bus services in rural areas
Set up a community e-bike scheme in a rural area, with a central location
Expand the eligibility for free bus passes
Review the goals of National Highways to understand what metrics might be persuasive
Declare my car as off-road the next time I go to tax it
Each participant then made a commitment to delivering that action when they got back to work.
Influencing
How often have we, as transport professionals, found our carefully thought-out plans met with a wall of flat rejection? Too often it would seem. These are often intractable problems with vested interests wielding disproportionate power.
‘What can we do about it?’ is the question the Influence Stream set out to explore.
In Session 1, we started by identifying example objections and setting them in context – Low Traffic Neighbourhoods were a common example, but wider pavements, Residents’ Parking Zones, and bus-only routes also featured.
In Session 2, we mapped the stakeholders in these schemes in a Power/Interest matrix to see who is motivated to engage (positively or negatively) and their level of influence in the outcome.
And in Session 3, we each took on a stakeholder persona and explored their motivations through the lens of a behaviour model, SCARF. Hat-tip to Thomas Ableman‘s podcast with Rory Sutherland for that idea.
During the day we covered everything from tanks to teenagers. The conversation revealed insights and it also exposed some gaps, particularly in budget and skills for effective engagement, sparking some ideas and suggestions for research into the area… watch this space while those percolate.
Meanwhile, the commitment in the room was inspiring and the rallying cry was to ‘be brave’ while being aware of the dynamics behind stated and actual objections.
To those that came along, thank you. Jennifer Cook and Liz Davidson hope you found the sessions interesting.
Designing
A team of approx 10 people joined Amber, Anna, Kit and Marie and volunteers Tom, Suki and Richard for the Design stream.
We got started by taking the 80(ish) ideas generated by all Mobility Camp participants on what they would like to focus on relating to Backing Sustainable Transport. As a group we clustered these into key themes, which included politics + policy, public engagement, finance and rural mobility. People then self-organised themselves into groups based on the themes they were interested in. They were tasked with defining the problem and coming up with a possible solution to it.
Under the theme of politics and policy a group focused on the problem of how siloed funding focuses the majority of public spend on road building rather than active travel. The group came up with an idea to combine all road based activity under one body (including policing related to road accidents and Active Travel England). Funding would therefore become conditional based on how well any road-based scheme incorporates active travel.
Under the theme of public engagement a group focused on making public consultation accessible to all. They came up with a proposal called VR Presents: From crayons to co-design. The idea is to engage schools in talking about transport, inviting younger generations to co-design their local streets. The ideas generated would be put into Virtual Reality and then shared with staff, parents and the local community. This would result in plans for local communities generated by the people that will be living within them.
Under the theme of financing a group focused on how to finance sustainable transport initiatives in local communities. They came up with an idea to introduce Community Carbon Credits via an app that tracks sustainable transport behaviour and results in individuals earning credits for their community. Credits can then be used to purchase things like trees, food banks and community café’s. The initiative would initially be funded using money saved from undertaking the collection of traffic data.
Under the theme of rural mobility a group focused on how to reduce the impact of increasing deliveries made to rural areas. The group decided they would revive the post-bus! The post-bus would combine deliveries with discounted bus tickets and would travel from a central town (where there would be passenger and freight consolidation) and connect people and parcels with nearby villages. The post-bus would be complemented with cargo-bikes to undertake the first and last mile.
The groups came up with amazing ideas in response to these emerging themes. These were:
Bringing together all road-based funding, governance and policing under one body that ensures that any road-based development incorporates sustainable transport and safety.
VR presents: from crayons to co-design. A service where schools are engaged in co-designing local community initiatives, with their ideas put into VR and shared among the wider community.
Bringing back the Post-Bus! A freight and passenger consolidation model that sees deliveries combined with discounted bus tickets to enable people and parcels to move around rural areas. Complemented with cargo-bikes that become the new paper round.
Community Carbon Credits that are based on tracked sustainable transport behaviours resulting in rewards that communities can spend on anything from trees to food banks.
Mobility Matters 