West of England Sustainable Travel (WEST): Final annual outcomes monitoring report

Bartle, Caroline; Chatterjee, Kiron; Clayton, William; Parkin, John; Ricci, Miriam

Abstract

The Local Sustainable Transport Fund was launched in January 2011 with the four West of England unitary authorities (Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol City, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Councils) being awarded nearly £30 million by the Department for Transport from the fund on two separate but linked project programmes. The Key Commuter Routes (KCR) project programme was implemented in 2011/12 to 2012/13. The West of England Sustainable Travel (WEST) ‘Large Project’ programme was implemented in 2012/13 to 2014/15 and involved an integrated package of measures covering the entire West of England travel to work area. The WEST project was awarded extension funding covering the 2015/16 financial year. This Final Outcomes Monitoring Report provides results on outcomes from the LSTF programme delivered up to the end of 2015/16.

The context for the programme is that the West of England area has a high level of road congestion and significant anticipated growth in housing and jobs. The WEST project represents a complex intervention due to the dynamic environment in which it is being implemented, the interaction between different measures within an overall package, the targeting of multiple behaviours, the impacts potentially taking time to build up, and the effects varying across the population.

In the period 2010 to 2015, the population of the four unitary authorities has increased between 3% and 6%. Gross Value added has increased by 12%-13% and employment by 2.4%. Fuel prices have reduced to 95-96% of their 2010 level, with a suggested effect on vehicle kilometres of a 1%-2% increased based on the range in recommended modelling elasticities. We are not aware of other exogenous policy factors that could influence the quantum of travel, or travel choices.

Taken together, it can be assumed that the direction of the trend of the exogenous factors each will contribute to more travel. The change in travel is more likely to be in line with the change in population than any other factor, hence travel might be expected, all other things being equal, to be in the order of up to 6% greater in 2015 than 2010.

There have been a range of non-LSTF funded transport related developments in transport provision in the four unitary authority areas. Taken together, we consider these to be of a scale and a significance that is unlikely at the aggregate level to influence the way in which travel and travel choices have been made.

At a local level, there will have been disruption to travel as a consequence of work by statutory undertakes, and other local road closures. These effects are likely to have been transient. The only potentially longer lasting impact of a non-LSTF intervention is the introduction of the residents parking areas in central Bristol. These would act to potentially suppress car based commuting in the longer term.

The data have been collected five categories which we have defined as follows: aggregate transport data (e.g. traffic counts); business engagement data; data derived from local community activities; public transport data; and data derived from work on transitions. We have then drawn these data together to assess its contribution to answering the research questions that were originally posed in the monitoring plan. These questions have been addressed with the assistance of the intervention logic map from the monitoring plan.

• Report Type: Project Report
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: local sustainable transport fund evaluation, LSTF, West of England, transport
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/904666