Delivering Sustainable Travel
Public transport has an important role to play in the development of more sustainable transport solutions.
Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise worldwide and congestion is an increasing cost to society. Transport solutions to address these issues are vital.
The UK Government's White Paper, Creating Growth, Cutting Carbon, challenges local partnerships to work together to encourage a greater move to more sustainable travel.
Partnerships
Partnerships are central to ensuring effective delivery of public transport. These partnerships may be with our contract customers, the network providers, other transport providers or other operators. At local level we promote these partnerships to find ways to improve our services and develop more integrated travel solutions.
At a strategic level we work across the industry and in broader collaborations to promote the role of public transport.
- We are founder members of Greener Journeys, a bus and coach, industry collaboration that encourages greater travel by bus and coach and influences policy development that supports it.
- We engage with the Sustainable Rail Programme, a cross industry collaboration to support the development of a more sustainable rail industry.
- In Scotland we are members of the 2020 Climate Change Group, a group of industries which advises the Scottish Government on meeting their climate change targets.
Sometimes you can't beat the bus
In September 2010 Greener Journeys launched a national campaign targeted at three pilot areas to promote greater bus travel. These pilots demonstrated that with the right conditions such campaigns can be effective, but that local circumstances are a big factor in their likely success.
Promoting behaviour change
One of the biggest contributions we can make to more sustainable travel is to encourage more people to use public transport. We do this through ongoing investment in our services and development of marketing and information campaigns to encourage greater use of public transport. All our train operating companies offer real-time updates on service disruptions. Similar services are available on a growing number of bus companies using Twitter. Our North American school bus operations have launched a unique vehicle tracking and information system which improves on-time performance, safety and security.
This year we launched the Corporate Travel Club which provides a range of bespoke products to large organisations wanting to encourage greener travel amongst their employees.
We continue to add to our integrated travel offerings. Further details can be found here.
Corporate Travel Club
The Corporate Travel Club is aimed at large employers wanting to promote greener travel amongst their employees. We offer significantly discounted travel which employees can purchase in easy monthly instalments. To date 160 employers have signed up to the scheme.
'I was keen to offer an easy-to-administer incentive to encourage more public transport use to our sites. The First Corporate Travel Club scheme did just that.'
Andrew Cassey, Travel Plan Manager, BT
The ftr supports passenger growth
The development of our ftr services demonstrates the value gained from effective local partnerships that support behaviour change. This year our Swansea ftr service (launched in September 2009) welcomed its one millionth passenger on board. Passenger growth on this service is 10% above predictions and passenger satisfaction is higher than for previous bus services. The success of the partnership between First and the City and County of Swansea was recognised at the 2010 National Transport Awards, where the scheme received the award for Improvements to Bus Services.