Staff involvement

Involving a wide range of staff in promoting sustainable travel in your workplace is helpful as this ensures a range of viewpoints (and assistance) is gathered. This can also assist in achieving buy-in from numerous sections of the organisation.

Bicycle User Groups (BUGs) or Sustainable Travel User Groups (STUGs) are groups that can be set up to establish a community of enthusiastic individuals and gain feedback from people who already travel sustainably. This ensures that people who have direct experience of any barriers to travelling sustainably can feed their knowledge and experiences into your activities. The group can also discuss measures which could be implemented to improve and promote sustainable travel options, and assist in getting things done.

As part of the group, a range of topics could be discussed:

• Infrastructure such as cycle routes, paths, shower facilities, bike parking, lockers, car sharing facilities/schemes.
• Any barriers to staff travelling more sustainably.
• Promotion of sustainable travel.

It can also be useful to distribute safety equipment such as bike bells, lights and reflective straps, as well as maps and other relevant information.

A travel plan steering group is a group of people drawn from your business who form together to discuss sustainable travel options to your site and how these can be improved and promoted.

It is good to include a wide range of enthusiastic people from your organisation to represent different areas and grades of seniority of your company.

Through this group people can meet, discuss, and generate ideas, plan events and the implementation of measures.

It can be helpful to assign specific actions to group members, make notes and document your meetings.

If other employers are located near to your site you could include representatives from these organisations to collaboratively improve and promote travel options. Alternatively a separate area travel plan group could be established outside of your employer steering group.

For more information, please read the section How to prepare a Travel Plan from Cheshire East Guide to Business Travel Planning.