WHO WE WORK WITH

Highways England

Travel Demand Management Strategy Advice

September 2019 - January 2020

About the project

Highways England, one of the UK’s national highway agencies, recognised the potential advantages of using a variety of innovations to influence travel behaviour on England’s strategic highway network including travel demand management (TDM). TDM has been used as a means of addressing concerns about congestion associated with major disruption of infrastructure improvements for several years and Highways England were keen to explore the potential for this in new highway projects as well as using TDM in steady state. The focus was the A27 Corridor along the Kent and Sussex coastline in southern England. 

In the Round was commissioned, alongside WSP transport planning consultancy, to develop a strategy for the use of TDM interventions by Highways England as part of its highway improvement programme. In the Round’s specific responsibility was to investigate the role of new advances in marketing communications to influence travel behaviour both in relation to business as usual and in connection with minimising the disruption associated with new infrastructure works. Our key objective was to identify best performing interventions that Highways England could consider including in its forward programme.

There were three elements to the commission:
  1. Review of best practice: This was a desk-top review of several case studies including work on disruption led TDM by Transport for London, the role of TDM in managing impacts of major sports events and examples of international best practice. The review confirmed the marketing communications interventions that were present across all/majority of the case studies. In addition to confirming the importance of having a single source of truth for travel information related to the intervention, understanding the audience was also a key feature together with relevant messaging and creative to target the key audience(s). Finally, whilst paid for advertisements was not commonplace, there was recognition of the value of having creatively designed campaign, full engagement with all potential stakeholders and the use of integrated communication channels.
  2. Benchmarking current practice: This stage of work included one to one interview’s with key individuals within Highways England and local authorities, participation in workshops with local authorities and desk-top review of websites/social media and so forth. The benchmarking took the form of a SWOT analysis and RAG rating of current practice using best practice as the reference point
  3. Optioneering and identification of best performing options: A long list of possible interventions was then identified. This ranged from proposals to amend Highways England’s current governance and organisational structure in relation to marketing communications within highways projects, to the development of toolkits and advice to project sponsors and local authorities. It also included recommendations on the need for centrally identified and coordinated approaches to audience segmentation, development of travel messaging and engagement activities with large trip generating/attracting uses. The long list of interventions was assessed using a multi criteria-based approach adopting the Department for Transport’s best practice assessment framework. The long list also included non-marketing communications TDM measures (WSP’s responsibility).
The key outcome of this piece of work was the development of a delivery plan that included costed, robust, value for money TDM marketing communications interventions. These recommendations went forward for consideration in funding applications to Highways England’s internal capital and revenue programme. 
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