What is a travel plan?

A Travel Plan is a living document that provides a strategy to try and minimise the number vehicle trips generated by your new estate. This is achieved by encouraging a shift to more sustainable modes of transport and by reducing the need to travel.

Travel Plans have many benefits including:

• Potential cost and time savings (mileage, car parking, lateness, lost time in travel);

• Improved health and fitness; and

• Better quality of life.

Travel Plans are an effective way to help residents plan their daily travel requirements without resulting in spending long hours driving their cars.

Travel plans are a requirement made by a local authority (the council) when a housing development is given planning permission.

There are many reasons why this type of document is becoming more and more necessary. Firstly, the roads in Britain are not able to take a constant growth in car travel. This is why you might have noticed that congestion is getting worse and worse.

Second, building new roads is not the solution. Paradoxically, it has become clear with research that constructing new, wider roads does not ease congestion in the long run. In fact it makes it worse as drivers learn easier routes that then fill back up to their capacity again.

Instead modern wisdom is that we need to work towards traveling in a more efficient way, this is either walking and cycling where the flexibility of choosing which route you take is greatly improved. Another option is taking public transport where more people can fit together in a smaller area, meaning less strain on the roads.