Transport behaviour change with Swindon house hunters

Through the securing of residential travel plans during the planning process, it’s becoming increasingly common to influence transport behaviours of residents moving into new build property.  A house move is documented as one of the key stages in life to be able to affect behaviour, as residents adopt new routines.

Here Claire Fleming, Travel Plan Officer and Modeshift Executive Board Member, tells us more about a house hunters project she’s working on in Swindon with Public Health:

‘In Swindon, we realised that it was equally important to go one step upstream and try to intercept people at the point of deciding where to live.  Many house hunters will be attracted to the reputation of an area, the facilities it has, the affordability of the postcode area and so on, without thinking about the location in terms of its accessibility to the common destinations that need to be travelled to, such as work, school, leisure and their social circle. As transport planners, we often receive feedback in surveys bemoaning the lack of a bus service from people that have made the choice to live in a remote rural hamlet out of town.

With Swindon’s population swelling by nearly 25,000 additional residents over the past decade, the transport planning officers teamed up with public health to see how best to raise awareness of the transport implications of a house move before the homeowner makes the investment. Estate agents and housing associations were the obvious target.

With funding from the public health team, we were able to adapt the resident welcome pack that we use at new housing developments to be more generic for Swindon as a whole.  In it we stress in the introduction that “Travel choices is all about thinking about where you want to go in relation to where you decide to live, and how you are going to get there.”

The brochure promotes the benefits of walking, cycling, bus and rail, with contacts and links for maps and further information. The borough bus map shows the key routes across the town, and we included information about car sharing, taxis, and electric vehicles.  At the back of the brochure we include wider local contacts, including health and wellbeing opportunities, such as parkrun, clubs and leisure centres.

Once the brochure was ready, we reached out by email to Swindon’s 36 estate agencies first, offering free copies of the brochure for their offices.  The email contained a picture demonstrating what the brochure looked like, and a link to a PDF copy that they could download. We also produced an A4 poster and an A5 flyer with QR codes for those offices who felt space was tight.   It would be fair to say that the response was reluctant to begin with, and only a handful coming back to take up the offer.  A second letter then chased up, containing a hard copy of the brochure.  This prompted a few more positive responses, taking the total take up to 7.  Maybe the commercial world of property isn’t used to things being offered for free!

The next plan of attack was to doorstep the offices in person, and this produced much better results, albeit a time-consuming activity.  Six months on and 20 estate agents now stock the brochure, with instructions to contact us when stocks get low.  We are also starting to contact the housing associations who appear to be receptive.

Monitoring the effect of the brochure on individual house hunters is currently impossible but we can track how many brochures are given out.  As we come to reprint the brochure, we can use opportunities to expand the information into other areas, such as promoting the heritage and cultural aspects of the town.  We can also think about including an offer that enables the recipient to contact us, giving us access to track the impact of the brochure on that individual.’

For more details about the project, contact swindontravelchoices@swindon.gov.uk.