Our eleventh mini-seminar was Sustainable Travel A dynamic duo of expert speakers working on sustainable travel:
Tina Heathcote; Buxton Town Team will soon be consulting on the first ever whole-town all-inclusive Sustainable Travel Plan in the country to keep Buxton On The Move. It has taken four years of partnership working with the Borough and County Councils along with a host of providers and users, multiple surveys, audits, two conferences, and too many meetings to count. Tina spoke about a key element of the Travel Plan: The Big Buxton Experiment: Sharing Place, Space and Ideas and the trial of 5 new traffic free walking and cycling routes within the town.
Developing new transport provision Roland Strube, who manages Hayfield Sustainable Transport Ltd talked about shifting control and responsibility for developing new transport provision from providers to users, from top-down to bottom-up. The financial risk associated with new transport provision is a barrier to transport providers developing the new services required to: Fill gaps in provision, Adapt to rapidly changing demand, and Build network capacity in post-Covid environment. Users and the organisations which are responsible for activities that make transport necessary, are better placed to manage this risk as they know who is going where and when and have communication links to prompt changes in behaviour.