People and Place: Options for monitoring and evaluation of modal shift to active travel

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging a reduction in single occupant car journeys is part of Scotland’s path to net zero. People and Place is Transport Scotland’s primary active and sustainable travel behaviour change programme.

People and Place funds a wide range of activity through the seven Regional Transport Partnerships (RTP) and direct funding to local authorities. The RTP programme covers work with schools and workplaces, access-to-bikes schemes, inclusion measures, travel behaviour campaigns, cycle parking, small physical improvements, shared mobility and links to public transport. That breadth is one of the programme’s strengths because it allows delivery to reflect local need. It also makes monitoring harder, because a single measure cannot capture these different mechanisms of change equally well.

This project examines how the impacts of shifting to active transport in the People and Place programme can be robustly measured, given the scale and breadth of active travel behavioural change interventions delivered by the programme.

This report draws together the project findings and proposes a practical monitoring and evaluation framework. It does not try to produce a final quantified estimate of programme impact. Instead, it sets out what the current evidence base can already support, where the main gaps lie, and what changes would make future reporting more useful.

Key findings

• Scotland already has strong active travel evidence, but it is spread across surveys, counters, project returns and administrative sources. These sources are useful together, but they are not interchangeable.
• The most valuable national building blocks are clear. The Scottish Household Survey gives the best picture of travel behaviour and mode share across Scotland, while the Cycling Scotland counter network provides the strongest continuous evidence on cycling volumes. Each answers only part of the People and Place question, so the system can harness their potential through jointly using the data in a complementary way.
• The biggest challenge of the current system is to link what was delivered and how change is recorded.
• A universal project reporting form would prove unwieldy – the emerging evidence points to a typology-based approach, where different interventions each have a small set of tailored minimum metrics.
• Mixed methods are essential. Ministers and programme managers need comparable numbers, but they also need short structured qualitative evidence that explains who was reached, what barriers shifted, what did not work and whether change looks likely to last.
• Wider outcomes such as health, emissions and wellbeing should be modelled only after core reporting is stable.

Recommendations 

• Transport Scotland should formalise a small core dataset by intervention type and issue it in workable, iterative manner going forward.
• The first technical priority should be a national intervention register, with location, date, intervention type, delivery scale and target group recorded for every funded project.

For further information, please read the full report.

If you require the report in an alternative format, such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.