A checklist for a travel plan with measurable targets

A travel plan with measurable targets differs from the version that gets conditioned and forgotten in four specific ways. It has a baseline someone can reproduce. It has targets expressed as numbers with dates attached. It names who does the work and how they are paid. And it says what happens when a target is missed. Everything else in the document, the cycle parking counts, the bus timetables, the welcome pack, is supporting material for those four things.

What the plan has to do to be worth conditioning

The Planning Practice Guidance treats a travel plan as a long term management document for delivering sustainable transport objectives, not as a statement of intent submitted with an application. Councils apply it that way. An officer reading yours is asking whether, in five years, a monitoring officer could open it and tell whether the development complied.

Two forms exist in practice. A framework travel plan accompanies an outline application and sets the structure, targets and monitoring regime without the detail that depends on the final occupier. A full travel plan comes at reserved matters or before occupation and fills in the specifics. Say which one you are writing on the cover.

The plan should sit alongside the Transport Assessment or Transport Statement and use the same trip generation figures. Where the two documents disagree about how many vehicle trips the site produces, the travel plan loses.

Setting a defensible baseline

For a new development there is no existing travel behaviour to survey, so the baseline is constructed rather than measured. Be explicit about how.

The usual approach takes census travel to work data for the relevant output areas or a comparator site of similar type and location, adjusts for the accessibility of your site, and states the resulting mode share as the starting point. Where a comparator site is used, describe it: its size, its use class, its distance from a station, and why it is a fair analogue.

For an occupied site being redeveloped or intensified, run a proper staff or resident survey before submission. A survey with a response rate under about a third will be questioned, so put effort into the distribution rather than the questionnaire design.

Record the baseline in a table with mode shares summing to 100 per cent, the survey dates, the sample size and the response rate. A baseline without a response rate is not a baseline.

Targets that can actually be measured

The test of a target is whether two people reading it would count the same thing.

Good targets name the metric, the value, the population and the date. A reduction in single occupancy car driver mode share among staff from 62 per cent at baseline to 55 per cent by the end of the third full year after occupation is a target. A meaningful shift towards sustainable modes is not.

Set no more than four or five. A plan carrying fifteen targets usually has fifteen targets nobody monitors. Pick the mode share target, a cycle parking occupancy target, and where relevant a target on vehicle trips during the peak hour, which is the number the highway authority actually cares about because it drove the junction modelling.

Be careful about targets you cannot influence. Bus patronage depends on a service you do not run. Tie the target to the thing the development controls.

Measures that shift mode share

Measures fall into three groups by how much evidence there is that they change behaviour.

The ones that tend to work involve price and convenience: secure, covered, ground floor cycle parking closer to the entrance than the car park, a car club bay with funded membership, subsidised season tickets or a mobility budget for first occupiers, and constrained or charged car parking where policy allows it.

The ones that help at the margins are information and infrastructure: a welcome pack, personalised journey planning, showers and lockers, a cycle repair stand, real time departure screens in a lobby.

The ones that do very little on their own are awareness campaigns, notice boards and an annual event. Include them if you like, but do not rest a target on them. A Parking Survey and a parking strategy usually carry more weight than any amount of promotion, because parking supply is the variable with the clearest relationship to car use.

The coordinator and who pays

Name the role, the hours and the funding source. A travel plan coordinator with a defined time allocation, contact details published to occupiers, and a budget for measures is a commitment. A reference to a coordinator being appointed in due course is not.

For residential schemes the role often transfers to the management company after an initial period, and the plan should say when, and what obligations transfer with it. That handover is where plans die quietly, so write it into the document and into the section 106 obligation.

Councils commonly require a monitoring fee to cover their own officer time in reviewing submitted reports. The amount is set locally and published in a fees schedule or a section 106 protocol, so take it from the current published document rather than from a previous scheme.

Monitoring surveys and reporting years

Set the survey regime out as a sequence tied to occupation rather than to calendar dates.

1. Confirm the trigger for the first survey, usually a stated occupation level such as 75 or 80 per cent, with a longstop date if occupation stalls.
2. Repeat the baseline survey method exactly, including the season, the days of the week and the questions, so results are comparable.
3. Survey in a neutral month, avoiding August, December and school holiday weeks.
4. Report within a set number of weeks of each survey, in a format the council can compare year on year.
5. Continue for a defined period, commonly five years from first occupation, with reporting in years one, three and five.

Keeping the method identical matters more than the sophistication of the survey. A change of question wording between year one and year three destroys the comparison you are paying for.

Remedial measures and trigger points

The clause that separates a serious travel plan from a decorative one explains what happens when a target is missed.

The mechanism most authorities accept is a remedial measures fund, held as a bond or a sum secured by the section 106 agreement, drawn on to implement additional measures from a list already agreed in the plan. Put the menu of remedial measures in an appendix so the argument about what to do happens now, not in year three.

Set the trigger as a shortfall against the target rather than as a failure of the plan as a whole. Missing a cycle parking target by two per cent should trigger a review, not a penalty, and the plan should say which is which.

Securing the plan in the permission

Small schemes are usually handled by condition requiring the plan to be submitted and approved before occupation. Anything with monitoring fees, bonds or obligations that run for years needs a section 106 agreement, because those cannot be delivered by condition.

Check the drafting matches the plan. The obligation should reference the approved travel plan by title and date, carry the monitoring and reporting duties, and name the remedial mechanism. Where an application is also subject to review by Active Travel England as a statutory consultee on larger residential schemes, expect the cycle infrastructure and walking routes to be examined against national design guidance rather than accepted as drawn.

Browse all 66 PlanScope report types to see which transport documents your application needs and how they fit together.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.