Draft Active Travel Strategy Consultation

4. Providing Residents with Travel Choices

4.1 Why people opt to travel the way they do has been extensively researched and is well understood. These 'behavioural insights', summarised at Appendix B, have been used to inform the aims, objectives and actions within this strategy and detailed in Section 7.

4.2 Underpinning these insights is the government funded National Travel Survey, the primary source of information on personal travel patterns by residents of England. The survey collects data from households on how, why, when and where people travel as well as factors affecting travel demand. This is used to monitor long-term trends in personal travel and to inform the development of national policy.

4.3 In addition, the authority surveys a sample of its households bi-annually residents travel choices, with the first survey taking place in 2010. The insights gleaned at both a national and local level sit alongside the experience of running behaviour change initiatives over a fifteen-year period, including for example promoting Leighton-Linslade as a Cycling Town. This has created a powerful foundation of knowledge and experience on which to build, utilising a mix of hard and soft measures and behavioural insights to 'nudge' individuals to travel more actively.