“You can’t change what you don’t understand”

Encouraging people to travel more sustainably is a shared ambition across the transport sector. Achieving meaningful change in how people move through their daily lives, requires an understanding how and why current travel patterns exist. There are lessons to be learnt from other sectors that have long prioritised audience insight.

Why does understanding matter?

Put simply, when you know your audience, your marketing, communications and interventions are more effective and efficient. In the commercial marketing sector, the insight and research sector is worth over £9 billion and growing - a sign of the importance that other sectors place on effective audience research. Yet in transport planning, in-depth research is sometimes overlooked or reduced to minimal consultation. As highlighted in this welcomed guidance from the UK government, engagement can and should be more than a tick-box exercise. It’s a powerful opportunity to understand public perceptions and bring communities along with change.

What are we trying to understand?

In transport research, while specific aims vary by project, some core themes consistently guide what we seek to understand:

Motivations + Habits: Our travel patterns are shaped by routines, perceptions and the environment. The government’s recent report, Moments of Change, reinforces a long-held understanding that life transitions can disrupt habits and open the door to new behaviours. The classic examples are moving home, starting school or changing job. The report also identifies less obvious triggers such as major travel events or fuel shortages. Recognising these moments helps us time and target interventions more effectively. In Derbyshire, for example, we’ve focused on those transitioning into or out of high school and jobseekers. Meanwhile our Travel Demand Management (TDM) projects target messaging around major travel events.

Barriers: Understanding what stops people from changing is fundamental. Actual and perceived barriers are often layered and shaped by identity and lived experience. A teenage girl may face very different challenges than an older man. At ITP, we use our Inclusive Mobility Route Audit to work directly with communities to uncover and address these barriers. This is a hands-on assessment that combines digital audits, mapping, and lived experience to uncover how routes can better serve women, people with disabilities and neurodiverse individuals.

How do we understand behaviour?

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative tools to understand behaviours and travel patterns:

User Insights: These explore individual motivations and barriers. Focus groups allow us to understand nuance and amplify underrepresented voices. Surveys, the most ubiquitously used tool, provide broader patterns. At ITP, we use our Audience Assessment tool as part of TripSwitch, to embed behavioural science questions and understand complex underlying motivations.

Market Research: Data helps us segment audiences and build personas that reflect real-world travel behaviours. In transport, this is often rooted in spatial information recognising that rural and urban travel patterns differ significantly.

In projects up and down the country, we have used tools to understand our audience from the outset, leading to more effective campaigns.

• The Travel Demand Management programme for businesses during the Commonwealth Games was rooted in data and personas. It resulted in 93% awareness amongst businesses surveyed, 261,000 employees in the region reached and a 39% reduction in car use by residents.
• Similarly, our recent marketing and coordination support for the launch of the ‘Loop’ bus service in Milton Keynes used demographic and socioeconomic characteristics to identify potential demand for the bus service. This led to well-aimed engagement events, where we spoke to more people than targeted, and boarding data showed patronage increased.