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A Personal Travel Plan answers a very personal question: “Given my current commute, what realistic choices do I have?” But repeat that analysis across hundreds or thousands of employees and a different set of questions, and answers, start to emerge. How are people travelling today? How many actually have realistic alternatives? Where are those opportunities concentrated? Where is driving still the only practical option? And where might an employer get the greatest value from

A Personal Travel Plan can show somebody different ways they could get to work. It cannot make them choose any of them. That distinction matters, because it is tempting to assume that if employees are given better information about walking, cycling or public transport, behaviour change will naturally follow. Sometimes it might, but commuting decisions are influenced by much more than information alone. Cost, convenience, habit, confidence, caring responsibilities, working pat

A journey planner can usually find an alternative way to get from A to B. That does not necessarily mean it has found a useful alternative. This distinction matters in workplace travel planning. If an employee receives a Personal Travel Plan that recommends a journey they immediately recognise as impractical, the problem is not simply that one recommendation has missed the mark. It can make them question the rest of the information as well. A Personal Travel Plan earns trust

Personal Travel Plans can be valuable because they make travel information relevant to the individual. For some people, seeing realistic alternatives to their own journey, and how they compare, may be all the support they need. For others, a conversation with a skilled practitioner or adviser can add another layer of value: exploring what might genuinely work for them and what could be getting in the way. Both are very different from sending everybody the same leaflet about c

Personal Travel Plans are not a new idea in workplace travel planning. For years, travel planners and behaviour change practitioners have used personalised journey advice to help people understand the alternatives available for their individual journeys. Done well, they can be extremely useful. But there is an important difference between providing someone with travel information and giving them a genuinely useful Personal Travel Plan (PTP). A list of nearby bus services, cyc

How much does it cost to drive to work? It sounds like a simple question. But two employees can live the same distance from the same workplace, drive to work on exactly the same days and still face very different commuting costs. The latest HMRC Advisory Fuel Rates provide a useful illustration. From 1 September 2026, the rates include: Fully electric car (home charging) - 7p per mile Petrol – up to 1,400cc - 14p per mile Diesel – up to 1,600cc - 15p per mile Petrol – 1,401c

It is relatively easy to identify an alternative way for someone to travel to work. A journey planner may show that an employee could, technically: Walk. Cycle. Catch a bus. Take a train. Use more than one mode. Share a car with somebody making a similar journey. But that does not mean any of those options represents a realistic alternative to their current commute. For workplace travel planning, the more useful question is: Would this journey actually be credible for this em

A staff travel survey is only useful if enough employees take part. But getting a good response is not simply a case of sending the survey link to everyone and waiting. Employees are busy. Some may not immediately see why the survey is relevant to them. Others may intend to complete it and forget. And some groups can be much harder to reach than others. So how can you improve staff travel survey response rates without making the process complicated? There are six things worth

Workplace travel surveys often begin with good intentions. An organisation wants to understand how employees commute, calculate emissions, review parking pressure or update its workplace travel plan. A questionnaire is created, a link is emailed to staff and the responses are downloaded into a spreadsheet. Then progress slows. The results may produce a mode-share chart, an average commuting distance and a list of comments. But the organisation is still left asking: What shoul

A staff travel survey can tell you much more than how many employees drive, cycle or use public transport. Designed well, it can help an organisation understand: How and when employees commute. How hybrid working affects travel patterns. The emissions associated with commuting and homeworking. Where realistic alternatives may exist. Which practical constraints affect people’s journeys. Where workplace travel interventions should be focused. Designed poorly, it may produce an

A staff travel survey is only one part of the project A well-designed staff travel survey is important. It helps an organisation understand how employees currently commute, how often they travel to work, where they travel from, and what patterns exist across different worksites. But the survey is not the whole project. It is one part of a wider workplace travel planning process. The organisations that get the most value from staff commute data are not usually the ones that si

A staff travel survey should be more than a data collection exercise Many organisations run staff travel surveys. They might use Microsoft Forms, SurveyMonkey, SmartSurvey, Google Forms or an internal HR survey tool. These approaches can be useful. They are familiar, relatively quick to set up, and can help collect basic information about how employees travel to work. But collecting travel data is only the first step. The real value comes from what happens next. A good staff

Commuting emissions are no longer just about the journey to work In recent articles, we have looked at the 2026 UK Government Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors, the commute data organisations need to calculate employee commuting emissions, and how that data can be turned into a Scope 3 emissions figure. But there is another important part of the picture. Hybrid working has changed the commuting baseline. For many organisations, commuting is no longer a simple assumption of fi

Conversion factors are only useful if the underlying commute data is good Last week, we wrote about the publication of the 2026 UK Government Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors and how the relevant factors have already been incorporated into CalCommuter. Those conversion factors are important. They provide the official assumptions used to convert activity data into greenhouse gas emissions estimates. But they are only one part of the calculation. To understand employee commuti

The 2026 UK Government Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors for Company Reporting have now been published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. These factors are an important part of how UK organisations calculate and report greenhouse gas emissions. They are used to convert activity data — such as miles travelled, fuel used, electricity consumed or hours worked from home — into emissions estimates. At CalCommuter, we use the relevant official UK Government convers