How to scale PTP (Personal Travel Planning) without losing the personal touch
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 cycling, buses or sustainable travel.
The difficulty is that genuinely personalised travel planning takes time.
That might be manageable when working intensively with a relatively small number of people. It becomes much harder when a workplace has hundreds, or thousands, of employees.
So how do you retain the value of personalised travel planning while reaching people at workforce scale?
The answer is not to automate the practitioner or adviser. It is to automate the repeatable groundwork, making personalised journey information available at scale while allowing human support to be focused where it can add further value.
The traditional trade off: personalisation or scale
Producing a good Personal Travel Plan manually can involve quite a lot of work.
A practitioner might need to understand somebody's existing commute, research public transport journeys, look at walking or cycling options, compare journey times and costs, consider working hours and then pull that information together into something meaningful.
Done well, the result can be genuinely useful.
But repeat that process 500 times and the resource requirement becomes very different.
At large workplaces, this can create an uncomfortable choice.
You can provide detailed, personalised support to a relatively small group of employees.
Or you can communicate with the whole workforce, but inevitably make the information more generic.
Neither approach is necessarily wrong. But technology creates the possibility of a third option: give everyone useful personalised journey information at scale, with more intensive practitioner or adviser support available where it can add further value.
Automate the repeatable work
A significant part of producing a Personal Travel Plan is repeatable.
Where is the employee travelling from and to?
When do they need to travel?
How long does their current journey take?
What realistic public transport, walking or cycling alternatives exist?
How do those options compare on journey time, cost and carbon emissions?
Do the alternatives fall within sensible viability thresholds, or are we presenting journeys that somebody is highly unlikely to consider?
Those are questions that can be analysed consistently across a large workforce.
That is where automation is particularly useful.
Instead of manually starting from scratch with every individual, the repeatable journey analysis can already have been done consistently at scale.
For many people, that personalised information may be useful in its own right. Where further support is available, it can also provide a much stronger starting point for a conversation.
A Personal Travel Plan can stand alone, or support a deeper conversation
Automated analysis can tell us a great deal about somebody's commute.
It cannot fully understand the person making it.
Two employees might be presented with exactly the same alternative journey and react completely differently.
One might immediately see the benefit of saving money.
Another might be concerned about reliability.
Someone else might like the idea of cycling but lack confidence on a particular section of the route.
Another employee might have travelled the same way for 15 years and simply never seriously considered doing anything different.
These are not necessarily things that an automated journey comparison can resolve.
Where further support is appropriate, a practitioner or adviser can ask questions, listen, understand context, challenge assumptions, provide reassurance and bring local knowledge.
That personal touch still matters.
The opportunity is therefore twofold: provide useful personalised information to far more people, while also making any subsequent human support more focused and productive.
When a one-to-one can help, start with the groundwork already done
Where one-to-one support is available, imagine a practitioner or adviser has 20 minutes with someone.
In a traditional model, a significant part of that session might be spent establishing the journey and researching what alternatives are available.
Now imagine both people start the conversation with a Personal Travel Plan already in front of them.
They can immediately see the current commute and the realistic alternatives that have been identified.
Perhaps there is a rail journey that takes ten minutes longer but costs substantially less.
Perhaps cycling looks realistic for part of the week.
Perhaps public transport works well on most shifts but not one particular finishing time.
Or perhaps there simply isn't a credible alternative at present.
The conversation can start from there.
Instead of:
"Let's work out what journeys are available."
it can become:
"Here are the realistic options we've identified. Which of these could work for you, and what would need to be different?"
That is a much better use of skilled practitioner time.
Not everybody needs the same level of support
There is another important scaling question.
If a workplace has 2,000 employees, does every one of them need a one-to-one conversation?
Probably not.
For some people, the Personal Travel Plan itself may be enough: they discover an alternative they did not know about, get the information they need and require no further support. Others may have a strong alternative but face a relatively small barrier that a conversation, incentive or piece of practical support could help overcome.
Some will have no realistic alternative to their current commute. Intensive travel behaviour change activity may achieve very little unless something more fundamental changes first.
Others may have a strong alternative but face a relatively small barrier that a conversation, incentive or piece of practical support could help overcome.
That suggests another role for analysis: not simply producing Personal Travel Plans, but helping practitioners decide where to focus their limited time.
The questions then become:
Which employees have realistic alternatives?
What types of alternatives are they?
Where are those opportunities concentrated?
Which groups appear to have the greatest potential for change?
Where might more intensive engagement be worthwhile?
And where are the structural barriers that individual travel behaviour change work cannot solve?
This is where workforce level insight becomes particularly valuable.
Opportunities are rarely spread evenly across an organisation. They can cluster around particular worksites, settlements, transport corridors or groups of employees.
Understanding that distribution allows practitioners to be much more deliberate about where they intervene. CalCommuter's product design has increasingly focused on exactly this kind of prioritisation: identifying who, where and why so organisations and projects can allocate limited resources more effectively.
Automation should create more space for expertise, not less
There is sometimes an assumption that automation and personalised professional support sit at opposite ends of a spectrum.
We don't think they need to.
Used badly, automation can certainly create generic or implausible recommendations at scale.
But used well, it can provide valuable personalised support in its own right, while also removing repetitive work where practitioners or advisers are providing more intensive support.
That might mean:
reviewing a Personal Travel Plan with somebody who needs more support;
exploring why an apparently strong alternative still does not appeal;
helping build confidence around walking, wheeling or cycling;
bringing knowledge of local schemes, services or infrastructure;
working with an employer to address a recurring barrier;
or recognising that the real problem isn't employee motivation at all.
The value of the practitioner is not simply knowing how to look up a bus timetable.
Where professional support is involved, its particular value lies in understanding what to do with the information once the journey options are known.
The same principle applies to travel behaviour change communications
There is a similar lesson when communicating with employees at scale.
It is possible to send the whole workforce the same message encouraging them to cycle, use public transport or share journeys.
But if only a fraction of employees have a realistic opportunity to make that change, much of that communication is irrelevant.
Analysis can help identify the appropriate audience first.
Practitioners can then use their expertise to decide what message, support or intervention is suitable for that group.
Again, the technology does the groundwork.
The practitioner provides the judgement.
This reflects a wider principle behind CalCommuter's development: technology should help consultants and advisers deliver more effectively, rather than attempt to replace the relationships, local knowledge and professional expertise they bring.
What this means for Personal Travel Planning at large workplaces
At workforce scale, I think the most useful model has three layers.
Give everybody useful personalised information.
Every employee can receive their own Personal Travel Plan, showing the realistic choices available for their commute and how they compare.
Understand the workforce level opportunity.
Analyse those journeys collectively to understand where viable alternatives and barriers are concentrated.
Where additional human support is available, focus it where it can make the greatest difference.
Use practitioner or adviser time for the people, groups and locations where deeper engagement is likely to add value.
That does not make personalised travel planning less personal.
Arguably, it allows the genuinely personal part to become more personal.
The practitioner is no longer spending valuable time assembling information that could have been prepared beforehand.
They can spend it listening, understanding, advising and helping somebody work through the things that are specific to them.
Automate the groundwork, not the expertise
There will always be things that a good travel planner or travel behaviour change practitioner can do better than an automated system.
That is not a problem technology needs to solve.
The better question is:
Which parts of the process genuinely require that expertise, and which parts can be done consistently in advance?
For Personal Travel Planning, much of the initial journey analysis falls into the second category.
Automating that work can make useful personalised information available to far more people than would normally be practical through manual delivery alone.
And where practitioners or advisers are involved, it can also free their time to concentrate on the conversations, interventions and decisions where their expertise makes the biggest difference.
That is the real opportunity in scaling Personal Travel Planning.
Not replacing the personal touch. Creating more time for it.
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