What Is a Personal Travel Plan (PTP), and what should it actually tell you?

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, cycle routes and train times may be personalised to somebody’s location. That does not necessarily mean the options are realistic for the journey they actually need to make.

A useful Personal Travel Plan should help someone answer a much more practical question:

Given my actual commute, what realistic choices do I have — and how do they compare?

What is a Personal Travel Plan (PTP)?

In workplace travel planning, a Personal Travel Plan provides travel information tailored to an individual rather than to a workforce as a whole.

A workplace travel plan is an organisational plan. It might set out measures to improve access, reduce parking pressure, support walking and cycling, increase public transport use or reduce single occupancy car journeys.

A Personal Travel Plan is about the journey of an individual employee.

Where do they travel from? Where do they work? When do they need to travel? How do they travel at the moment? And what other practical options are available to them?

The aim should not be to tell somebody how they should travel.

It should be to give them enough relevant information to make a better-informed decision about their own journey.

Personalised should mean more than inserting a postcode

It is relatively easy for a journey planner to generate alternative routes between two locations.

The harder part is deciding whether those journeys are actually useful.

Imagine somebody drives 25 minutes to work.

A Personal Travel Plan finds a public transport journey between their home and workplace, but it takes 75 minutes, requires two changes and arrives 50 minutes before their shift begins.

Technically, the plan has identified an alternative.

Practically, it may not have identified a useful one.

That is why a good Personal Travel Plan needs to go beyond simply identifying what is possible. It should consider whether an alternative represents a viable alternative commute for that particular employee.

The same principle applies to walking and cycling. The fact that a route can be calculated does not automatically make it a credible everyday commute.

Personalisation is therefore partly about the information used to create the plan. But, it is also about filtering out information that is unlikely to be useful.

What should a Personal Travel Plan actually tell you?

There is no single format that every Personal Travel Plan needs to follow, but there are several things that can make the comparison genuinely useful:

• The employee’s current commute, so there is a meaningful baseline rather than alternatives being presented in isolation.

• Realistic alternative journeys, based on where and when the employee actually needs to travel.

• Journey time, allowing someone to see the practical time difference between options.

• Cost, using realistic assumptions for both the current journey and alternatives.

• Carbon emissions, giving another useful point of comparison without assuming that emissions will be the employee’s main motivation.

• Journey complexity, particularly for public transport journeys involving changes or several stages.

• Combined journeys, where using more than one mode could make an option practical — for example cycling to a station before continuing by train.

• Relevant practical circumstances, so options that clearly do not work for somebody’s commute can be excluded.

• No viable alternative, where that is the honest conclusion.

That final point is particularly important.

Sometimes the useful answer is that driving remains the realistic option

A Personal Travel Plan should not be judged by how many alternatives it manages to display.

For some employees, there may simply be no genuinely practical alternative to their current commute.

They might work at a location poorly served by public transport. Their working hours might fall outside service times. Their journey might be too long for walking or cycling to be realistic. Or the alternatives available simply might not compare well enough with their existing journey.

Presenting an obviously unsuitable journey does not solve that problem.

Worse, it can undermine confidence in everything else in the plan.

One implausible recommendation can make someone question whether any of the information they have been given is credible.

A useful Personal Travel Plan should therefore be comfortable saying, in effect:

Based on the options available today, we haven’t identified a realistic alternative for this journey.

That is credible information for the employee.

It is also useful information for the employer, because it distinguishes between people who already have realistic alternatives and those for whom something more fundamental would need to change before another option became practical.

Cost comparisons need to feel fair

Cost deserves particular attention because apparently similar commutes can have very different costs.

Two employees could live the same distance from work and drive exactly the same number of days, but their fuel or electricity costs could differ considerably depending on the vehicles they use.

Parking can change the comparison again.

And there is an important distinction between the full cost of owning a car and the costs somebody could actually avoid by changing how they commute.

As we explored in our recent article on why the cost of driving to work varies so much, the objective should not be to manufacture the largest possible saving for an alternative.

It should be to give the employee a comparison they recognise as fair.

The same principle applies to journey time and emissions.

Trust matters more than making the alternative look good.

Not every workplace travel opportunity belongs in a Personal Travel Plan

Some opportunities only become visible once responses from across a workforce have been analysed.

Car sharing is a good example.

Whether two (or more) employees could potentially share a journey depends on information about both of them: where they live, when they travel and which days they attend the workplace. That picture may only become clear once the survey has closed and the wider dataset can be analysed.

More importantly, identifying a potential match is not the same as offering somebody else’s journey as an available travel option.

Whether an employee wants to share their car or their commute with somebody else is their decision.

For that reason, CalCommuter analyses potential car-sharing opportunities at an organisational level rather than presenting individual employees with other people’s journeys in their Personal Travel Plans.

A Personal Travel Plan should contain information that is genuinely appropriate and useful to that individual. Wider workplace analysis can then identify additional opportunities and patterns that only become visible across the workforce as a whole.

A Personal Travel Plan cannot make a poor alternative good

There is also a limit to what personalised travel information can achieve.

If the bus is too infrequent, the cycle route does not feel suitable or the last train leaves before somebody’s shift ends, a Personal Travel Plan cannot make those problems disappear.

What it can do is distinguish between two very different situations.

For one employee, a good alternative might already exist but they simply do not know about it, have never compared the cost or have never considered using it.

For another, there may be a genuine barrier that needs an employer, transport operator, local authority or another organisation to address.

That distinction matters when thinking about behaviour change.

Before asking “How do we persuade this person to travel differently?”, it is worth establishing whether there is actually a realistic alternative for them to consider.

Giving something back to employees

There is another reason Personal Travel Plans can be valuable within workplace travel surveys.

Many traditional staff travel surveys ask employees to provide information primarily for the benefit of the organisation.

The employer gets the data.

The employee gets very little in return.

A Personal Travel Plan can change that exchange.

The employee receives something directly relevant to their own commute: information about realistic journeys they may not have considered and a comparison of what those options could mean for their time, cost and emissions.

That does not mean they will change how they travel.

Nor should the purpose of a Personal Travel Plan be to push everybody towards the same answer.

Different people have different priorities. One person might be interested in saving money. Another might value journey time or predictability. Someone else might want to build more physical activity into their day. For another employee, driving may still be the option that works best.

But providing useful information means that taking part in a workplace travel survey can deliver some immediate value to the employee, rather than simply generating another dataset for their employer.

That principle is central to how we approach workplace travel surveys within CalCommuter: respondents receive a Personal Travel Plan based on their own commute.

From travel information to useful decision support

A good Personal Travel Plan does not need to tell an employee what the “right” commute is. Its job is to make the relevant choices visible and comparable.

That is how we approach Personal Travel Plans in CalCommuter. A short employee commute survey establishes the current journey, before realistic alternatives are identified and compared using factors including journey time, cost and carbon emissions.

The objective is not to find the greatest possible number of alternatives or to persuade every employee to stop driving.

It is to provide credible information about the choices that actually exist.

Traditionally, producing this level of personalised journey advice can require considerable practitioner time, particularly across large workplaces. Technology creates an opportunity to automate much of that legwork— but that raises another important question: How do you scale personalised travel planning without losing the value of the personal touch?

We’ll explore that in a separate article.

Because ultimately, the most useful Personal Travel Plan should not answer:

“How could we get this employee to stop driving?”

It should answer:

“Given this person’s actual commute, what realistic choices do they have — and how could we support them best?”

That is a much better place to start.