Why showing unrealistic travel options can damage employee trust
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 by filtering options, not by finding as many as possible.
Possible is not the same as practical
Imagine somebody currently drives 25 minutes to work.
A journey planner identifies a public transport alternative.
It takes an hour and 40 minutes.
It requires three changes.
And it gets them to work 50 minutes before their shift begins.
Technically, a public transport journey exists.
But presenting it as though it is a credible alternative risks telling the employee something they already know is unrealistic.
The reaction is unlikely to be:
"I hadn't considered that."
It is more likely to be:
"Clearly whoever produced this doesn't understand my commute."
Once that happens, even genuinely useful information elsewhere in the plan can lose credibility.
That is why identifying a viable alternative commute requires more than asking whether a route can be calculated.
More options do not necessarily make a better Personal Travel Plan
There can be a temptation to treat the number of alternatives identified as a measure of success.
Car.
Bus.
Train.
Walking.
Cycling.
Perhaps combinations of several modes.
The plan looks comprehensive.
But comprehensiveness and usefulness are not the same thing.
If several of those options are obviously unsuitable, displaying them can create noise rather than value.
A useful Personal Travel Plan should make it easier for somebody to understand their realistic choices.
Sometimes that means showing several good alternatives.
Sometimes it means showing one.
And sometimes it means saying that, based on the journeys available today, no realistic alternative has been identified.
That is not a failure of the analysis.
It can be the most credible answer.
Public transport needs to work for the journey someone actually makes
Public transport is a particularly good example of the difference between availability and viability.
There might be a bus stop close to someone's house and another close to their workplace.
That tells us relatively little on its own.
The journey might involve multiple services, lengthy waits or significant walking between connections.
The employee's shift might begin before the first practical service arrives.
The return journey might not work at all.
Or the public transport journey might simply take so much longer than the existing commute that very few people would realistically consider it.
None of this means public transport is inherently a poor option.
It means the comparison has to reflect the actual journey, rather than simply the existence of a route between two places.
This is especially important at workplaces with shift patterns or less conventional working hours, where a service that looks reasonable for a nine-to-five commute may be irrelevant to a large part of the workforce.
The same problem applies to walking and cycling
Walking and cycling routes can also be technically possible without being realistic everyday commuting alternatives.
Distance is an obvious factor.
A mapping service may happily calculate a walking journey that would take well over two hours each way.
Likewise, it may identify a cycle route over a distance that is unlikely to be a practical regular commute for most people.
There can also be differences between a route existing on a map and somebody feeling able or confident to use it.
The answer should not be to assume that nobody will walk or cycle beyond an arbitrary distance.
Different people make very different journeys.
But neither should a Personal Travel Plan display every route simply because the software can calculate one.
The objective is to narrow the information down to choices worth considering.
Journey time is only part of viability
A simple journey-time comparison is useful, but it does not tell the whole story.
Consider two public transport journeys that both take 50 minutes.
One involves:
a short walk;
one direct train;
and a five-minute walk at the other end.
The other involves:
a bus;
a transfer;
another bus;
a long wait;
and a final walk to the workplace that get the person there 40 minutes before they start work.
The headline journey time may be identical.
The experience of making those journeys every working day is not.
Complexity matters.
So can departure and arrival times, waiting time, cost and how the journey fits around the employee's working pattern.
A credible Personal Travel Plan therefore needs to look beyond the headline question:
"Can this journey be made?"
and ask:
"Is this a journey somebody could realistically consider making regularly?"
Practical circumstances matter too
There are also circumstances that a journey planner cannot understand from geography alone.
Someone may have caring responsibilities built into their commute.
They may need access to a vehicle during the working day.
Their working pattern may vary.
Their journey may involve circumstances that make an apparently straightforward alternative considerably less practical than it first appears.
That does not mean software can or should attempt to understand every detail of somebody's life.
But it does mean travel analysis should avoid false precision.
An alternative identified by a routing engine is not automatically a recommendation.
It is a candidate that still needs to pass a test of realism.
Why unrealistic recommendations matter for behaviour change
This is not only a question of producing a nicer Personal Travel Plan.
It affects what happens afterwards.
Imagine an organisation tells employees that it has identified a large group who could switch from driving to public transport.
It then launches communications, incentives or one-to-one engagement aimed at that group.
But a significant proportion of those "alternatives" involve journeys that employees consider plainly unrealistic.
The organisation has not simply produced poor travel information.
It may also have:
overstated the genuine opportunity for mode shift;
targeted behaviour-change activity at the wrong people;
used practitioner time inefficiently;
created unrealistic expectations about potential parking or emissions reductions;
and weakened employee confidence in future travel initiatives.
The quality of the filtering therefore matters at both an individual and organisational level.
A theoretical opportunity is not the same as an addressable one.
"No realistic alternative" is useful information
There can be discomfort in telling an organisation that some employees do not currently have a practical alternative to driving.
It can feel as though the analysis ought to produce a solution.
But identifying where alternatives do not exist is just as important as identifying where they do.
For the employee, it avoids being told to consider journeys that clearly do not work.
For the employer, it helps distinguish between different types of challenge.
One group of employees may already have good alternatives and primarily need better information, confidence or support.
Another may face structural barriers: poor public transport provision, unsuitable working-time connections or geography that makes active travel unrealistic.
Those situations require different responses.
The first may be a behaviour-change opportunity.
The second may require changes to transport provision, working arrangements, facilities or infrastructure before meaningful change becomes realistic.
Knowing the difference is valuable.
Trust is more important than making the alternative look good
The same principle applies to how alternatives are compared.
Journey times should not be presented selectively.
Costs should use assumptions that employees can recognise as reasonable.
Carbon information can be useful, but it should not be used to imply that somebody ought to accept an otherwise impractical journey.
A Personal Travel Plan should not be designed to "win" an argument for a particular mode.
It should provide credible decision support.
That means sometimes showing that an alternative compares very favourably.
Sometimes showing that it involves a compromise.
And sometimes showing that the current commute remains the most practical option.
As we explored in What Is a Personal Travel Plan — and What Should It Actually Tell You?, the purpose should not be to answer:
"How do we get this employee to stop driving?"
It should start with:
"Given this person's actual commute, what realistic choices do they have?"
Filter first, communicate second
This also has implications for workplace travel campaigns.
Before deciding what to say to employees, it helps to establish who actually has the opportunity to act.
Sending public transport messages to people for whom public transport is plainly impractical is unlikely to help.
Likewise, promoting cycling indiscriminately across a workforce can make a campaign feel generic if only certain groups have genuinely credible cycling journeys.
Better analysis allows communication and support to become more relevant.
Rather than:
"Everyone should consider walking."
the organisation can focus on the employees for whom walking genuinely represents a viable option.
Rather than:
"Could you cycle to work?"
it can identify where realistic active travel opportunities are concentrated and decide what practical support might help.
The starting point for good behaviour-change activity is therefore not persuasion.
It is credible opportunity identification.
How we approach this in CalCommuter
This principle has shaped the way CalCommuter approaches Personal Travel Plans.
The objective is not to display every journey that can technically be calculated.
Instead, alternative journeys are assessed for viability before being presented, using factors such as journey time, working times and journey complexity alongside the practical information provided through the commute survey.
Employees can then compare realistic alternatives against their current commute using information such as time, cost and carbon emissions.
And where those tests do not identify a credible alternative, the right answer may simply be to say so.
That matters because the Personal Travel Plan is not just an output from a survey.
It is part of the relationship between the employee and the travel-planning process.
If the information feels sensible and recognises the reality of their journey, there is a much better foundation for whatever comes next.
If the first thing they see is obviously unrealistic, that foundation can disappear very quickly.
Credibility before quantity
The success of a Personal Travel Plan should not be measured by the number of alternatives it contains.
A plan containing five theoretical options is not necessarily better than one containing a single credible alternative.
And a plan that honestly identifies no practical alternative can be more useful than one that fills the page with journeys nobody is likely to make.
The question is not:
"How many different ways can we find to make this journey?"
It is:
"Which of these journeys are realistic enough to be worth putting in front of this person?"
Because when asking employees to reconsider something as routine and personal as their commute, credibility matters.
Show people options they can trust — even when that means showing fewer of them.
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