The Workplace Model and Student Travel Behaviour

The travel plans examined in this survey show a bias towards influencing and measuring staff commuting trips. This is evidenced through travel plans that deal solely with staff trips (City University), base their measures on generic employee workplace travel data (Huddersfield, Leeds Metropolitan, Cambridge), or conduct

Graph 2 – UTR: Staff/Student FTE SOV Users By Institution

surveys that are distributed solely to staff (Anglia Ruskin, Roehampton, Southampton Solent).

The analysis shows that university travel plans have been developed using guidance written for workplace environments even though for the majority of university commuters, the campus is their study-place not their workplace.

Guidance on the development of travel plans for the HE sector highlights the importance of considering student movements in the plan (Forum for the Future, 2003, p. 35). However, when students are considered in the travel plan they are often subsumed within the workplace commuting behaviour of staff. Thirteen out of the twenty two travel plan surveys examined used the same methodology to elicit commuting behaviour for staff and students. Even the HEFCE’s own guidance on the collection of staff and student commuting data for the purposes of reporting emissions levels includes an indicative pro-forma workplace survey with a note that it can be adapted for use as a student travel survey (Higher Education Funding Council England, 2012, Annex B).

Is it reasonable to consider that student study-place commuting is synonymous with staff workplace commuting? If it is then the adoption of the workplace travel

planning methodology for student trips is a sensible choice. However, what if the characteristics of student trips differ from those of staff? This then suggests that university transport planners do not fully understand student study-place commuting behaviour or that the workplace metaphor is being used as a second-best

alternative in the absence of anything more appropriate.

Institution Survey

Table 3 – UTR: Reported student on-campus arrival and departure times

The workplace travel model, when applied to students, assumes that the trip-making behaviour of the student population is independent of the academic timetable, and that their choice of arrival times, departure times, trips per week and trip distribution across the week are no more constrained than those of the staff at the same

institution. This leads to a confusion in both survey methodology and interpretation.

For example, six travel plans include a presentation of student on-campus arrival and departure times, and a summary of these figures are shown in Table 3.

The percentage of students arriving before 9:00 and to a lesser extent departing between 17:00 and 18:00 shows little consistency across institutions and whilst this might be expected due to the differing context of each campus, a similar disparity exists between survey years at the same institution. The figures for Sunderland show a 66% decrease in the number of students arriving before 9:00 over a two year period. It is unlikely that such a large reduction is attributable to travel

behaviour change alone when some other external factor, such as changes to the timetable, might explain some of the variation.

The data for Glasgow shows that 21% (25%) of students have variable arrival (departure) times. These relatively high percentages could be partially as a result of variation in the start and end time of the academic day in individual student

timetables and as such a variable arrival and departure time might be an expected student behavioural response. However, none of the other surveys allow

respondents to indicate variable arrival or departure times. Indeed Sunderland includes an ‘it varies’ category in the staff questionnaire (presumably to capture information related to flexi-time) but not in the equivalent student version.

Other data appears to be similarly misinterpreted with distributions of the percentage of students on-campus each day accompanied by comments about

‘students least popular’ days (Southampton) or ‘students travelling to university slightly less often than in previous years’ (Sunderland). If timetable influences trip-making behaviour then the proportion of students with timetabled sessions on a given day will largely determine the percentage of students attending on that day and changes to the timetable will produce knock-on changes to trip-rates which may then incorrectly be attributed as a change in behaviour.

If student study-place commuting is different from workplace commuting, then the data collected in most of the university travel surveys can only provide a partial understanding of student travel behaviour, and student timetables need to be considered in parallel with the trip data in order obtain a fuller insight into student travel behaviour.

The survey approaches of Kingston, Plymouth and York obtain data about each student’s academic timetable. Kingston and Plymouth use the same instrument, and importantly use the same question wording, asking first for information on

attendance at timetabled sessions together with a statement of the number of visits made by the student to each campus site, Figure 2.

Figure 2 – UTR: Timetable Specific Questions (Kingston University) The question Q3 seems to be both ambiguous and based on assumption. If a student has no sessions on a Wednesday but they attend campus on that day how do they respond? What does ticking ‘no sessions this day’ mean? Are students assumed to never attend on-campus when they don’t have timetabled sessions?

Similarly if a student has timetabled sessions in the late morning on a Tuesday but they arrive on campus before 9:00 and depart after 17:00 what boxes do they tick?

and what does this reveal about travel behaviour? If a student habitually misses a timetabled session do they leave the appropriate box blank? Is this question capturing information about the student’s timetable, their attendance on campus or their travel behaviour? The second question, Q4, is also ambiguous since it does not differentiate between home to campus trips and inter-site trips once the student is already on campus.

The University of York travel survey provides evidence of best practice and includes separate questions for travel behaviour and then timetable, Figure 3. This approach potentially allows the full relationship between a student, their trips and their

timetable to be observed. It can reveal any difference in the likelihood of attendance on-campus on TTDs (mandatory trips) and NTDs (discretionary trips), and can demonstrate the relationship between on-campus arrival and departure time and

session start and finish times. However the survey method will be unable to capture any instances of student leave-and-return trips, or behaviour that evolves over the term, semester or academic year.

Figure 3 – UTR: Timetable Specific Questions (University of York) This review of university travel survey methodologies indicates that there is little consensus amongst university travel planners and between institutions in terms of the data to be collected from students in order to understand their travel behaviour in relation to their academic timetable.

If the contemporary view of the timetable applies then a revised trip model is required to represent study-place commuting behaviour as distinct from workplace commuting behaviour.