Travel Awareness
Improving transport choice and encouraging better awareness of transport costs and alternatives are important elements of the Regional Transport Strategy (RTS). Over use of cars for even small distances have resulted in congestion, increased pollution, reduced journey times and contributes to a range of health issues in particular obesity and chest heart conditions. If all drivers used a different way to work one day a week traffic would be cut by about a fifth.
The RTS contains a travel hierarchy which supports the least polluting congesting travel first the table lists them and the types of intervention’s Nestrans supports.
| Walking | Nestrans provides the walking journey planner www.walkit.com |
| Cycling | We employ a cycling development officer in partnership with Sustrans |
| Public Transport | Nestrans helped with the opening the railway station at Laurencekirk and the new station at Kintore which will open in 2020. We have negotiated extra trains across the city with Transport Scotland and host the local bus operators forum, working on bus priority measures. Nestrans has also pioneered a real time bus website www.realtimebus.com |
| Park and Ride | Nestrans publicises and promotes park and ride services to Aberdeen City Centre particularly in the run up to Christmas. |
| Car Share | Nestrans provide the liftshare website www.liftshare.com and promotes it across the region the scheme has over 3,000 members |
Getabout
Since 2008 the Getabout partnership has promoted active and sustainable travel across the North East under a single identifiable brand. The partnership currently comprises of Nestrans, Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Councils, NHS Grampian, Aberdeen University, Robert Gordon University, North East Scotland College, Energy Savings Trust and James Hutton Institute.
The getabout website provides travel choice and travel planning information and is updated with latest news and details of upcoming events. An on-line travel plan builder is available via the getabout website and offers organisations a free tool to build a travel plan.
Nestrans has developed a Sustainable Travel Grant Scheme, which provides match funding to organisations investing in measures to promote more sustainable travel by their employees or customers. To help more people share car journeys, Nestrans launched a car sharing website for the north east in and can be viewed here www.liftshare.com.
Follow Getabout's Facebook and Twitter accounts for more details.
