Soft Measures
There are more ways to promote bicycling than building bike roads. A variety of innovative soft measures have been used within Trendsetter. These also include trip planning tools on the internet and new ways of marketing clean or public transport.
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It can be quite expensive and take a lot of time and effort to change a city’s infrastructure so it favours pedestrians, bicyclists and public transport instead of cars. Complementary ways to affect peoples’ travel habits are for example inventive marketing campaigns or education for children. These kind of soft measures are often cheaper than changing the infrastructure and can have good effects.
Graz and Stockholm have combined a variety of projects in order to promote bicycling, make trip planning easier and make more people aware of clean transport and safety.
BicyclingIf people would choose the bike more often, also in combination with public transport, air quality and congestion in cities could improve. Both Graz and Stockholm try to make bicycling more attractive.
In Graz, bike training in real traffic is offered to all primary schools in Graz. The training is praised by teachers and directors, who find the traffic environment very good for teaching the children how to deal with real traffic situations. Also, public transport stops have been equipped with theft protected and, in some places, sheltered cycle racks. The occupancy of these Bike&Ride facilities varies between 33 and 75 percent and has changed some people’s commuting behaviour.
Bicyclists in Stockholm can easily check what route to take if they want to go fast and safe from one place to another. A web site gathers different maps with cycle tracks in the city and several municipalities around Stockholm.
Trip planningMore people might choose public transport if they easily could get information about how to go from A to B and how long it takes. Stockholm and Graz use the latest technology to provide such planning tools and other traffic information on the web.
For Stockholm, the web site includes all kinds of information about the traffic situation in and around Stockholm, public transport, parking and bike routes. People can even get traffic information on their cell phone. Another innovative aspect is real-time travel time and smart choices for combined transports.
The Grazer web page provides trip planning from door-to-door with public transport. The service is popular and the number of users has increased steadily.
When developing systems like these, all involved operators must cooperate and several data sources be integrated.
Awareness of clean transport and safetyNew target groups might be reached if new messengers provide the information. Graz has educated taxi drivers to inform passengers about the advantages of biodiesel. This means thousands of personal contacts yearly and a chance that taxi customers become more aware of clean transport.
To make traffic safer, Graz has tried to reduce the car speed. Within Trendsetter, more streets have become a part of 30 km/h speed limit street network. This has contributed to a large reduction of accidents. Also, the city has bought speed control devices, which show the drivers their current speed on displays. This can reduce speed with about 10 percent on average.
Integrated mobility centreAll information service about a city’s public transport could be gathered under one roof. If travellers could find out tariffs and timetables, buy all kinds of tickets and plan their whole trip at one place, public transport would be more attractive. A new mobility centre in Graz combines the ticket selling of three former ticket vending centres and has been a success. Investments in a mobility centre pay off in less than a year since the service make more people travel by public transport. However, it can be difficult to gather several operators if they are very different from each other.
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Thematic co-ordination - Soft measures:
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