Hounslow Travel Active personalised travel advice catch up
21 January 2016
Changing travel behaviour through personalised travel planning in Hounslow.
In October and November the SWITCH programme was launched across all nursery and reception classes in Hounslow. SWTICH is an initiative to promote active travel to schools, increasing activities such as walking, scooting and cycling and minimising the need for car use to ease congestion around schools. SWITCH is a programme aimed at engaging with people at 'life changing' moments so by ensuring parents and children are given the resources and encouraged to travel sustainably from the beginning throughout their school life.
We caught up with one of our participants of the SWITCH programme to see how they got on, Amita said:
‘I always preferred to use the car even for short journeys, but this switch campaign was quite inspiring and encouraged me to switch my way of life from the car to walking."
The initiative involved two games across the borough, Beat The Street and The Traffic Snake Game; both travel games, challenged children to travel more sustainably to school in a fun, interactive manner. The games inspired the children across the schools to walk more, in the borough due to the challenge. Amita whose child goes to Westbrook in Feltham added, 'I love to walk short distances with my son and he is also excited to cycle and walk more.’
In Hounslow approximately half of trips made in the car are under 2 miles in distance, SWITCH aims to reduce the need for these short trips and see which of these can be walked or cycle instead. Through projects such as SWITCH more people are enabled to access the information to ease them into walking and cycling in Hounslow.
SWITCH is a project ran across Europe which aims to promote sustainable travel in different ways. You can find out more from projects in Poland, Spain, Germany and Belgium that have got people like the project in Hounslow travelling more sustainably.