The Smarter Choices programme involves finding ways of influencing people’s travel behaviour to encourage more sustainable travel options such as walking, cycling, travelling by public transport and car sharing.

Our smarter choices programme for 2006 - 2011 includes:

• Better Ways to School initiatives
• Giving people better information about the travel options available to them and marketing travel options more effectively
• Providing new transport services or facilities and making improvements to the way they are organised
• Providing options that reduce the need to travel at all.

The purpose of Smarter Choices initiatives is to improve the attractiveness and use of sustainable travel. This will improve conditions not just for those using these options but also, by reducing car numbers and therefore congestion levels, for those for whom there is no reasonable alternative to using the car.

Some Smarter Choices initiatives are likely to have a bigger impact than others. Targeting
journeys to school and work, for example, should have a significant impact on congestion, even in the short term. The impacts of other approaches like providing better travel information may be harder to assess, but such approaches are known to have significant benefits when used in a targeted way.

Smarter Choices initiatives will in many cases complement schemes we’re doing in other
programmes. For example, where we improve bus priority along a route we will also introduce live timetable displays at bus stops. We’re also going to investigate driver information systems to provide live traffic information on roadside signs to complement improvements to the county’s road network.