Where are the pressure points on transport?

Photo Credit Carlo62

If not knowing what positive activities are taking place, where and when is one big problem for young people – the other has to be transport.

Young people are major users of public transport, yet very few sing the praises of their local bus, or find the timetables and prices meet their needs when they are trying to get out and about to take part in sports, arts, volunteering or leisure time activities.

There have been many pilot schemes to make transport more accessible and convenient for young people, and young people are actively campaigning for change (sometimes using a fantastic mix of social media tools) – but there is still a long way to go.

Andrew Stuck of Rethinking Cities is working on a project for Play England to explore to identify how lobbying on transport could be better joined up – and to learn about what works in campaigning and lobbying for better public transport provision for young people.

Andrew writes:

I would welcome your opinion on how lobbying on behalf of children and young people is currently taking place and your suggestions on how it could be improved.  Are there local authorities that are outstanding in their consultation with young people, and are there initiatives being undertaken by NGOs or by young people themselves that have proven to be effective in influencing national transport policy?

If Play England wanted to develop a transport lobbying initiative at which points in the transport policy making process do you feel that such intervention would be most effective?

If you’ve got an insight or a story to share – please do use the comments below and we’ll get all your comments back to Andrew and fed into the Play England research.

So, how do I get there?

Once again we’ve rolled out a few updates at http://stockport.plings.net, one of which is to implement Transport Direct’s ‘intelligent links‘ service allowing people to get travel suggestions for making their way to an activity.

With the help of this post:
http://da.vidnicholson.com/2007/01/converting-between-latitudelongitude-os.html
it’s easy enough to convert our location data (in decimal lat/lng) into the format needed by Transport Direct.

A link from each activity, or venue, now takes you to the Transport Direct service, with your destination already set. If you add your start data and the time of travel, the service will advise you how to get there using Public Transport, or by car.

What about the cyclists? Fortunately us cyclists are a resourceful lot, so although Transport Direct doesn’t cater for cyclists directly, the excellent OpenCycleMap does, so this has been added as an option to the OpenStreetMap view that is now available on all maps on the site.

We’ve also tweaked the navigation a bit, cos the sites all about Places to go, Things to do, so that should be the data that’s presented first, shouldn’t it?

Finally, we’ve added some more links to other activity providers that don’t yet aggregate their data us, but do have their own sites and offer activities in the area. We do this by tagging them in delicious.com and then reading in the feed from there.

Positive access required

Until last Summer I was a teacher and had been for twelve years. Not everybody’s favourite subject, history, but teaching did at least make me appreciate how, for many young people, education has become a narrower experience. The worst excess of this has been to plonk many young people on the assessment conveyor belt, whizzing past SATs and on to a host of familiar and unfamiliar educational acronyms GCSEs, GCE AS/A levels VCEs, NVQs, BTECs or Diplomas.

Not surprisingly some young people find themselves on the wrong conveyor at the wrong time. Schools are still trying to provide a diet richer than the latest examination syllabus, sorry specification, but because young people increasingly have less time during the school term to engage in more broader activities, the life of a typical hard working teenager reflects something more akin to an economic boom and bust cycle. Boom during term time’s head-on and head long engagement with the examination conveyor belt and bust during the holidays when there is less direction, less engagement and less support. If you, or rather your parents, have money (I’m not talking a massive amount but I’m coming to that) and the desire to get more out of the school day, and out of the long summer holiday, then you probably will -money empowers, money facilitates access. How much money? I’m not talking about housing a pony – it could be simply the cost of getting to and from an activity by bus or train. For some young people, when they have the time to participate in positive activities, contributing to a broader, more holistic education, they don’t necessarily have the means to engage.

Young people should feel reasonably lucky if they live in Greater Manchester. A subsidised fare of 70p per bus journey makes the cost of travel a lot less than if you happen to live in one of the shires. I recently took a bus from Minehead to Taunton in Somerset and nearly collapsed when I was charged over £6 for a pre-9am return. Children (bus operator’s language) paid a reduced fare but 70p it was not. Not surprisingly, at the beginning of the off-peak period a bus load of savvy pensioners who had bought tickets to the wherever the bus had been destined to arrive at by 9am suddenly dived off the bus and rejoined, brandishing their free travel passes. I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong in this and I’m certainly not suggesting that pensioners shouldn’t have free travel. But why don’t under-18s have free travel to school, to college, to health care, to positive activities? Travel should not be a post code lottery – we’re talking about buses not dentists!

Pl!ngs can only flourish if our young people can enjoy the same fares regime that pensioners and disabled users have come to appreciate. Without free travel, many young people, and not just in Greater Manchester, will continue to experience boom and bust in their wider education.