The Scottish Workplace Journey Challenge – Edinburgh Fringe Society Team

The challenge is an online competition in which participants log their sustainable and active journeys to work. Employees compete to clock up the most walking, cycling, public transport and car-sharing journeys, improving air quality and making healthier travel choices. 

Organised by Sustrans, it leverages the competitive element as a real incentive for people to change their travel behaviour and encourage others to do so.

The Scottish Workplace Journey Challenge ran throughout March 2017 with workplaces from all over Scotland registering as teams and achieved some fantastic results:

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society was one of the participants of the Scottish Workplace Challenge. The organisation underpins the famous festival, supporting participants, assisting audiences and promoting the festival to the world. The organisation started the challenge with existing high levels of walking, but after that, the most frequently used travel modes were bus and car.

Taxis were also occasionally used, adding to the 48% of journeys that were logged citing a motorised vehicle as the mode that would have been used prior to the challenge. The challenge incentivised people to make a positive change.

The challenge

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society has a really positive attitude to employee wellbeing. They wanted to encourage everybody to travel actively and get involved with the Challenge to reach their 100% participation target. This would mean getting all 43 staff members logging active and sustainable journeys, including those who would have normally reached for the car keys or only got the bike out in the Summer months.

Our role

Sustrans organised and promoted the Challenge to hundreds of workplaces via an online marketing campaign and through a series of events. In total we encouraged 218 workplaces to sign up, all interested in using the challenge to create team camaraderie whilst developing a culture of conscientious travel decisions that benefit both employee health and the environment.

The design and implementation of the web platform demonstrated that behaviour change was possible and the difference an individual can make just by travelling differently.

Impact

As a result of participating in the Challenge, the Edinburgh Fringe Society achieved their goal of getting all their staff to engage with active travel. In total, 68% of staff journeys were made by active modes and 32% of these were a switch from non-active. In addition to this all 43 staff registered on the website and logged journeys via a wide range of sustainable modes including walking, running, cycling, buses, trains and electric bikes. That is an amazing 100% participation rate.

Edinburgh Fringe Society was one of three teams in their size category to reach 100% participation. In the case of a draw, rankings are determined on the number of journeys logged.