Milton Park
A leading example of cutting workplace traffic near Oxford
Milton Park is a science, technology and innovation park located south of Oxford. It is home to over 250 companies, employing 9,000 people, and covering 300 acres. Around 75% of the workforce come in at least 3-4 days a week. It offers lab space, R&D workspace, serviced offices, co-working, industrial and office space, as well as conference space for hire. They have an especially user-friendly ‘getting here’ page, and brilliant visibility of travel options across their website.
They have made huge reductions in single-vehicle occupancy rates in the last 8 years. Veronica Reynolds, the Sustainability and Community Manager, explains what they did.
What was the problem?
Eight years ago, the Park was a very different place. It was perceived as very car-centric and mainly accessible by car. Parking spaces were always full and there were often long queues of traffic in and out of the site.
With over 250 different lease arrangements, all with varying levels of parking, it was difficult to consider parking restrictions or charges of any kind across the whole site. We therefore decided to use incentives and positive messaging to encourage people out of their cars and into sustainable travel modes.
Now more than half of those travelling to the site use sustainable modes such as taking a bus, cycling, and car sharing. This has been an overall reduction in single occupancy vehicle (SOV) journeys of 28% in 8 years.
What did you do?
Buses
Anyone working at Milton Park can apply for an annual £20 bus pass and benefit from unlimited bus travel for any journey starting or finishing at Milton Park for about a three-mile radius around the site, including the villages of Steventon, Drayton and Sutton Courtney. This has been transformative - last year, we saw an increase of 5% of people taking the bus, and it has gone up 18% overall over the last five years, and against a national backdrop of declining bus patronage.
13 Milton Park-branded buses now connect the park to the wider Oxfordshire area. We ran a competition to name the buses! All names had to start with an M and people voted for their favourite. Mabel won and I also love Mufasa and Mario. Again, these kinds of ‘softer’ efforts matter for the visibility of alternatives and building underlying positive attitudes.
Lift sharing
We use KINTO Join to manage lift sharing. It is a phone app, which links to the app of the other person in the car, so it knows you are sharing a journey. Through a Bluetooth connection from the both the driver’s and passengers’ phones, the app can trigger a carpark barrier to lift to give preferential parking to sharers. It can also be linked to discount vouchers and other rewards.
I believe that car sharing is an underrated tool for large employers. It means people still have the convenience and comfort of a car, but they can save money, and it is sociable. It can be transformative for employees with mobility issues or those who live in more rural areas and/or a long way from the site. If 1 in 5 cars had two people in it, instead of one, you would cut SOV by 10% in one go! This kind of decrease could transform most sites in Oxford, and the Oxford ring road.
Cycling
The first Wednesday of the month, between March to November, is ‘bike 2 work’ day across the site. We give a free breakfast to those who cycle in – they just have to sign up and order their menu choice through our onsite app. Making cycling visible, social and rewarding is essential, and the croissants are always popular! 11% of people now cycle to work at Milton Park.
We also have a bike mechanic come on these days, and they offer a free bike service and can carry out simple repairs on site. We do this through Walton Street Cycles. We find this offers reassurance to novice cyclists who might be worried about repairing punctures or fixing a chain – often something as simple this can derail a good cycling habit that someone is forming! We also have 5 bike maintenance stands and 24-hour security, helping to minimise bike theft.
Most of the 9,000 employees on the site are employed by third party occupiers, meaning it is up to their employer to offer a Cycle to Work scheme. My role is to help companies sign up to such schemes, alongside salary sacrifice schemes for EVs.
We also offer 18 bikes and 12 e-bikes for hire throughout the site, provided by Walton Street Cycles and incorporating the Donkey Republic software for the rental app. The bikes are grouped in geo-fenced hubs which can be seen on the app. Staff with a Milton Park company email address can sign up and use them for free. The e-bikes are all used at least 5 days a week and are a popular alternative to the bus for journeys to the station, but they are also used for journeys further afield and for getting around our large site. The e-bikes are used three times as often as the other bikes in the scheme that aren’t electric.
We also work hard to connect footpaths and cycleways into and out of the site, to make it a no brainer to actively travel short journeys and to integrate with our local community. In 2020, we worked with OCC to open a new bike/footpath running north-south across the length of the park, joining up with routes from Abingdon and Oxford.
What has been the impact?
We’ve seen a significant fall in SOV journeys from 70% to 50% over 8 years.
The obvious impact is lessening the traffic in the local area, especially for those who really need to use their cars, such as disabled people or people with caring responsibilities.
We are a responsible site owner and want to reduce our negative impact on local communities, and reducing traffic to our site is a very clear way to help. More than that, our businesses simply cannot operate well if staff are turning up stressed and late due to congestion. Providing alternatives benefits everyone - including those in their cars.
We also measure our Scope 3 emissions and have estimated that our bus scheme alone has led to a 223 metric tonne reduction in carbon emissions each year. We assumed that 80% of these additional passengers would have driven the journey in a private vehicle if not for the bus pass.
What are the less obvious benefits?
As well as the obvious benefits, our businesses have found that the travel options really improve recruitment and retention.
These options open talent pools of younger staff who are increasingly non-drivers, and other people who just don’t drive – our improvements make it easy for them to take a job with our tenants.
Our green travel agenda is also critical in planning terms. Milton Park benefits from a Local Development Order – a simplified planning arrangement which means we can quickly respond to our occupiers’ needs, for example, for expansion or installation of specialist plant. As part of our LDO, we have committed to keeping traffic levels within certain parameters under our Section 106 Agreement. The way this s106 is designed incentivises Milton Park to invest in green travel first and foremost and reduces the likelihood of having to build new road infrastructure in and out of the site.
Top advice for other organisations:
Get good baseline data
Do one really good staff travel survey every three years or so (you can do lighter ones in the years in between). The investment in changing travels habits is easily worth it, but you will need the figures to show what is working and what is not. If you cannot stretch to a full survey, use your postcode data from all staff to map where they are, and do a very simple questionnaire to ask what mode they are currently using. That is really all you need to then start looking at ‘clusters’ where you could introduce an alternative, i.e. a local car club, new bus route or cycle buddy scheme from that town/area.
Enable people to try things out
Habits are hard to shift, but once someone experiences something – sitting in a car and making friends with a colleague or the wind in their hair when cycling – they tend to realise it is easier than they thought, or there are brilliant co-benefits they hadn’t thought of. Make it as risk and friction free as possible to try – like the e-bikes around site, easy sign-up pages, etc. Give reassurances they can get the parking permit back, and so many more people will give it a go.
Focus on the willing and able
You do not have to change everyone’s journeys! There will always be one person who lives a million miles away, is disabled and works nights; that’s fine, they probably need to drive! There will be 100 other people who are nearer and only need a bit of nudge or specific support. I really recommend focusing on new starters, as the best time to lay down new habits is when something big is changing, like your job.
Make it visible
The fun stuff matters – the bike breakfasts, the bus naming competitions – it’s tempting to see these as fluff but many people don’t swap because they simply haven’t thought about it, and these things make it much harder to miss. Paint your bike racks lovely colours, put up colourful bus stop signage, create a little competition between departments who have made the biggest progress – a little competition never hurt!
Remember it is possible and that the gains are HUGE
There is scope to increase the number of tenants and people on site without having to buy land, there will be far fewer carparks to maintain and the site will remain a pleasant, green, aspirational space to work, and people have options about to get there. In our experience, this is simply invaluable for our occupiers, and for their recruitment and retention.
