A tree a day saved by West Yorkshire commuters who walked and cycled in June!

To encourage West Yorkshire commuters to give up the car and walk or cycle for all or part of their journey, the Travel for Work team held its first ‘Take the Active Route for a Better Commute’ campaign in June.

Over 40 organisations signed up to the campaign covering no less than 101 sites and 100,000 staff. In addition, individual members of the public were also encouraged to take part with adverts placed by local authority walking and cycling publications.

For those participating, a goody bag was provided containing a drinks bottle, flapjack, a shoe shine kit, a pedometer together with a leaflet and diary card so they could record all their walking and cycling activity.

Overall, 554 diary cards were returned revealing that over 46,000 miles were walked and cycled by participants over a four week period. If these journeys had been made by car, over 14 tonnes of CO₂ would have been emitted and it would take 15,000 trees to absorb this amount over the same time period!

Tom Lloyd, from the Travel Plan Network, said ‘the results from this campaign show that by West Yorkshire commuters making small changes to their travel habits, such as walking to the train station instead of driving, or cycling all the way to work just one day a week, they are not only looking after the environment but saving money and getting fit at the same time’.

Participants who returned their diary cards were entered into a prize draw to four prizes totalling £700. The Travel Plan Network member winners came from Calderdale Council, Whizz Go and the individual winners came from IBM and Leeds Primary Care Trust. When asked about their journeys to work, the winners cited getting fit and saving fuel costs as the main reasons for starting to walk and cycle to work.

For your individual organisation’s CO₂ results, please refer to the results issued in the August 2008 e-newsletter.

The CO₂ savings made through this campaign will be banked with the other CO₂ savings that are being made by workplace travel planning in order to reach our 30,000 tonne target!

The next campaign aims to encourage car drivers to switch to public transport by giving them a free weekly MetroCard for September.