Commuting and travel
Step one - Beginner
Improving your travel methods and reviewing your travel needs can have a huge impact on your overall sustainability ambitions. If you’re calculating your carbon footprint, travel through commuting, business travel and distribution can represent large parts of your emissions data. Before we begin, read below for some useful terminology.
Useful terminology
- EV / BV – Electric Vehicle or Battery Vehicle, these are powered via electricity rather than directly through fossil fuels.
- ICE – Internal combustion engine, these refer to the majority of vehicles powered by fossil fuels
- Hybrid – a vehicle powered by a conventional fossil fuel engine, as well as having a supplementary battery power source
- Plug-in Hybrid – this vehicle is similar to a hybrid, but typically has a larger electric range for emission free travel. This vehicle will need to be charged, but can also be refuelled with fossil fuels.
- Active Travel – walking and cycling as an alternative to using mechanical transport.
Understanding Travel Emissions
Emissions generated through travel typically fall under Scope 3 (unless the travel is conducted in a company owned vehicle, in which case it can be calculated under Scope 1). For the majority of organisations, travel will cover:
- Staff Commuting – how your team gets to and from work
- Business Travel – any transport use necessary to perform work such as travelling to different sites, or going to meetings
- Customer or Service User travel – how your customers reach your premises (if applicable)
- Supply chain and distribution – the movement of your goods and services
The first decision you will need to make is deciding which sources of travel you will include in your measurement.
How to conduct a Travel Audit
You will need to identify the different ways that travel happens within your organisation. It will be useful to make a list of these areas, based on what you have chosen to focus on. Here are a few things to consider:
- What modes of transport are most commonly used?
- How far do your services or your teams travel to conduct business?
- How often do members of your team commute, and via what mode of transport?
- How do your customers or service users typically reach your premises?
Writing a Travel Survey
Creating a travel survey can help you to better understand commuting habits, work related travel patterns and spot opportunities for improvement. The best way to conduct this is via a simple survey, which can be circulated to your team asking them to report on their typical travel habits. Here are some example questions to use:
- What type of transport do you typically use to commute with?
- What distance do you travel to your place of work?
- If you travel for business purposes, how far do you travel?
- How often do you commute or travel for business?
You can write your own questions, or you can download our Travel Survey Template.
Alternatively you can utilise our online form – simply click here to access and click DUPLICATE before using. This will automatically compile your responses into an Excel spreadsheet for easy viewing.
It is good practice to set a goal for the number of responses that you would like to get from your team, as well as a deadline for completing the survey. You could utilise the wording below to send alongside your survey to ask your team to contribute.
Whilst this has been set up for measuring staff commuting and business travel, you could easily repurpose this to share with your customers or audiences who travel to your venue.