Growing emphasis is being put on cutting pollution in the UK by reducing our use of transport. But millions of us still need to move by car, bus or train each day. In the village of Scremerston in Northumberland, getting around was problematic. Many villagers don’t own cars or faced a lack of regular and affordable public transport to get them to school, work or hospital appointments. Current transport systems weren’t helping enough people from Scremerston get where they needed to go and they weren’t decreasing anyone’s carbon emissions, so they weren’t environmentally sustainable either.
Designers working as part of Dott 07 aimed to answer two key questions: How could the transport systems in Scremerston be made more carbon-efficient without making it more difficult for people to get about? And how could making it easier for people to get around also help them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?
The design team already knew how other places had got the cars, buses, bikes and trains in their area working harder. Making better use of public transport was the most obvious way of reducing the environmental impact of getting from A to B, but the designers didn’t know what other transport ideas would work in Scremerston.
As they got started on the Move Me project in Scremerston, service design agency live|work knew the best way to design a service would be to work with the people who would use it. So they set up a co-design team which would involve Scremerston residents and get them to share their transport needs and help create and prototype possible solutions.
Pinning down the problems was the first priority. The co-design team, made up of live|work and local residents of all ages, started by doing some research. All Scremerston First School’s 42 pupils (from 34 families) and 11 employees, including full and part-time teachers, cleaning, catering and janitorial staff had to travel to get there. So the school was a great place to start asking how people got where they needed to go, what transport there was in the village and what were the major problems. There were plenty.
Buses were few and far between and families sometimes struggled to get theit children to school and themselves to other appointments because there wasn’t enough public transport. Many residents didn’t own a car and others said they found it difficult to afford taxis if there wasn’t a bus available.
The designers realised they needed to respond to these problems with more than a pre-formed solution inspired by examples elsewhere, such as timetables for community mini-buses or a route map for a walking-bus (a way of getting groups of school children to school on foot without every parent having to walk with them). They wanted to encourage the people of Scremerston to develop their own solutions collaboratively and understand the reasons behind them.
Transport facts
- The Department of Transport estimates that the amount of traffic on our roads will grow by more than a third over the next 20 years
- People are badly informed about existing public transport services: we overestimate by 70% the potential time it takes for a journey by public transport – and underestimate the length of a car journey by 26%
- There are 10 million empty seats in cars every day on UK roads
User profiles
Margaret
The team joined Margaret on the four-mile walk she makes six days a week to care for her mum. Walking beside the busy road it was clear to see that a lack of transport wasn’t the problem – there were lots of cars heading in her direction with plenty of room inside. She just had no way to access to them.
Lindsay
Lindsay walks her children to Scremerston First School every day but now she’s pregnant she also needs to visit a clinic in Berwick-upon-Tweed which is three miles away. The buses are so infrequent that it’s difficult to keep appointments, and it can be even trickier to get back to Scremerston by bus, so it can take her all day to do the round trip.
Drew
Drew lives in Scremerston but his wife, who’s training to become a midwife, takes the car to Edinburgh every day. As well as other day-to-day trips he needs to attend the doctors for treatment for his injured back, but feels trapped by the infrequent public transport services.
Dott07
Designs of the time '07 (Dott07) was a year-long series of design projects run by the Design Council and the regional development agency One NorthEast to involve local people in exploring how design can improve everyday life. www.dott07.com