The team came up with two different kinds of solution: offering a clearer picture of the transport available to the community and a lift-sharing scheme to help connect the journeys people had in common.
live|work encouraged Scremerston residents to look carefully at the current bus timetables and promotional posters to decide whether they did the job of communicating what bus services were available. They found that confusion over the times, and even the type of vehicle, had an impact on the use of this important community resource.
Arriva, one of the local bus providers, took the residents’ complaints seriously and together they have designed a new colour-coded, easy-to-read timetable to make their service more user-friendly. In testing, residents have agreed it’s easier to understand and that it has made travelling by bus easier too.
The co-design team also found people wanted a way to keep track of only the services that would be useful for them, check times when they weren’t at the bus stop and also provide their children with timetables leaving out the times for buses they’d rather they didn’t catch, such as later in the evening.
The team developed a simple concertina-folded, credit card-sized form which residents could use to note down times and routes that match their needs and then make copies of it for their family. These ‘My Timetable’ cards, have already had positive feedback.
Lift sharing
Lift-sharing is one of the most talked about ways of making transport more efficient and environmentally friendly. But talking to residents made the designers realise that lift-sharing needed to be redesigned to work in Scremerston.
Designers live|work wanted to know whether lift-sharing was a viable option, caused any worries or could be made easier for the community to take up. They discovered that a limited amount of lift-sharing was already happening but that more people could benefit if the opportunities to do so were more visible.
The team found that an etiquette for lift sharing would be needed for it to be a fair exchange. People requesting lifts didn’t want to feel ‘needy’ or worried about getting into strangers’ cars, while those offering lifts wouldn’t want to feel obliged to keep providing them if it became inconvenient.
From ideas to etiquette
Lift sharing isn’t going to work if givers are worried that they may never be able to terminate a lift sharing arrangement and getters felt needy or scared for their safety getting into potential strangers’ cars. The designers say insights like this were vital if a lift-sharing scheme was going to succeed. They also wanted to find out what the people thought about schemes that were already up and running.
Northumberland Car Share already offered a lift-share service but it was floundering slightly as there was very limited awareness of it within the community and it was reliant on people accessing the internet to take a speculative approach to finding a lift sharing match.
‘Lift share doesn’t work without registering a certain number of people with a common destination. In Scremerston and the surrounding areas, destinations for education and leisure are obvious choices to base the scheme on and the people that provide these services become the ideal channels to promote and manage them,’ says Richard Telford, service designer from Live|work.
Critiques of other lift sharing services showed that people in Scremerston didn’t always feel reassured by hi-tech schemes using websites. Surprisingly, given how widespread internet use is, the Northumberland Car Share scheme suffered because it was online. People couldn’t find out about opportunities to share lifts in places where thinking about lift-sharing was most likely, such as at the school gates or outside the local leisure centre. And not everyone had access to the internet.
live|work realised a simple offline service, provided through people central to the community, was needed to communicate a lift-sharing scheme in Scremerston. It would focus on groups of people with a common interest who were likely to be making similar journeys.
The result was the Lift Exchange card, which trusted community figures like teachers, midwives or football coaches could give to people who wanted to give or get a lift. They would then fill in the details of their journey and this information would be held by the service provider who would use their knowledge of the community to find them a match. The cards also provided a simple guide to lift-sharing etiquette to counteract some of the potential problems.
The Lift Exchange cards are currently being trialled by three local service providers with access to more than 2,000 people: Scremerston First School, Sure Start and Berwick Community College.
Richard Telford explains: ‘The challenge is to design a solution that is easy to use and maintain so it has the best chance to extend beyond the life of the project’
The designers developed a Community Transport Toolkit that can be scaled up and multiplied to be used on a national level and have created a blueprint for how to design the message, pitch the idea and log results.
Since 2007
As a direct result of the Dott project, Scremerston First School has implemented a walking bus, developed with a school travel plan co-ordinator at the education authority, to encourage parents to park further from the school, keep traffic away from school and increase fitness.
The community notice board in the school grounds has also been very successful and has been introduced to some other local schools .
But not all the new movement design solutions have survived. Despite designers coming up with ideas that could solve problems associated with car sharing schemes, residents in Scremerston didn’t like the idea, and they couldn’t be persuaded by a web-based scheme either. Some people are still relying on chance to find someone else who is going their way who they may be able to share a lift with.