Kelly Theis is the Project Manager for South West England and Wales at Living Streets, the innovative UK charity for everyday walking. At TRANSPORT Smart Class, Wales & West of England 2024, she demonstrated how digital technology is helping to deliver one of the biggest behaviour change programmes in Wales.
Working with local authority and transport partners, WOW – with the award-winning interactive Travel Tracker – is making a positive impact with thousands of families the length and breadth of the country to help achieve modal shift from cars to active journeys to schools.
Following her insightful presentation and Q&A, Kelly, with support from School Coordinator (Wales) Deryn Howell, went on to host in-depth roundtable discussions with each table of delegates.
Presentation highlights and notes:
- Living Streets Vision – A nation where walking is the natural choice for local, everyday journeys;
- Living Streets Mission – To achieve a better walking environment and inspire people to walk more;
- For almost 100 years, Living Streets has been a beacon for walking – In the early days, their campaigning in the early days led to the UK’s first zebra crossings and speed limits;
- Living Streets work with a wide range of public, voluntary, and private organisations including schools, local authorities, community groups and workplaces;
- Public Sector – Work with public sector organisations extends across transport, NHS/public health, social housing, regeneration, and town centre planning and management; Services range from short-term bespoke project support to longer term embedded support staff dedicated to delivering your active travel objectives;
- Community Engagement – Meaningful community engagement is vital to delivering successful schemes. Living Streets facilitate face to face community engagement; production of relevant materials; communications and campaign support; and much more…from School Streets, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and footway widening, to 20mph speed limits and public realm improvements, Living Streets have a history of success in working with partners to make streets better for walking;
- 2023-24 Impact – Scotland rolled out a ban on pavement parking; Over 29m trips logged on the WOW Travel Tracker and over 540k pupils logged their journeys to school; 54k supporters; 3.4k members; 65 Local Groups, including first Rainbow Walks Group; 94% of Walking Friends Wales participants reported an improved sense of physical wellbeing; 65% increase in minutes walked by older people on Walking Connects programme; Walk to School Outreach project saw 1.8m car km removed from the road and 21% more all the way walking/wheeling journeys; Over 250 people at UK Walking Summit; Wales adopted a 20mph default speed limit in residential areas;
- What is WOW? WOW is Living Streets’ year-round Walk to School Challenge with primary schools; The key element of WOW is Living Streets’ award winning interactive Travel Tracker tool; Last year over 1800 primary schools across the UK took part in WOW; Living Streets are currently in their second year of a Welsh Government funded project delivering WOW with over 170 primaries; WOW vimeo video;
- How does WOW work? 3 Simple Steps – Walk to School; Log your Journeys; Earn Badges;
- WOW Travel Tracker – The WOW Travel Tracker is used in schools to monitor how children travel to school; It’s a digital, interactive tool which can be accessed via iPads or interactive whiteboards; It’s really easy to use in classrooms and the children love using it; It also means Living Streets can provide data to schools, local authorities and funders; This is a great way to get some healthy competition going between classes, but also between schools in the local area or nationally!
- Classroom Visuals – Each class logs into Travel Tracker daily and the visuals that the classroom accounts display are useful for school ATP and live data for maths;
- Schools are encouraged to link the data to maths lessons so that active travel can be embedded wider in the school day;
- WOW links to Maths at Afon Y Felin, Bridgend – The school has already linked WOW into maths lessons and plans to further link WOW to the curriculum by connecting active travel options to healthy eating, creating surveys around the project and creating awareness posters of the campaign and distributing these within the community;
- Walk to School Wales Project – Funded by Welsh Government; 178 primary schools logging on Travel Tracker; 22 local authorities; All resources are bilingual; Over 1 million journeys logged between 1 September and 30 November 2024; 43.7% reduction in cars to school gate last academic year (22.4 percentage points); Compared to baselines, last academic year saw a 28% increase in pupils at WOW primary schools walking/wheeling all the way (6.96 percentage points) and a 54% increase (24.45 percentage points) in active travel journeys including walking/wheeling, cycling, scooting/skating and Park and Stride;
- Travel Tracker always comes as part of WOW – WOW can be bought in by schools directly, but there are a number of funded WOW projects;
- Events across Wales – e.g. School walks, WOW Ambassador workshop and using Travel Tracker data to celebrate school’s achievement and impact;
If you satisfy our regular delegate qualification criteria but were unable to join us in Cardiff on December 5th for the live in-person event at Cardiff Masonic Hall, CLICK HERE and complete the short “Download form” (located at the bottom of the post) to receive a unique link enabling free access to the presentation video recordings and slides (including the film footage and slides from Kelly’s initial presentation).
Those qualifying to receive the rich presentation content from this event include commissioning, procurement, trialling, partnering and policy leads, senior influencers, strategic decision makers, programme managers and planners from local authorities (e.g. city, borough, metropolitan, district and county councils); public transport operators; regional transport partnerships, sub-regional transport bodies, combined authorities, integrated transport authorities and passenger transport executives; highways authorities and road operators; government and supporting national transport agencies; non-governmental organisations; fleet operators, parking operators, prime contractors etc.
