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Colchester Station Travel Plan - The Background
Context
The station is a key gateway to the regional centre of Colchester. It is just over 1km north of the town centre, and in one of the most congested areas on Colchester's road network. The urban population of 105,000 is within the station's catchment, and it also serves the surrounding settlements across the Borough, with a total population of 176,000. The station accommodates over 4 million passenger movements per annum, with over 7,000 passengers using the station each day.
The station is 84km from London Liverpool Street. It is a junction with branches to Colchester Town, Clacton and Walton. Main line services from London continue to Clacton, Harwich, Norwich, Lowestoft and Peterborough. The basic service of 5 trains per hour in each direction on Mondays to Saturdays is strengthened in the peak periods. 3 trains per hour operate on Sundays.
As an origin for rail journeys, Colchester station serves the London commuter market and other principal towns on the Norwich to Liverpool Street route. The station is a destination for commuters, students, shoppers and visitors to Colchester, some of whom may change trains here for the local service to Colchester Town or Hythe stations. The University of Essex and Colchester Institute of Higher Education have nearly 3,000 employees and 20,000 students
between them. The town centre, Colchester Garrison and the General Hospital are also major destinations for staff and visitors, all within easy reach of the town's stations.
Need for a Travel Plan
The partners in the Station Travel Plan (STP) project are Colchester Borough Council (CBC), Essex County Council (ECC) and National Express East Anglia (NXEA). We believe that a STP is an important first step in combating the worsening traffic congestion issues in the area, whilst at the same time encouraging more people to use the rail service as a more sustainable way to travel.
Colchester will continue to grow and its population is expected to reach 224,000 by 2021. Within the regional planning process the town has been identified as a Key Centre for Development and Change and a Regional Interchange Centre. The Regional Transport Strategy expects greater use of sustainable travel, to enable growth to take place without negatively impacting on the transport networks.
Over the years the demand for rail travel has increased, due to growth in the area and in London commuting. However, we believe that the traffic congestion that this growth is generating is now putting barriers in the way of additional use of the railway. The STP project is designed to establish what those barriers might be, and to determine a plan of action to remove them.
The potential of the STP is also very timely, as -
• The area around Colchester station is likely to attract a significant amount of inward investment during the next 10-15 years as part of the North Station Masterplanning for the area.
• Colchester is emerging as a priority location for investment through the National Stations Improvement Programme (NSIP).
• Specific proposals are being developed which build on the outputs of the STP
workshops.
• Colchester is designated as a Cycling Town, which brings a separate funding stream, and one of the priorities of the agreed 3-year programme is to improve cycle access to the station.
The STP will therefore help to set the context in which these separate programmes are delivered. Also the STP will not be a one-off project, but will need to be regularly refreshed with new targets and objectives adopted as needs be.
Description of the process
The project partners (CBC, ECC and NXEA) appointed consultants Steer Davies Gleave to assist in the development of the STP. Their first task was to establish the clients shared vision for the future of the station. This helped us to determine overall objectives for the project, which were later developed into SMART objectives and targets.
Our process built on the standard format adopted for the National Station Travel Plan Pilot Programme, initiated by the Department for Transport (DfT) and managed by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), and has been expanded to take account of the needs of the North Station Masterplanning for the area around Colchester station.
For this reason, a supplementary series of surveys and counts were undertaken at the same time as the main surveys, to determine desire lines for access to the station, and the way that the surrounding highway network and the station itself impacts on general circulation and movement in the area.
With the results of these surveys available, two workshops were held with a wide range of local stakeholders. The first workshop was held to obtain buy-in to the objectives set for the project and to confirm that our thoughts on emerging issues were correct. The second workshop made progress on a prioritised list of interventions that formed the STP Action Plan. Delivery of the STP Action Plan and Objectives is subject to funding being available from
the partners.
The project partners have agreed that the STP will be monitored, and the targets we have set will be measured in 2012, not 2011 as required by ATOC, due to significant NSIP work being carried out to the station at this time. If the station is required to be monitored in 2011 we are unsure if the targets will be met.
Action Plan highlights
• Station function: Colchester station is important both as an origin for commuting to London and as a destination station in its own right. These two functions have different requirements in the STP Action Plan. A feature of the plan is the need to strike a balance between the two.
• Improving the profile of cycling: Cycling Town status brings resources that we hope will allow innovation with the type and quality of cycle facilities offered at the station. This is against a background of limited space for expansion of facilities. The STP Action Plan and parallel programmes such as Cycling Town and NSIP need to focus on researching the needs of cyclists before stipulating what form the new facilities might take. This research stage is now under way.
• Establishing strategies: The plan allows for development of two important strategies in the initial 6 months — Marketing and Signing — which will then inform the campaigns and improvements to take place in these areas over the following 18-24 months.
• Improving the south side access: Surveys have shown that footfall is divided
approximately equally between the north and south sides, yet the main ticket hall and forecourt facilities are on the north side only. Reinstating some of these facilities on the south side will be a major part of the STP Action Plan.
• Integration with other programmes: The STP Action Plan confirms the importance of co-ordinating a range of parallel projects and programmes, notably NSIP, the Cycling Town programme and in the longer term the North Station Masterplan. The first two of these fall within the timescale for this STP, although NSIP is actually a 5-year programme and at the time of writing the content and timing of the work at Colchester have yet to be confirmed. We have therefore extended the term of our STP Action Plan, beyond the two years of the national pilot, to ensure that the benefits of programme integration are captured. Integration with the North Station Masterplan will be taken forward in a future version of this STP, post-2012.
Key lessons learned
The need to establish from the outset a clear vision that is agreed by the clients or main sponsors of the STP. This includes local authority members who determine policy and budgets for future programmes. Once this is established, involvement of a wider stakeholder base becomes much easier.
It has been difficult to ensure continuity between the centrally commissioned surveys and those supplementary surveys and counts that we have commissioned. In some respects it could be argued that the need to be directly comparable with other stations in the pilot programme has hampered the production of an integrated survey and data package for Colchester. However, these problems can be solved.
Our STP Action Plan contains some large projects, in terms of commitment and funding from partners, which will contribute significantly to improved facilities for customers at Colchester, for example the NSIP proposal to open up a new south side access and ticket hall. The role of the STP is to support and encourage these projects, and to give them an overall context within the future vision of the station. However, delivery of these projects is outside the scope of the STP itself.
Survey Results and Key Documents
Colchester Station Travel Plan
Survey results
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