Minnerva provided Mouchel Essex with project support to the Basildon Industrial Area Survey - BIAS. This was an employer based travel survey aimed at identifying and understanding the travel behaviour of the people working on the Basildon Industrial Estate. This covers a very large area just south of the A127 and north of Basildon Town centre, and one that suffers from traffic problems throughout most of the working day. An objective of the study was to see if there was any likelihood of encouraging modal shift away from car in the working population for the journey-to-work to help easy these problems

The project was divided into two Phases:

Phase 1 saw the construction of an inventory of the more than 1000 commercial, manufacturing and retail businesses on the estate. This was required as there was no clear understanding of the employer base operating from the Estate, and a sampling frame was needed from which a representative sample of employee’s, by company type, could be sampled.

Phase II saw the selection of a representative sample of these businesses, and a self-completing travel survey questionnaire was issued to all their staff. This explored travel behaviour, which included identifying the points in the network where congestion was encountered on the way to and from work.

Minnerva designed the questionnaires for both phases of the survey.

Further, it developed and produced the software used for data input which also geocoded and manipulated the data to provide an ‘analysis-ready’ high quality data set used for the subsequent analysis.

Other survey design projects that Minnerva have been involved in include the Travel Diaries project for Essex County Council/Mouchel Essex.

(Contact: Miles Logie)