Innovation and good practice

The TPS “Wiki” innovative good practice guide

Good practice guides take a great deal of time to assemble and tend to go out of date quite quickly. TPS wants to try a new approach for transport planning initiatives which have wider value. These would include “on the ground” schemes, but also new ways of working, and new policy approaches. The aim is to spread best practice and contribute to the wider public understanding of transport planning as well as some of the useful work that we do. It will hopefully give a better structure for identifying our award for Transport Planner of the Year.

The approach we want to try is to get our members (public or private sector or jointly) to submit a description of a transport initiative or scheme (ongoing or completed) which has innovative or particularly successful content, in a short, standard format. It would be open to organisations of all shapes and sizes, plus individual freelancers. We do stress, however, that this a good practice resource not a marketing exercise! The involvement of younger professionals in preparing the submissions would also be a benefit and we could tie this in with completing the PDS units.

There will be a new section of the website which contains the guide and it will be featured prominently on the home page and in the specialist transport press.

Rules for submissions

• Completed schemes or initiatives must be ongoing or less than 3 years old in the first instance. This will change to the last 12 months once the guide is established.
• Submissions must start with an introductory sentence listing innovative feature(s) and key benefits.
• They should be followed by a 500 word description expanding on above.
• One graphic, one picture and a map may be included.
• Submissions will be moderated by a named panel selected by the Board and possibly sent back, but not edited.
• No limit to submissions per organisation, but the panel will moderate entries to ensure overall balance.
• Schemes archived after 3 or 5 years or when more than 2 are posted by the same organisation/person.

The wiki approach will be reviewed after a year to check whether it is working, if so how it could be improved and if not it will be archived. It is expected it will take a year to have a reasonable number of schemes submitted.