As part of its ‘Workplace Travel & Wellbeing' project, The Means recently presented at the Universities Transport Studies Group Annual Conference held at The Open University in Milton Keynes.  Means team members Paul Gehres and Sophie Tyler presented a paper entitled ‘The social element of commuting: do current workplace travel assessments neglect health and wellbeing considerations?' which highlights research from the Knowledge Transfer collaboration between The Means and the University of Westminster (for a copy of the paper, click here: gehrestyler_utsg-2011_final). 

Presenting to an audience of UK transport academics and PhD researchers, Gehres and Tyler discussed how past academic work depicts the complex relationship between an individual's perceived wellbeing, level of physical activity, and commuting habits (see figure above). They highlighted the inadequacies of current UK transport questionnaires in collecting sufficient data on respondent wellbeing, and concluded by proposing a new questionnaire.

The presentation prompted a lively and fruitful discussion which touched on topics like the subtleties of creating an accurate commuting questionnaire and the challenges of integrating transport and wellbeing research.  In February 2011, this project is moving forward with a period of extensive data collection from UK workplaces.

For more information on The Means's ‘Workplace Travel & Wellbeing' project (and your potential involvement), contact Paul Gehres ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

For more information on The Means's Smarter Travel services, click here.