SEStran (South East of Scotland Transport Partnership) is currently undergoing £5.3 million worth of projects to facilitate active travel behavioural change in Scotland. Using uSmart as a single source of truth, they're able to monitor the delivery and impact of these projects. 

As part of SEStran’s Regional Transport Strategy 2035, the People and Place Plan seeks to deliver active travel behavioural change across the South East of Scotland. 

Through a dedicated SEStran People and Place fund from Transport Scotland, £5.3 million worth of projects are being delivered to raise awareness and increase participation in active travel, as well as building capacity and capability for change.

The People and Place Plan’s main objectives: 

• Deliver increases in walking, wheeling and cycling, by both enabling and encouraging people that don’t make these choices to start to do so, and for those that do so already to do more
• Raise awareness of the benefits of active travel to many other people, making them more likely to change in future
• Work in many of the region’s communities, schools, and residential settings, plus build capacity and capability for further change.

UrbanTide is working with SEStran to facilitate monitoring delivery and impact of these individual projects and objectives by collating all relevant data in real time onto one platform – uSmart.

How uSmart is helping SEStran monitor delivery 

UrbanTide is supporting SEStran in their delivery of these projects by providing the People and Places Monitoring Dashboard - a white-labelled version of our data insights platform, uSmart.

By feeding large amounts of people and place/active travel data into the dashboard, the tool functions as a single source of truth that provides complete transparency on all ongoing projects that contribute to the People and Place Plan objectives.

Through SEStran’s custom dashboard, users can easily track and monitor delivery progress in real-time, while promoting full transparency on where funds are being spent and how. 

Data is accessed as an interactive regional map of the South East of Scotland. Users simply click on a local authority to see a list of all the individual projects related to that area. From there, they can dig deeper into different types of granular data: The type of project, which theme it addresses (e.g. accessibility, schools, access to bikes) and who the local authority and delivery partners are.

Users can also get a full transparent overview of funds spent for each area of each project, making it easy to report back to Transport Scotland on progress as well as clearly demonstrating value of each initiative. This is a totally new way of monitoring the delivery of large-scale projects like the People and Place Plan. Data can be accessed anywhere in real-time, eradicating the inefficiencies and admin workload typical of a traditional reporting process.

Iona Chandler, Partnerships Manager for UrbanTide has said:

"We're delighted to be collaborating with SEStran on delivery of the People and Places Monitoring Dashboard. It's crucial to rely on robust, accurate data when planning projects and evidencing their impact on reducing car dependency, improving safety and encouraging more sustainable choices. A single-source platform with standardised people and place data and active travel data will build a complete and comprehensive picture, empowering SEStran with the tools to prove the value of a significantly increased funding stream. I'm excited to see where this collaboration takes us!"    

What's next?

Our partnership with SEStran is ongoing, and this is only the beginning. We have a number of exciting developments we'll be adding to the dashboard over time, including:

• Survey data: In line with Transport Scotland's People and Place Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, public survey responses will be collected directly into the dashboard to visualise and illustrate responses pre-and-post project, showing impact.
• Data collabortations: Collaborations with Health Boards and organisations like Cycling Scotland can also be integrated into the reporting tools and processes to showcase how partnerships can leverage value and increase active travel in certain sectors.
• uMove: uMove is our transport data integration platform that helps organisations better understand usage and travel patterns. Integrating uMove provides the potential to centralise, automate and streamline traffic data from RTS & People and Places monitoring and evaluation, Smart Cities projects and other cross-sector insights to create a truly holistic evidence base.
• Future-proofing data initiatives: UrbanTide supports all our partners in future-proofing initiatives, such as data maturity, making data AI ready and enabling data sharing including open data.

To find out more about uSmart's capabilities or see our innovative data insights platform in action, get in touch to request a demo.