Surveys, Awards & Challenges

Discover the sustainable travel activities, initiatives and challenges taking place in the region.

The Love to Ride Challenge

The Love to Ride website is an online cycling encouragement platform used to increase and capture cycling levels. Local Authorities including North Somerset and Bristol promote Love to Ride as it’s proven to encourage new, returning and existing riders of bikes, motivating them to make more trips by bike. Signing up for free, registering your business and promoting it to staff (perhaps as part of a Sustainable Travel Plan) shows a commitment to increasing active travel at your workplace.

Love to Ride offers ongoing prizes as motivation, plus several annual mass participation events. In 2021, register for Bike Month in June, Cycle September, Light the Night (November) or Winter Wheelers (December).

Join Love to Ride

Join Love to Ride North Somerset
Go to Love to Ride North Somerset
Join Love to Ride Bristol
Go to Love to Ride Bristol
Find resources to promote the challenge
Resources to promote the Love to Ride challenge at work

Travel to Work Survey

The 2021 Travel to Work Survey is closed

The Travel to Work Survey takes place annually and is live for one week. This year’s Travel to Work Survey took place between 8th to 14th March 2021. Despite the pandemic we were keen to run the survey and find out if and how people are currently travelling to work. Anyone living in the West of England can participate during survey week, however any businesses that pre-registered in January will receive a bespoke survey link, opportunity to add additional questions, promotional materials, and a report with their results.

Last year’s Travel to Work Survey took place in spring 2020 and covered businesses in Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. We are really grateful for the 21,539 respondents who completed the survey.

Employers use the results to support their site Travel Plan and also to create business cases for improved or additional facilities to support staff such as new cycle storage or Electric Vehicle (EV) charging points.

All employers who participated and received over 30 responses receive an individual report along with raw data and this is also the case for each employers site with over 30 responses.
The four West of England councils along with the West of England Combined Authority use this data for planning future transport and housing needs.

Reports are created for the West of England along with each local authority and reports based on locations.

Each authority’s Business Engagement Teams and Economic Development Teams use the data from the survey to work with employers and understand how they can support them and transport issues affecting staff travel.
Despite the COVID pandemic, the Travel to Work Survey ran as usual this year, with some tweaks. The 2021 survey was updated to reflect changes to how businesses are operating through the pandemic, allowing individuals to report when working from home. This could provide valuable data to businesses in terms or lessons learnt from the pandemic when comparing to future years’ data.

At the moment our view of how businesses are currently operating (from home/ work) is very anecdotal so the survey will provide us with a better understanding of how businesses are operating during the pandemic. This will help us to:
- provide more tailored support to businesses
- influence our sustainable travel offers
- better inform transport infrastructure planning so that the network supports the current needs of businesses
The survey is wider than how the individual travels to work on that given day, for example we also ask questions on public transport and electric vehicles which will help us to understand how the pandemic may have changed people’s views on using these.

More information

How can my organisation get involved in this year’s survey?
How to take part in the Travel to Work Survey & digital assets
What do we do with the results from the survey?
What we’ve done with the Travel To Work Survey results
How did we do in previous years?
Previous years Travel To Work Survey archived results
How do we care for your personal data?
Travel To Work Survey Privacy Statement

Travel Awards

News of any upcoming Business Travel Awards events will be posted here. Pre-Covid, this annual event celebrated the work carried out by businesses in the West of England in the field of sustainable travel. The 2019 event took place at the Grand Pier in Weston-super-Mare on 28 November.

More information

What happened in 2019?
The 2019 Travel Awards
What happened in 2018?
The 2018 Travel Awards
How can you get your own Travel Plan Accreditation?
Travel Plans & Audits

The Travelwest Challenge

The Travelwest Challenge is an annual month-long event. It encourages businesses to compete by getting the highest numbers of their staff to walk, cycle, lift-share or catch the bus to work during the Challenge.

Individuals log each journey they’ve made using sustainable transport. This enters them into our prize draws and their organisation’s leader board. Businesses are then ranked against each other to add another level of competition.