Just like a Swiss army knife has many tools to allow you to take off into the wilderness and survive, we have numerous tools at our disposal to travel using various forms of transport.
The future of modern transport has to be multi-modal. What does that mean? It’s a silly piece of travel planner lingo meaning more than one form of transport. We do it all the time. If you’ve travelled by train, or flown anywhere or caught a ferry, you’ve done multi-modal, and for long distances we see the advantages, but for shorter distances we seem to be blinkered into believing that car is usually best. Well, let’s help dispel that thought process.
Believe it or not, on many occasions within a city like Sheffield multi-modal travel can be the quickest and cheapest way to get places, but it just takes a little thought and understanding from the traveller, along with a genuine active travel principle applied by the transportation authority and companies to provide the facility.
Take a journey from Ecclesfield to the city centre as an example. For most this would be done by getting into the car on the drive, spending at least 21 mins travelling into the town centre, then another five minutes driving aimlessly around to find a car parking space, and then another couple of minutes paying the time limited parking charge, only to find that you’ve spent at least 30 minutes travelling.
Alternatively you could do it multi-modal, and be quick, efficient, have fun, get healthy and enjoy the journey without stress.
Pick up that bike you bought in the pandemic and cycle along the flat, traffic free and picturesque Blackburn Valley Trail to Meadowhall railway station. This will take about 14 minutes at a gentle pace (Google Maps help with this) along the off road Blackburn Valley Trail. Then park your bike in the high security Russell’s Bicycle Shed cycle hub, which will take you two minutes or less. (And it’s only £5 per month, so a lot cheaper than two hours car parking in town). Then if you time it right, it’ll be only a couple of minutes before a train to Sheffield arrives at the platform next to the cycle parking hub, and with ticket prices starting at £1.90 for the 8 minute journey into town it’s a steal, check out National Rail to find out more. So all in that has taken less time than driving and cost a lot less than using and parking the car.
If you feel like a more scenic route why not try the Supertram which takes a little longer at 19 minutes but gives much more choice in where to disembark, from Commercial Street and Ponds Forge or the Cathederal and Fargate.
If we want to be serious about reducing congestion, making the environment more pleasant for future generations and destressing our travel options, we must all start to think multi-modal.