Commute Smart Week 2012: 11th - 17th November

Commute Smart Week launches our annual, winter long campaign to raise the awareness of implementing smarter ways of commuting during the winter months.

Run each year just as British Summer Time ends, Commute Smart Week highlights the many ways employers and employees can work together to avoid or reduce the misery of commuting during the dark mornings and evenings, which millions of people endure as they struggle to get to and from work. The campaign seeks to highlight the significant cost to businesses and the economy due to lost productivity, with recent estimates showing that £22 billion is lost each year due to bad weather conditions and congestion on the UK’s transport infrastructure.

The main themes of Commute Smart Week are:-

• Flexible Working

  Encouraging people to travel outside peak times. Coming into work an hour early, and then leaving an hour early at the end of the day, or going an hour later, and leaving an hour later.

• Remote & Agile Working

  Working from home one or two days a week or encouraging people to use satellite offices or drop-in centres instead of travelling to their normal office. These could include serviced office space or even hot spots such as coffee shops, and hotels.

• Virtual Meetings

  Encouraging people to hold a meeting by telephone, telephone/video conference or online instead of travelling to a meeting.

• Health Benefits

  Cycling (why spend hours in the gym?),Walking (get off a stop or station early and walk), Office (take the stairs, not the lift).

• Road Congestion & Road Safety Day

  Road users are more at risk of an accident on a Friday than any other day of the week, especially during the winter. Statistics show that more accidents happen on a Friday, and particularly between the hours of 4pm and 6pm, than at any other time. The statistics also show that the number of accidents jumps by up to a fifth in the winter compared to the summer.

Smarter working and commuting may also help mitigate the significant increase in deaths and injuries that occur on our roads during the winter months, many of which are schoolchildren.