TAS and the Transport Innovation Fund
The Transport Innovation Fund represents a new approach by the Department for Transport (DfT) to funding transport projects. Through the TIF, the DfT will be able to direct resources towards the achievement of two objectives - specifically tackling congestion and improving productivity.
Money from the TIF will become available from 2008/09 and the fund is forecast to grow from £290 million in 2008/09 to over £2 billion by 2014/15 as shown in the table below, although no suggestion of the allocation between either congestion or productivity focused schemes has been announced.
|
2008/09 |
2009/10 |
2010/11 |
2011/12 |
2012/13 |
2013/14 |
2014/15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
£290m |
£600m |
£930m |
£1300m |
£1680m |
£2100m |
£2550m |
Authorities proceeding with an application for TIF funding (as well as those wishing to by-pass pump-priming funding and apply for TIF money direct) must submit a full business case by the end of July 2006, when there will also be a second opportunity for others to bid for pump-priming funds. To aid this application process the DfT has published more detailed guidance explaining the two kinds of proposals it is looking for - those aimed at tackling congestion, through demand management and better public transport and those which meet national productivity objectives.
TAS is ready to assist you with your TIF application. Our bus reliability, bus speeds, journey time variability and delay analysis routines are of particular relevance to local authorities in the context of tackling congestion and TIF applications – producing detailed illustrations of congestion points and bus speeds on the network. All of this is comparable to data local authorities will be required to collect measuring congestion on the highway.
Critically, all of this data can be accompanied by the passenger numbers using the services – again straight from operators' own ticket machine data – allowing the impacts of the TIF proposals to be modelled. The result is an extremely powerful tool in making the case for the bus in towns and cities as part of your TIF application. Contact us.