Case Study Summaries - Richard Armitage Transport Consultancy ...

MAKING CAR SHARING AND CAR CLUBS WORK CASE STUDY SUMMARIES
2 BARCLAYCARD (NORTHAMPTON)
General Background
2.1 Barclaycard’s HQ at Northampton is approximately 2 miles from Northampton town centre
on a business park. The building was designed for 2,300 staff and now accommodates
3,000 staff. The organisation has 1,900 car parking spaces.
2.2 The business operates on a 24hr/7day basis but the majority of staff, 70-80%, work within
the traditional 08:00-18:00 core hours.
2.3 By Christmas 2003 car parking on site was becoming a major problem. Questions and
comments to management by staff were increasingly concentrated on car parking issues.
Around 90-100 staff each day were unable to find a car parking space for their car on the
site. Staff were parking their cars anywhere on the business park they could find space.
Grass verges and link roads near to the Barclaycard building were blocked with parked cars,
and some staff were parking on the grass verges on the approach to the roundabout leading
from the business park to the main road.
2.4 Barclaycard purchased a car sharing website from Liftshare in Summer 2003. Ben Brakes,
the Environmental Manager, began to promote the car sharing scheme seriously in January
2004.
Operating Structure
2.5 The Barclaycard Scheme uses Liftshare’s internet based software to match car sharers. The
company has a dedicated car sharing car park, for 300 cars, located in front of the main
entrance to the building. The car park is staffed until 12:00 and only staff cars with two or
more people are admitted to the car parking area.
Impact and Effectiveness
2.6 The scheme has 300 registered car sharers. However, many of these have found their car
sharing partners informally from within their Department, rather than signing up through
Liftshare. Ben likes the ease of administration of the Liftshare scheme, but thinks that staff
would be more likely to use the matching service if it was provided and developed by
Barclaycard’s usual IT provider, as staff have expressed concerns about giving personal
information to a third party. The scheme has effectively been promoted by word-of-mouth as
staff have discovered that they can park easily and quickly in the car sharing car park, rather
than waste time searching for spaces elsewhere on site.
2.7 Barclaycard has carefully monitored the car sharing car park area over the past two months.
They have been running a prize draw, open to car sharers only: the prize was to be a
SmartCar but only if at least 750 different cars had used the car sharing car park over the
two month period. By the closing date, July 31st 2004, just 670 different car registration
numbers had been included in the draw, so the main prize will not be given. Instead,
Barclaycard will provide a range of smaller prizes for staff who registered for the draw.
Final V1.1, Dec. 2004 - 7 -