Our Thinking

Managing Director, Simon Babes, has been appointed to the Railway Industry Association (RIA) Board. Simon joins the Board, which includes Chief Executives and Senior Directors from across the rail industry, as Chair of the SME Group where he leads activities promoting the role of RIA’s small and medium sized members.

Accreditation of suppliers is increasingly becoming an important component of our Client’s assurance framework and Movement Strategies continues to secure accreditation from relevant bodies. Recent milestones include Cyber Essentials Plus certification and Constructionline Level 2 accreditation and we continue to work towards ISO27001 accreditation.

Simon Babes, Movement Strategies’ Managing Director joined a UK Rail Delegation, led by Lord Faulkner, the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Taiwan, to Taipei on 29 and 30 January 2018. The 2 day Trade Mission included meetings with the Minister of Transport and Communications (MOTC), Department of Rapid Transit Systems of Taipei City, Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation, other City Metro authorities, Taiwan Railway Administration and the Bureau of High Speed Rail.

We have been commissioned by Greenshaw High School to analyse the circulation of students throughout the school to help them to plan for the movement of students between classes.

We are pleased to announce recent additions to our team.

Movement Strategies are pleased to announce their recent appointment as part of the design team led by BDP to masterplan the redevelopment of Manchester Airport’s Ground Transport Interchange (GTI).

Andrew Graham has joined Movement Strategies’ Board of Directors as a Non-Executive Director.

Congratulations to Christian Tonge who has won the runners-up prize for his dissertation titled "An exploration of mobile data: towards proximity based passenger sensing on public transport".

Movement Strategies has been appointed by Historic Environment Scotland to review visitor flow, behaviour and experience at Edinburgh Castle.

As cities grow and public areas become more popular and inevitably busier, how can we ensure the quality and enjoyability of these spaces is maintained?

For many workers commuting into, or even within London, the daily commute represents a stressful time. Research done by Office for National Statistics in 2014 concluded that “Holding all else equal, commuters have lower life satisfaction, a lower sense that their daily activities are worthwhile, lower levels of happiness and higher anxiety on average than non-commuters.”(1).

Our inboxes are beginning to overflow with emails from companies seeking our confirmation that we would like to remain contactable via email, phone and post. This correspondence will continue as we approach 25 May 2018, the implementation date of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Winter Olympics 2018 is here. An opportunity for us all to discover new ways to descend mountains with great speed, and for those of us in the UK to rekindle our love of the Skeleton – travelling down a bobsleigh run on little more than a tea-tray at close to 80km/hr.

In the aftermath of the Chancellor’s budget, much of the focus is given to the economic forecasts underpinning the proposed (and cutting of!) public expenditure. The traditional indices used to measure these forecasts are numerous: employment, retail sales, housing starts, industrial output, CPI and GDP are but a few examples. One less highly featured is travel demand.

The unlit firework waits patiently in its alloted place on the field, awaiting it’s moment of glory when it shoots into the night sky competing for space with other fireworks in a dazzling array, then dissipating into the darkness. Perhaps that’s stretching the metaphor of crowd studies too far, but my weekend visit to the Wimbledon Park display wasn’t too disimilar to wholly negate the comparison.

Travelling, whether for work or for pleasure provides an opportunity to appreciate other cultures and experience life in other cities and to benchmark these against cities you know well.

An electrical fire on a Bakerloo line train this morning raises a question about the safety and the extent to which the Bakerloo line rolling stock remains fit for purpose.

Wimbledon, known for the strawberries and cream, Pimm’s, crowds, celebrities like Andy Murray, Tim Henman, and more... has one more phenomenon that stands out from the rest of the experience, which is the queuing.