Smarter Choices, Smarter Places
‘Smarter choices smarter places’ is a Scottish Government funded project designed to promote sustainable communities, healthy lifestyles and reductions in transport emissions.
To do this, local councils will be promoting sustainable travel, trying to increase public transport use and encouraging people to use more active forms of travel.
Smarter choices in Barrhead
East Renfrewshire Council was successful in its bid for ‘smarter choices smarter places’ funding for Barrhead.
We were one of only seven successful bids from all over Scotland.
Barrhead submission. (PDF 6,161kb)
The projects
To achieve the aims of Smarter choices smarter places, we will have £1.3m of projects getting underway over the next three years with over £800k of this funded direct by the Scottish Government.
The overall aim of the project is to promote a healthy and active lifestyle by combining the benefits of high quality infrastructure with behaviour change initiatives targeted at children, residents and employees.
The projects include:
Personalised journey planning
Walking and cycling initiatives
Reducing road speeds
Increasing bus and rail travel
Bike parking at primary and secondary schools
Smarter Barrhead Schools
Improving paths
Barrhead High School travel group
Dams to Darnley Country Park, Balgray Reservoir path
Better Barrhead Public spaces
Go Greener event and pilot project
East Renfrewshire Council travel plan pilot and working with business
Support
The project has received the support of a variety of individuals, groups and organisations, including:
Community engagement
‘Smarter choices smarter places’ will join-up with the community engagement work already been carried out by the better Barrhead regeneration team. This work has created an active partnership between East Renfrewshire Council and the community and we will expand it to reflect the aims of ‘smarter choices smarter places’.
For more information on the work undertaken by the better Barrhead team already, go to the public spaces pages.
Monitoring and evaluation
Monitoring and evaluation will be a critical to our success. The Barrhead project will be represented on the Scottish Government’s monitoring and evaluation subgroup and will work with appointed contractors to collect information over the three year programme.
Delivery
The responsibility for delivering projects lies with a project management group. In East Renfrewshire Council this brings roads, planning and transportation, environment, regeneration, economic development, active schools and the community health and care partnership services together.
This page will be regularly updated as ‘smarter choices smarter places’ develops and if you have any questions email us at smarterchoices@eastrenfrewshire.gov.uk