Historic Cities Project Task 4 – The Business Surveys: Questionnaire Design, Implementation and Initial Analysis.

The Historic Cities project examined the potential impacts of transport demand management strategies on three case study ‘historic’ cities in England. These cities are York, Cambridge and Norwich, all of which have the following characteristics: - they are cities which pre-date motorised transport, and thus tend to have city centres dominated by narrow streets; - they are all members of the Historic Towns Forum; - they have a high architectural and historic heritage, and attract many tourists each year; - they have severe congestion, and congestion related problems; - the city authorities are faced with the problems of maintaining the environmental quality of the city, while allowing the most efficient use of the transport infrastructure.

The focus of the project was how transport demand management policies, particularly parking, pricing and road-space re-allocation, can contribute to the last bullet above.

Task 4 in the Historic Cities project examined the predicted effects on the urban economy from a work place parking levy and road user charging. It is thought that a major barrier to the implementation of these instruments is the perception that they will have detrimental impacts on the local economy. This task examines whether this hypothesis is correct by examining the impacts on, and attitudes of, businesses in the case study cities.

This working paper describes the survey work that was undertaken and presents the initial analysis of the results. It has the following sections:

Section 1: introduces the research;

Section 2: describes the policies to be studied;

Section 3: describes the development and rationale for the questionnaire;

Section 4: describes the sampling process;

Section 5: presents the initial analysis of the results;

Section 6: gives a summary and conclusions.

This is the second Working paper that summaries the Task 4 study. The first working paper (537) outlined the business sector profile for each city. A third working paper (552) will present multi-variate analysis of the dataset.