Background
The company was created to focus on community-defined sustainable transport projects, and further deploy our in-house skills and professional competence in this field. Existing active travel clients previously handled by well-established sustainability consultancy Crispin Hayes Associates, are now served by Cycle Path Services Ltd.
Within our strategic theme ‘Rural Alternatives to Car Use’, the consultancy has a particular interest in rural cycle paths connecting villages and towns, and in strategic regional segregated routes. Our community engagement work shows that road safety is a key barrier to cycling in the rural situation.
People
The company is led by Dr Crispin W. Hayes CEnv AMCIHT AaPS AMAPM who is Principal and Director. He is a Member of the Institute of Environmental Science and Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transport, the Association of Project Safety, and the Association of Project Management.
Crispin has been working in the active travel field since 2007 when he carried out his first community-focussed active project which engaged unemployed young people to be part of building local all abilities paths. A subsequent project received a Highly Commended at the Scottish Transport Awards.
We have a dynamic team including engineers, GIS experts and community engagement specialists which creates a breadth of skills and experience.
Low carbon consultancy
We consider that we are the sustainable transport consultancy with the lowest carbon impact of any consultancy within the UK. Our clients can be confident that we have already taken significant steps over several years to achieve that status. We base our assertion on the following
Zero carbon office
Our office is in the Fife Renewables Innovation Centre. It is powered via a microgrid comprising Poppy (750kW wind turbine on site), large onsite solar PV arrays, and the Hydrogen Centre that makes and stores hydrogen from excess renewable energy. When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, hydrogen is turned back into electricity to power the microgrid. The building itself is BREEAM rated ‘Excellent’.
Low carbon Transport
Our policy is to use public transport wherever possible, and make connections to project sites by bike. Where in some rural situations, this isn’t feasible we use electric vehicles.
We have operated EVs since 2014 when our first Nissan Leaf was brought into consultancy use. And since that time, our own charging has been with 100% renewable energy.
Reduced footprint IT and web services
Our websites & mail are hosted by providers who run on 100% renewable energy. We have our cloud collaboration on a Nextcloud service hosted in Germany also on 100% renewable energy.
We carefully select new and used equipment that has a long lifecycle, and choose to upgrade rather than replace. We aim to get more than 7 years of service from computer hardware, while at the same time running the latest software. We are able to avoid early redundancy by investing in high spec hardware initially.
Privacy & Data Protection
We take data protection very seriously and are registered with the Information Commissioners Office as a Data Controller. Since the EU-US Privacy Shield was been declared invalid, we have largely migrated to web services hosted and controlled within the UK and the EU in order to benefit from their strong data protection regulatory regimes.
Our privacy policy is available here.