News & Views

Last Thursday ITP’s Ruby Stringer was lucky enough to be invited up to the stage at the Annual Transport Practitioners Meeting to receive the Transport Planning Society’s award for ‘Best Paper at the Conference by a Young Professional’. The award, presented in the beautiful Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was for her paper ‘Quality Incentive Contracts to Improve Women’s Safety on Public Transport in Bangladesh’.

The paper was inspired by some of ITP’s work in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and the issues faced there by women when using public transport. The use of Quality Incentive Contracts to improve bus services has been occurring in London since the early 2000’s, and Ruby was able to re-work this concept with the intention of incentivising bus staff to prevent harassment on board their vehicles.

The paper was chosen by a subgroup of TPS directors who assessed against markers of clarity, originality, quality and the potential usefulness of the conclusions. Ruby’s paper scored well in all of these areas with the TPS board commenting that: 

'Ruby identified and clearly explained an important problem particularly prevalent in Bangladesh. Drawing on evidence and experience from elsewhere, she developed a series of well considered and practical actions to address the issue, specifically designed for conditions in Chittagong. She not only put forward a range of sensible ideas, but demonstrated their robustness by critiquing them against possible objections. The paper was extremely well written and she is considered to be a highly capable and competent young transport planner who deserves to be encouraged by TPS.’

We couldn't agree more and are all delighted for Ruby.  This achievement builds on a number of previous TPM award-winners from ITP, including Rachel Tate last year for a paper on the ‘Connected’ travel behaviour change project in Derby. 

Photo credit: Chelsea Cliff