Planning, Transport and Accessibility

Anja!

PART I

THE CONTEXT FOR PLANNING FOR ACCESSIBILITY

Part I of this Concise Guide sets out the rationale for using an accessibility approach. It enhances thinking about the integration of town planning and transport planning practice in order to deliver sustainable transport.

Planning practice has been slowly shifting away from a focus on planning for individual mobility, where private cars dominate, to one where walking, cycling and public transport are the primary approach. The aims are to reduce travel distances, especially by car, but also for long distance public transport commutes. Many journeys are for short distances, and providing improved walking and cycling infrastructure will assist in replacing short distance car journeys with active travel modes.

Understanding the factors that result in individual travel behaviour is key to designing a land use transport system that improves sustainable travel. All too often, this system is designed through a lens based on the narrow experience of the individual planner. Instead, a keen understanding is needed of the variations in travel behaviour – by gender, life-stage, socio-economic advantage/disadvantage, geography, and the quality of the network that planners choose to provide. Activity diaries are one way of providing planners with greater insight into why particular travel modes are used and others are not.

In the past decade or so, a new generation of accessibility tools have been developed that can assist planners in understanding the accessibility of places. They can measure the qualities of the transport system and also the opportunities that the arrangement of land uses can provide. It is critical to capture both of these dimensions in planning for new development and transport infrastructure.

Accessibility tools can be used to inform decision-making with the aim of achieving sustainable accessibility. In some jurisdictions – the UK, for example – there are planning policies that require accessibility analysis to be conducted. In other jurisdictions – Australia, for example – there is at least an expectation of integration of land use and transport planning, to achieve sustainable transport outcomes. The system of governance is critical – how planning and transport agencies are coordinated, resourced, given authority, as well as the way the wider community is involved, are all factors that need consideration.

Chapter 1

Urban Transport and Accessibility

Introduction

The practices of urban planning and transport planning often operate separately, drawing on different disciplines. Yet both practices are concerned with the design of the built environment where practitioners seek to provide access to opportunities in order that citizens can meet their daily needs for work, education, shopping, services and leisure. Since the 1950s, the planning approach has been dominated by providing for this access by car. Urban planners have planned for new development assuming the majority will travel by car; likewise, transport planning has been dominated by the same assumption. Planning practice has been deeply entrenched in this approach, yet it has had significant unintended social, environmental, and economic consequences – increasingly documented in public dialogues, academic research and policy literature.

With an underlying principle of achieving sustainable development, urban planners, politicians and community advocates have aspired to a new approach for the planning of urban areas and transport networks in order that accessibility is provided for by all modes of transport, rather than simply a planning approach that assumes high levels of mobility, especially by private car. This approach is centred on designing urban areas in such a way that the need for travel is reduced and, where travel is necessary that there is a choice of ways (transport modes) of travelling. Practice has been slow to embrace this aspiration beyond setting policy goals, but changes in planning practice are now resulting in the delivery of an accessibility approach to the design and planning of urban areas.

An accessibility approach raises several challenges for practitioners – how to plan for both the transport mode and urban development in an integrated fashion; how to assess the effectiveness of infrastructure investment from an accessibility perspective; and who should do what to ensure implementation. Since the 2000s, a new generation of accessibility tools have emerged that enable practitioners to meet these challenges.

The aim of this book is to show why and how we can successfully plan for sustainable accessibility through urban development planning and transport planning practices. Employing a multi-dimensional perspective, sustainable accessibility is considered:

Through the lens of different residents and their daily needs – this perspective is used as a device to integrate across different built environments and transport modes;

Through the lens of a ‘mobility pyramid’, starting from not travelling, through walking, cycling, public transport and the car;

At three different spatial scales – metropolitan/city-wide, town/activity centres, and local neighbourhoods – with a strong focus on their ‘place’ qualities;

In terms of governance, considering those who should take action, and how processes of implementation influence the effectiveness of design approaches.

This innovative, multi-dimensional perspective re-frames the traditional approaches to understanding and undertaking transport planning and urban development planning. The approach offers the reader an appreciation of the bigger picture of what is needed to plan for sustainable accessibility in new planning practices, while at the same time gaining knowledge of specific details that are necessary for implementation.

The context for Planning, Transport and Accessibility

The key debates about transport and land use planning set the context for this book, including environmental, social and economic concerns arising from increasing car ownership and use. This is particularly acute where citizens become captive to the private vehicle as their only practical option for routine travel. From a physical planning perspective, the debate focuses on: how to manage car use and traffic congestion; how to reduce air pollution and improve human health; how to expand and improve walking, cycle and public transport networks; and how to encourage people to change their travel behaviour to centre around these sustainable modes. From a planning process perspective, the debate focuses on the appropriate governance framework needed to deliver transport infrastructure that is integrated with urban development planning in a way that provides for transport choice and enables citizens to reduce their car use and distance travelled. This includes the challenge of coordination and integration of the different players with responsibility for urban planning and transport.

To understand what sustainable accessibility is concerned with, we need to set this in context – why is it that current policy approaches in many cities around the world are moving towards a sustainable accessibility approach? The starting point lies in a debate about sustainable transport emerging in the late 1980s as a response to growing concern about the impacts of private car travel over previous decades.

Transport planning in Britain, Australia and much of the English-speaking world was dominated by the North American approach to transport planning based on forecasting demand for (car) travel and producing road-based infrastructure proposals to meet projected demand. International traffic consultancies worked on urban growth studies around the world. Such studies were to have a profound impact on the urban form and structure of cities, as well as on traffic engineering practice, that continues to influence transport planning practice today. A range of standards and ‘rules’ were applied concerned with road capacity, traffic speeds and flows, ‘level of service’ (how much traffic delay would be acceptable) and road design. Critical assumptions were made regarding traffic growth expectations (which often were – and still frequently are – erroneous), priority for long distance transport, assumed mono-centric urban land use structure (where different activities were separated), and the extent of car travel (high) and public transport travel (low). Such studies also reflected a strong focus on the travel demands of commuters, and were based on implicit assumptions about the (predominantly male) demography and preferences of such travellers. The cities were developed on the basis of these studies, literally setting in concrete the way in which citizens could live, work, shop and play, and offering little other realistic options for them to travel otherwise.

Buchanan’s British study, Traffic in Towns (1963),¹ widely viewed as a milestone in land use and transport planning, had already expressed concerns about planning for the private car, citing concerns about the impact on the local environment of traffic congestion and car parking. He argued for a change in transport policy towards measures to influence the demand for car use, including provision of better public transport and more restrained approaches to parking provision. In 1964, the UK Ministry of Transport² argued for a ‘balanced approach’ that included planning for all forms of transport. Despite these early warnings, the planning approach adopted was for transport modes to be segregated from each other, with a dominant focus of planning for the car by segregating major movement corridors from the residential cells that they served.

During the 1970s this transport planning practice continued to be questioned. Americans Schaeffer and Sclar³ pointed to an ‘urban transport problem’, comprising traffic jams, accidents, unreliable public transport, spiralling costs of travel and worsening air and noise pollution. The ‘oil shock’ during this decade provided a catalyst for examining the relationships between energy costs, urban structure and planning. In Britain, almost a decade after the Buchanan report, a change in official attitudes saw the active promotion of public transport solutions and car restraint, but changes to common planning practices were patchy. Banister’s work⁴ suggested that the 1973 UK House of Commons Expenditure Committee on Urban Transport Planning was a watershed – expressing concerns about the 1960s approach, they instead emphasised the importance of land use transport integration and the better use and management of existing infrastructure.

Despite the concerns raised, physical design solutions aimed at adapting cities for the car remained the predominant approach for transport planning practice. These included proposals for mass road building through the comprehensive redevelopment of cities – an approach seen in many cities around the world. Urry⁵ describes what occurred as a ‘system of automobility’ that served to ensure that the private car was the dominant mode of transport – that, referencing Whitelegg,⁶ ‘subordinates other mobilities … and reorganizes how people negotiate the opportunities for, and constraints upon, work, family life, childhood, leisure and pleasure’. Urban planning has designed cities that lock in this system of automobility, just as the institutions themselves work to serve this system.

Several studies emerging from the UK during the 1980s/1990s led the way towards sustainable transport planning by arguing the need to manage the demand for car travel. In 1989, the UK National Road Traffic forecasts⁷ acknowledged that it was no longer possible to cater for the car in urban areas through road building – there simply was not enough room – and so satisfying demand was no longer possible. There were concerns about the economic cost of increasing congestion (which continue to plague city planners today), and the realisation that it was not possible to solve congestion by increasing road space through road building. Added to this was the finding by the UK Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment in its 1994 report⁸ that increasing road capacity induces demand – that is, it results in the generation of entirely new